Tag: Reading

When the shots went off on February 21st, the Ballroom descended into chaos. Shrieking audience members broke for cover. Betty dove beneath some chairs, shielding her children and shouting, “They’re killing my husband; they’re killing my husband.” Bradley, the shotgun man, dropped his warm weapon, wrapped in a green suit jacket, on the stage. Davis also dropped his weapon, to avoid being recognized. Hayer, the least experienced assassin, held onto his pistol, giving away his role in the plot. The shooters maintained a military crouch and headed for the rear exit, two hundred feet away. “I saw the three gunmen coming up the middle aisle,” Roberts said. From five feet away, Hayer shot at Roberts, who dodged. “The bullet went through my suit jacket,” he said. Roberts threw a chair, momentarily knocking Hayer down. When Hayer finally made it outside, he was shot in the leg by another of Malcolm’s guards. Bradley and Davis screeched off in a Cadillac, but the crowd caught Hayer, pummelling him. He was eventually pulled from the mob by the police and arrested.

The scrutiny that followed focussed on Florida’s balloting problems. Another factor received far less attention: a Republican effort, beginning before the election, that prevented thousands of eligible voters from casting ballots.

Around 6:30 p.m., Jon Ehrens, a producer for WHYY, the local public-radio station, went out to document the chaos. He was nervous to record the men, but, at first, the Bat Boys didn’t seem to care. “I’m ready to fuck shit up,” one man said. “You know, I’ve been looking for a fight for the past six months.” Around eight-thirty, Haskell, the ringleader, announced that the men had made their point. As the group walked away, about two dozen men gathered to listen to Haskell speak. Ehrens began to record the speech, and Haskell shouted at him, telling him to leave. When Ehrens turned to leave, four of the men followed and jumped him, beating him and breaking his nose. Ehrens later tweeted a photograph of his bloody face. Soon after, he began to receive death threats.

Early on in “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,” the first of three autobiographies Douglass wrote over his lifetime, he recounts what happened—or, perhaps more accurately, what didn’t happen—after his master, Thomas Auld, became a Christian believer at a Methodist camp meeting. Douglass had harbored the hope that Auld’s conversion, in August, 1832, might lead him to emancipate his slaves, or at least “make him more kind and humane.” Instead, Douglass writes, “If it had any effect on his character, it made him more cruel and hateful in all his ways.” Auld was ostentatious about his piety—praying “morning, noon, and night,” participating in revivals, and opening his home to travelling preachers—but he used his faith as license to inflict pain and suffering upon his slaves. “I have seen him tie up a lame young woman, and whip her with a heavy cowskin upon her naked shoulders, causing the warm red blood to drip; and, in justification of the bloody deed, he would quote this passage of Scripture—‘He that knoweth his master’s will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes,’ ” Douglass writes. Douglass is so scornful about Christianity in his memoir that he felt a need to append an explanation clarifying that he was not an opponent of all religion. In fact, he argued that what he had written about was not “Christianity proper,” and labelling it as such would be “the boldest of all frauds.” Douglass believed that “the widest possible difference” existed between the “slaveholding religion of this land” and “the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ.”

Word has it that Christopher Nolan’s new film, “Tenet,” is hard to understand. Not so. It’s a cinch—no more difficult than, say, playing mah-jongg inside a tumble dryer, while the principles of quantum mechanics are shouted at you in fluent Esperanto. In case that feels too easy, Nolan fiddles with the sound mix of the movie, thus drowning out important conversations. If you thought that Bane, the villain in Nolan’s “The Dark Knight Rises” (2012), verged on the inaudible, wait for the folks in “Tenet.” Most of them make Bane sound like Julie Andrews.

“You’re lucky,” Wesley remembers hearing from above. “I’m not going to kill you. The police are going to do that for me.”