Thursday (Mandela + RI's/US's 1st Black Gay House Speaker + Food Stamp Nation + Faulkner's Sources + RIP Alexander McQueen)

I realized I can probably recall the things I want to post about by scanning my Twitter feeds, because since it's so fast and easy to register a fleeting thought or some link of interest in 140 characters or less, I have taken to doing so. So here are a few things that I noted earlier, and a few that I didn't.

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It really has been 20 years since Nelson Mandela (Madiba) was released from prison, initiating the political and social transformation of the apartheid state, into which he'd been born, into one of the most progressive democracies in Africa. Today South Africa hailed the 91-year-old former leader (above, with his wife, Graça Michel, in parliament today. Photograph: Schalk Van Zuydam/EPA)  for his vision, courage, generosity, grace, and above all, leadership. As the post-apartheid state's first president, he established a record that neither of his successors have been able to match, but to which all national leaders might aspire. At the South Parliament today, before an address by the new president, the scandal-plagued Jacob Zuma, parliamentarians of all colors broke into songs of praise of Mandela, honoring his achievements and, as the Guardian UK suggests, striving to summon the unity, harmony and societal advancement that his tenure, against so many odds, represented. I should add that I can recall the day he was released; I was at the annual Celebration of Black Writing in Philadelphia, then sponsored by Robin's Book Store, and the late Dennis Brutus announced from the stage, to a chorus of cheers and applause, and disbelief that quickly turned into joy, that Mandela would be released.  I cannot say what I thought at that moment beyond my recognition that something utterly momentous was taking place, but it was clear, as had become year the previous year with the fall of the Berlin Wall, that the longtime commonplaces that had shaped the years of my childhood were changing before my eyes. Mandela was then, as now, not just the symbol, but the living embodiment, of greatness and promise, and whatever struggles South Africa continues to face, he gave its people, his people, a tremendous start and advantage on resolving them. As a praise song might begin,

He is Madiba the magnificent.
Leader of leaders, bearer of the future,
Father and husband, first president and prescient visionary.
With him the nation shed its shackles on the prison yard soil,
With him the nation walked free into its possibility,
With him, the magnificent, the people's lands
might belong to them again, might bear fruit again,
might bear the weight of new foundations, new dreams....