20100209
20100129
post-SoTU: will 2010 be oPOTUS's year of nothing?
What no one should forget is that many, perhaps most, who voted or supported Obama did so as a vote for change - and on that lexical point - the Nobel committee was right.
While he got my vote, Obama was not was not my first choice but I didn't think that Hilary as candidate was winnable given her last name. Obama was the lesser evil. And, he was probably the presidential candidate I was least excited about since I cast my first ballot as a college student for Jesse Jackson whom I didn't expect to win. How I miss the exuberance of that time.
Obama - as conflicted a persona he may be - on paper he is presidential. And that's part of his problem - demeanor. [By the way, whenever I start to write about Obama "Slytherin" pops into my head.] There are many whose life circumstances make Obama understandable as a non-committal chameleon; occasionally, we may even understand the mixed messages that seem to contraindicate who we think he is. But, it's those very attributes that made him electable.
Obama disappoints me because he still hasn't figured out how to meld MLK and Malcolm X to be someone who combines the best of Bayard Rustin and Angela Davis. Everything in his masterful marketing and above average education suggests that he could rise to the occasion. But I'm still waiting.
I think what gets lost in the media is that Obama is the best and the worst of the American dream. He's someone who was some place that was less (a "joe", less monied, less diverse, a community organizer) who moved on to embody what we think America means even when it never really did; and, not everyone agrees which of those binaries is good vs. bad. To whatever extent that he has common beginnings, pre-White House Obama was were he earned a right to be: living in Hyde Park, sending his girls to a lab school. However, I think the story of the road to that point enabled voters to see through Obama; he was a virtual tabla rasa after eight years of Cheney-Bush. However, we can't pretend that, race aside, Obama is much like any other man who has been put in that white house.
Yes, Obama's skin color may or may not be THE thing about which YOU care but his White House is still full of policy wonks and political geeks who will not be ushering in a proliferation of Marxist ideals in U.S. discourse even if I can dream of it coming to pass.
Obama's SoTU Address was the perfect hodgepodge of nothing new but chocked full of something for everyone who's lobbed a critique; there was some one thing to make everyone happy for a moment. Obama is a POTUS over whom the masses have overlaid dreams most of which can't be realized. The easiest to satisfy will be those happy just to get away from the common portrayal - the patrician dumber-than-spit-Yale-legacy, pretend-Texan who was a New Englander - that was Bush the lesser. So Obama is a welcome departure even as he is prototypical of the very educated males elevated to the title and whom more often than not in the twenthieth century have graduated from prestigious institutions. Like many before him, Obama is by definition, outside the norm, and that seems to be what the majority of those who vote go for.
Book smarts is not what comes to mind when we think of either Bush the lesser or Reagan who, as an actor served fabuously asorator-in-chief. We've had smart, intellectual presidents (e.g., Wilson, Clinton). We have had masterful politicians (e.g., LBJ). But it's a short list as to who has been both without also doing something egregiously wrong or stupid that clouds and/or colors the good (e.g., LBJ, Clinton).
Job Opening: POTUS few requirements nothing but grief.
I think Obama a master strategist hiding behind a professorial guise because at his core he doesn't want to disappoint because he is the good son all moms want to have raised. As presidents for whom I've voted go, Obama is a disappointment. I believed the smart people who told me he was smart even if he didn't much convince me (because the strategist knew I'd come along for the ride) but if he continues to have nothing to show for his time in office, I will blame his chososing not to play to win. Only history will name the victor.
Having used so many words to say so little, I do think it was a stroke of genius to televise today Obama's Q & A session with the Republicans in Baltmore; he was worthy of my vote even when he was David Mamet where John Hughes would have played better. Watch it in its entirety (01h 30m) if you get a chance.
the writer's advice: Do Something of Your Own
What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though. + Holden Caulfied in The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
How reading one novel, changes a high school student; hear the now adult writer/director Jim Sadwith's journey in "Meeting Salinger" which originally aired on July 9, 2009 on "The Story"
J(erome) D(avid) Salinger, 1919-2010 
20100126
Trivia Convergence: a hero and kid's TV
National political figures that continue to feel special today - probably because their force and personality remind me of my mom - are Barbara Jordan and Shirley Chisholm. So I enjoyed hearing the "Tell Me More" episode where I learned of the 40th anniversary expanded edition of Shirley Chisholm's biography Unbought and Unbossed. Another to acquire.
I decided to lookup up one of the show's guests Shona Lynch whose documentary CHISHOLM '72 - Unbought and Unbossed I watched during the Obama-Clinton campaign battle. Obviously, I failed to read Lynch's bio on the film website or I would have been less surprised to learn that she was Shola on Sesame Street; and, yes, I totally recognize her:
Shola Lynch, at the Muppet Wiki Shola Lynch, at IMDb.com
20090920
labor, smears, fixes: why #HCR matters to me
20090922: added embed of Paul Hipp's YouTube video.
Listening to the on-going brouhaha over health care reform, I realize that I'm forced to admit that I'm more liberal than I think am. A meme I encountered on Facebook had a supporting role in forcing this realization.
You see, I think of my political views as moderate to conservative since I do occasionally agree with the likes of Scalia; and I'm a proponent of a "classical education" albeit without an integration of the Christian worldview.
But I guess in the final analysis, there's no escaping my working class background -- one of social constructs where neither of my parents had a college degree and I knew that my mom was a member of the union the I.B.E.W. (And, later in life I got a thrill learning that I.A.T.S.E. is the union I'd join if I continue to work in theatre.) My dad was a laborer whose own mother worked as the hired help for a family whose daughter attended an equally exclusive but less academic private school as the one I attended but couldn't affford even with financial aid.
My mom grew up in a racialized world of the South. Also, I have a much older brother who served in Vietnam and was very involved with the Civil Rights movement. I have a very strong memory of this brother and our mom who'd had him as a teen discussing the merits of armed conflict in South Africa. So I heard stories and political talk forged by sleights that family survived. And even where it was embellished, there's also truth there.
I think health insurance is worthy of being a right and not a privilege. I write that from the safety of middle class privilege and our family is still just a paycheck or two -- my partner's alone, not ours combined -- from financial despair. So for me, it's not a big deal for health insurance to be a mandate. If that means moving towards socialism so be it. But perhaps socialism isn't so antithetical to capitalism, or the mythic US way of life. (Clearly, we can attribute some of the implied resistance on these matters relates to the fact that people don't even understand the words being batted about. Cf., The New York Times (NYT) editors's aggregation "What ‘Socialism’ Means to the Masses".)
In this day and age, I think we need to move beyond narrow definitions and strict lines. People fail to realize the extent to which they vote against their own best interests because their voting is an act based on the world they need to believe the US is, not the reality:
80% of the uninsured have full-time jobs. 62% of all bankruptcies in the US are because of unpaid medical bills. 75% of those actually have health insurance. Enough is enough, time for reform. If you agree, please post this as your status for the next 24 hours.I read these stats in a high school friend's Facebook status, and I re-posted them; she got them on Facebook from her Massachusett's state rep Kate Hogan who serves the 3rd Middlesex District. Hopefully, we're all mature enough to admit that when statistics get elevated (or demoted) to bite size portions in the blogosphere, we basically have PR spin via numbers. So we have a collective responsibility to question what's behind the data. However, in this instance quibbling over the specifics...fails to erase what I find to be a sad sad state for such a rich democratic nation even if tweaked:
80% of the uninsured come from families with full-time or part-time workers. Using a conservative definition, 62.1% of all bankruptcies in 2007 were medical.... Most medical debtors were well educated, owned homes, and had middle-class occupations. Three-quarters had health insurance.
Which is not to say that Obama has all the answers. Or Bauchus. No one has the best magic beans in their basket. But the status quo isn't sufficient either. Anything approximating a real solution restores dignity to being sick in the US. Or, as Paul Hipp's song and video put it, is there any glory in being #37?
Today and yesterday, too many who needed and wanted medically necessary treatments failed to get that which should be more readily available. Yes, it will cost -- as do all things that over the long term has some benefits we need (e.g., compulsory education -- and, we still are fumbling there largely because can't admit there's not one answer for every child or every locale; similarly, for any progress, public school students remain at the mercy of policy wonks with 19th century mindsets living in the rarefied air of the ol' plantation's main residence, aka the big house—"a term connoting not so much the physical size of the house as the power and authority it represented.")[1]
Must we write off another portion of society because we can't be bothered to care how easy it is to fall. Remember vouchers hasn't been much of an answer to the public education problem. The solution needs to be one that either we all have or if choice is involved it's has to be useful menu and one that any one of us wouldn't object to if we had to use that plan.
So rather than argue with those with sketchy half-truths, perhaps we all need to go find a good book that speaks some truths to some fictions. One candidate is The Healing of America by The Washington Post foreign correspondent T.R. Reid; of it, NYT review said:
The Healing of America blends subjective and objective into a seamless indictment of our own disastrous system, an eloquent rebuttal against the arguments used to defend it, and appealing alternatives for fixing it.
Whichever side is declared the victor, I still have a fantasy where social networks get more folks thinking critically. How's that for a pessimist trying to be optimistic?
[1] Encyclopedia of Alabama, August 2009 Plantation Architecture in Alabama20090710
20090602
A quote for the day
... Don't waste too much effort in searching for conspiracies. Most of the harm done in the world is out of stupidity, not by design. Be on the watch for skulduggery...but don't fall into the trap of thinking that every evil thing that occurs in the world in part of some diabolic master plan. The notion that whatever is wrong with the world can be blamed on somebody (never, of course, one's self) is a rather infantile carryover from the childhood days when our parents were thought to be all-powerful and therefore all-responsible.
+ Gerard K. O'Neill, 2081 (1981)
20090319
a striking book cover, Femmes of Power: Exploding Queer Femininities
