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
20090303
on thinking about citylife and graffiti
originally posted to Prince of Petworth in response to "New Apartments At Georgia Ave. and New Hampshire Gets Tagged And I Get Intimidated By Street Thugs".
Cities reflect its creators/developers first, then they are enhanced/redacted/molded by those of us who live in it AND choose to have a presence. And, the latter ain't easy whether regardless of color or place of origin.The exchanges above reminded me of a Peter Ackroyd quote I posted here 20080403:
Cities do not change over the centuries. They represent the aspirations of particular men and women to lead a common life; as a result their atmosphere, their tone, remain the same. Those people whose relations are founded principally upon commerce and upon the ferocious claims of domestic privacy will construct a city as dark and as ugly as London was. And is. Those people who wish to lead agreeable lives, and in constant intercourse with one another, will build a city as beautiful and as elegant as Paris. (from Dickens)We live in relationship to our cities and towns. And, each of us has a temperament that reacts differently to the surroundings. I've not witnessed a shooting or seen someone killed right before me but there's been no shortage of shady things or death's leftovers. I've only lived in urban areas. Yet, DC feels the most foreign but that could just be a function of my aging.I've lived in Petworth for over 3 years. Before that it was in Dorchester, MA; and backwards respectively: Jamaica Plain, MA; Providence, RI; and Memphis, TN. The color of my skin is Brown and I am a mom. I was raised to say "Yes, ma'am" and "No, ma'am". I know how to be a lady and choose to dress for comfort. That means I've scared little old ladies when exiting from the women's restroom; and, once was hassled at the local bodega b/c well...he was certain I was shoplifting (in reality I was rushing, I'd left something simmering on the stove a few blocks away, needed a can of something, and found the store lacking.)
But when I went to college people often told me that my affect, or demeanor, made them think me from NYC. In discussion, it seem to boil down to the fact that I had good ego boundaries and nothing bothered me. I'm not easily rattled -- generally. College is also when I had the epiphany that I was working class. So it is a solidly middle class household into which our child arrived.
This boy child feels safe in the interiors we control but he's also privy what he gleans from the streets we walk en route to school, the park, etc. Inside he knows our house where he has some 300+ that are his he knows his life is different from many of his public school peers. He's come of age in Dorchester and DC, and it's safe to say he'd rather live in the suburbs, or if in DC be closer to 16th where there's no grafitti -- and, where he imagines that the brown-skinned males he'd see would be less threatening.
So, my temperament differs remarkedly from my 10 year old who's only lived in DC and Dorchester. He's constantly rattled by normal city things -- people, sounds, cops -- things we'd not expose him to if we had control but when it's a crime scene in front of your house, or in the block next to you...or the kids who talk of guns in a way that exudes familiarity to him even if I might know it to be bluster...or his keen eyes always spots our neighborhood as we intentionally scan past the TV news channels -- that's how he found out about the body at Ronan Park where he'd no longer go and play. Is it wonder that he doesn't like being out after dark. He doesn't run the streets so what he sees confuses him. So he's truly a kid when he whispers to me that he thinks that girl over there on the bus is too young to be a mom. Or when he's perplexed by why anyone young or old would smoke. I don't understand tagging but I love Keith Haring. I can't skateboard but he wants to so I feel that I can't just ignore graffiti. It's ugly (often), it's communication (sometimes); and, it's part of living in a city and sometimes is a valid commentary on living and/or feeling ignored.
Having a child can make you see things differently. And, for him city life is by its very nature much more anxiety-causing. My inclination is to remain uninvolved, and more than once it's his insistence that's led to my calling [---] to deal....with the drunk neighbor wandering the street, feral cats, or whatever. DC confuses me more than other places I've lived. Yet in the last two, it's what our child doesn't see -- people involved and caring -- that keeps him scared. And, that would be true regardless of what had been tagged.
20090224
Re-post of the re-do of a Facebook mutation of a 2003 "BBC's Big List of Books They Think People Haven't Read"
I like to think of it as the next "25 Things" or "The three English words that end in -gry" riddle . Here's how it was presented to me:
The BBC's Big List of Books They Think People Haven't Read Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. Instructions: Copy this, then open "write a note". Copy it in. Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read. Tally your total read at the bottom. 1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (X) 2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien 3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (X) 4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (X) 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (X) 6 The Bible 7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (X) 8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (X) 9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (X) 10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens 11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy 13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare 15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier (X) 16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien 17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks 18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (X) 19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger 20 Middlemarch - George Eliot (X) 21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell 22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (X) 23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens 24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams 26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh 27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky 28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck 29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (X) 30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame 31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy 32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens 33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis 34 Emma - Jane Austen 35 Persuasion - Jane Austen 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (X) 37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini 38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres 39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden 40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne 41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (X) 42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving 45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins 46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery 47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy 48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (X) 49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding 50 Atonement - Ian McEwan 51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel 52 Dune - Frank Herbert (X) 53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons 54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen 55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth 56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon 57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens 58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (X) 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon (started it 2 nites ago) 60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck 62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov 63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt 64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold 65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas 66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac 67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy 68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding 69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie 70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville 71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens 72 Dracula - Bram Stoker 73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett 74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson 75 Ulysses - James Joyce 76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath 77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome 78 Germinal - Emile Zola 79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray (X) 80 Possession - AS Byatt (X) 81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens 82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell 83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker (X) 84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro 85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (X) 86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry 87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom 89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton 91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (X) 92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (X) 93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks 94 Watership Down - Richard Adams 95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole (X) 96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute 97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas 98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (X) 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl 100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Methinks my tally is 25.5.
20090213
attempting to login: blip.fm
Happened twice.
20080604
books - where what & how
20080403
Cities reflect its creators/developers...?
Cities do not change over the centuries. They represent the aspirations of particular men and women to lead a common life; as a result their atmosphere, their tone, remain the same. Those people whose relations are founded principally upon commerce and upon the ferocious claims of domestic privacy will construct a city as dark and as ugly as London was. And is. Those people who wish to lead agreeable lives, and in constant intercourse with one another, will build a city as beautiful and as elegant as Paris.
+ Peter Ackroyd, in Dickens
20080402
Science (+ Math) vs. News: Who trumps whom?
In the domain of things we wished didn't happen...aka, when bad things happen to good points of view. OK, that's a bit over the top. How about -- "There is no such thing as objectivity?"
Regardless of the frame, over at the thestatsblog some poignant issues are being raised as to the merits of phthalate bans and PBS's failure to cover both sides of the matter.
20080317
Black Rabbi in Chicago crossing boundaries
I grew up Southern Baptist and consented to being baptised, late as a teenager, merely to please my mother who wanted to have a place to bury me if I were to die. For seven years I attended a single-sex Episcopal school where I attended chapel daily. I went off to college where I probably claimed to be agnostic. Then, I stopped affiliating. When I had a commitment ceremony, it was in a Unitarian Church. And, matters of faith still intrigue me. I like ritual; perhaps that is some of the appeal.
20080306
Colt .45 in comics: sippin' and chillin'
- a cheap high
- more bang for your buck
So I got curious about the actualities of the demon brew.
Would you have imagined that malt liquor has been the subject of a PhD dissertation? I kid you not (and, the first twenty-five pages are allegedly available for free):
Brown Taylor, Didra. 2000. Knowledge, Attitudes, and Malt Liquor Beer Drinking Behavior Among African American Men in South Central Los Angeles. Thesis (Ph. D)--California School of Professional Psychology, 2000a.In the wings, there are more scholars waiting. [What did we do before we had the web?] See what further unblinking can unearth. Now, go forth, read and become more truly aware with "A Story without Heroes: The Cautionary Tale of Malt Liquor".
20080304
Nike celebrates a century of Converse shoes
20080211
Inhabitat » VIDEO: Grow a Treehouse
20080208
Why I'm Thinking Obama Can
But if the question is who I think can win, then I'm another vote now squarely behind Obama. (Especially, now that Romney has dropped out and I think Obama v. McCain is a more winnable battle.)
Folks (both, in print and in person) have convinced me that there is substance behind Obama's "Can't we just all get along" affect. So I gladly hear the history, and the uplift, of the moment arriving in this song -- masterfully choreographed by will.i.am:
Now, if someone can just keep Nader from spoiling the party again!
