A friend works with prisoners to publish their essays, stories, and drawings in a magazine they call SCOPE: Symbolizing Creativity on Prison Environment. Here's a cartoon from a recent issue, drawn by H.J. Halm, perhaps inspired by Paris Hilton. Check out their awesome work.
I recently finished Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father. Of course there's a lot to say on the subjects of race, nationality, and identity. But at least for now, I'm captured by "identity."
Obama's US-Kenya split resonated with me. I too am someone who's wrestled with two identities on two continents, who's matured from an American Jew to a Jewish American to a Jew and a American (must they be connected?) to an individual first-and-last, to a "global citizen" and sometimes plainly an American. My own cliched search for identity culminated with a purge: I jettisoned the Jewish part, deciding that it was not worth its theistic, misogynist, Zionist offenses, that notwithstanding my early enchantment, it was ultimately an imagined (indeed, no less real but no more necessary) construct born of communal insularity and political fever, inculcated from birth through seasonal rituals and melodies that - despite my stubborn attempts to disassociate - can still conjure up the smells of Friday night challah and the aura of transcendent messianic yearning that surrounded, like a divine canopy, the sacred and imposing ark of the covenant.
It's okay to think fondly of the past and never actually yearn for it. Yes, I did "wrestle" with identities. I know a little about wrestling. As a high school 140-pounder, I lost a lot of matches. I won a few, too. Importantly though, it was impossible to tie. One couldn't prevaricate under the ticking clock. It's what William James calls a 'forced decision,' where not deciding or weakly claiming indecision is itself a decision. There are some who claim to "wrestle" and "struggle" and yet remain cautiously and cowardly stationary, unprepared to either overcome or acquiesce. That's not putting everything on the mat. I wrestled with Jewish identity and it lost. Of course there are other ways to reconcile contradictory identities and split heritages. I'm pluralistic enough to understand that others could decide differently, so long as they actually decide.
Anyway, below is the moving passage from Obama's Dreams from My Father that wrought all this rambling. It follows after a conversation he had with a British man he met on a safari in Kenya.
“Maybe I was just angry because of his easy familiarity with me, his assumption that I, as an American, even as black American, might naturally share in his dim view of Africa; an assumption that in his world at least marked a progress of sorts, but that for me only underscored by my own uneasy status: a Westerner not entirely at home in the West, an African on his way to a land full of strangers.
“I’d been feeling this way all through my stay in Europe – edgy, defensive, hesitant with strangers. I hadn’t planned it that way. I had thought of the layover there as nothing more than a whimsical detour, an opportunity to visit places I had never been before. For three weeks I had traveled alone, down one side of the continent and up the other, by bus and by train mostly, a guidebook in hand. I took tea by the Thames and watched children chase each other through the chestnut groves of Luxembourg Garden. I crossed the Plaza Mejor at high noon, with its De Chirico shadows and sparrows swirling across cobalt skies and watched night fall over the Palatine, waiting for the first stars to appear, listing to the wind and its whispers of mortality.
“And by the end of the first week or so, I realized that I’d made a mistake. It wasn’t that Europe wasn’t beautiful; everything as just as I’d imagined it. It just wasn’t mine. I felt as if I were living out someone else’s romance; the incompleteness of my own history stood between me and the sites I saw like a hard pane of glass” (301).
I spent yesterday in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, registering voters for the April 22 primary. The deadline to register is Monday. Pennsylvania has a "closed primary," meaning only registered Democrats can vote. I traveled two hours south from Syracuse with three other 20-somethings named Jim, Mike, and John, who were only slightly more interesting than their names. I spent a good part of the day "canvassing" (fancy name for knocking on doors) in a mostly white working-class Catholic neighborhood, trying to convince independent voters to switch their affiliation to Democratic and vote for Barack Obama in the primary.
It took a lot of nudging to convince people to "box" themselves as Democrats. Unlike my colleagues, I nudged pretty hard ("this is a historic election," "here is your chance to make your voice heard," "the deadline is Monday and it's now or never.") And of course I promoted Obama, talking about national security, education, health care, Iraq, jobs, care for veterans. I made sure to wear a green "O'Bama" sticker. People say "all politics is local" but what they really mean is "politics is ethnic." I was uncomfortable explaining Obama's plan to create "American jobs" to a guy who complained about "the Indians at the gas stations who send our dollars to India." I spent a lot of time answering questions about Obama's faith, mentioning his white mother, and reassuring one voter that no, Obama wasn't a Muslim Arab, or as he said it, "A-rab."
It was classic small-town America, especially when I found myself in front of a K-Mart with mustached men in baseball caps and flannel shirts, and fat white women sporting sweatpants. A lot of people said "no, I'm not registered and hell I don't want to be;" some people announced that "Hillary's my girl," unable to conceal their contempt for the young black man who should wait his turn. I did have some light moments during the day: when one woman opened her door with a heroin spoon in her hand, or when I called out to a young black man with jeans around his knees while my canvassing partner quaked, "oh god, he looks scary." The guy turned out to be a avid Obama supporter. At first I gave him the only sticker I had, one that read "O'Bama" in Irish green. "Wait, that's silly," I said, unpinning a regular Obama button from my jacket, "take this instead."
Outside the K-Mart, one 30-year-old woman kept glancing at me:
"Are you registered to vote?" I asked her.
"Uh, I don't think so."
"Have you voted before?"
"I don't know a lot about politics."
"Well, if you'd like to vote for Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, you'll need to register; it's really easy," I started to explain, before realizing that she really didn't know anything, not even the name of John McCain-the-71-year-old, as I called him. So I began again: "There's an election for president."
"Okay," she said, grateful and utterly serious.
It can take a deep faith in democracy to stand up for "one person, one vote." It's also difficult sometimes to maintain a sense of urgency while knocking on yet another unanswered door at 3 pm on a Saturday and walking through empty neighborhoods with broken glass in the road, past houses with rotten siding and misaligned concrete steps. The smell from the local McDonald's permeates the air. It's 40 degrees outside and the sky is clear and clothing is hanging limply on the line and what-am-I-doing-in-this-unfamiliar-place and the future of America is at stake.
I'm probably not the only one struck by the religious undercurrent in Obama's address on race. Andrew Sullivan, for one, called it a "deeply, deeply Christian speech." And here I was, sitting, reading and re-reading the words and thinking to myself: I know this... from where?
From James Baldwin's 1962 book, The Fire Next Time, describing the black church:
The church was very exciting. It took a long time for me to disengage myself from this excitement, and on the blindest, most visceral level, I never really have, and never will. There is no music like that music, no drama like the drama of saints rejoicing, the sinners moaning, the tambourines racing, and all those voices coming together and crying holy unto the Lord. There is still, for me, no pathos quite like the pathos of those multicolored, worn, somehow triumphant and transfigured faces, speaking from the depths of a visible, tangible, continuing despair of the goodness of the Lord (33-34).From Obama's address in Philadelphia today, "A More Perfect Union" (video, text):
Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.Religion aside, Obama focused on the resentment and anger lingering from racial grievances. Impressively, he segues seamlessly into a discussion to class and economic prosperity.
We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. ...This is an address that we will return to for years to come.
For the men and women of Reverend Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. ...
And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright's sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.
In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience - as far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything, they've built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.
Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren't always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.
Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze - a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns - this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.
I just came across this great computer game (hat tip: Ezra Klein) where you try to contain the spread of tuberculosis by hitting the infectious litter buggers with a giant hammer marked "medical research." Tuberculosis may not be as sexy as HIV/AIDS (for one thing, it's not sexually transmitted), but it kills nearly two million people a year and spreads rapidly through the air and by touch. So, one might imagine that it's a very bad idea to take trans-Atlantic flights while infected, especially with the multi-drug resistant variety - cough Andrew Speaker cough cough).
Play the game:
I'm going to be anti-Zionist for a minute here (see me being anti-Palestinian here). For all the claims, justified or not, that the mainstream media is biased against Israel, there's at least one point where it's come down in favor of the Zionists: the MSM has never, ever, questioned the assumption at the heart of the I-P conflict: the alleged right of the Jews to that strip of land.
Here's one narrative, albeit simplistic: Shlomo inherits a house from his father, David. As Shlomo sorts the inheritance papers, he comes across a shocking discovery (indeed, something he should have seen earlier): David (citing a deep emotional and cultural attachment to that tract of land, despite an intermittent few centuries) had stolen the house from its previous owner, Mahmoud. Mahmoud has also died, leaving behind a daughter named Leila who seeks to claim the house. Perhaps because of her youth, she seems utterly determined to do it. What should Shlomo do?
What should we do, if Shlomo won't?
I was in the kitchen of my Be'er Sheva apartment when it came together. It was a gorgeous day as usual, perhaps a little warm, and I was reading yet another right-wing commentary in the supposedly left-wing newspaper Ha'aretz while waiting for the water to boil. The editorialist was denouncing Palestinian terrorism despite Israeli efforts (dubious, I should add) to return land seized in 1967. 1967 is the watershed year for the Jews; in the Zionist consciousness, it's the year that God blessed the Zionist project - as evidenced by the Israeli conquest of Jerusalem's Old City, not to mention the Suez Canal and the Golan Heights. But for the Palestinians, 1967 is just an extension, indeed an exacerbation, of the truly horrific year of 1948. Yes, that's the cursed year; it's not the borders they're concerned with; it the very question of Jewish European settlers claiming sovereignty over their fathers' house. There's lots of idealistic talk about the search for "common ground." Well if you want to find common ground, get a time machine.
The Israelis think they're being generous by not expelling the Palestinians to Jordan. The Palestinians think they're being generous by not pushing the Jews into the Mediterranean Sea. When everyone thinks they're doing more than their fair share, resentment is inevitable.
Jeremiah Wright, in the news this week:
To all the public outcry, my friend Shannon replies, "oh america....get over yourself already." And she's totally correct - so what if a friend of a presidential candidate criticizes America? Of course Obama will have to distance himself, even if there's still something true in Wright's comment that "Barack knows what it means living in a country and a culture that is controlled by rich white people." I don't think that's so "radical." Blind uncritical patriotism ascends to comic proportions in American politics, like Mitt Romney's silly comment, "Gosh, I love America" to the hullabaloo over Barack Obama not wearing an American flag lapel pin on his suit jacket.
Now there's another element to the public fascination with Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and it comes down to three words: Angry Black Man. The right-wing and even the mainstream media want to show that even presidential hopeful Barack Obama can't escape the legacy of black outrage. So they portray the Rev. Jeremiah Wright as an out-of-control revolutionary militant. It doesn't matter much what he's angry about - say, Hiroshima and Nagasaki or racialized wealth disparities or inadequate health coverage or failing inner-city schools; it matters that he's angry. The angry black man is an iconic image in American consciousness - something Obama will have to overcome.
It's also worth checking out the audio excerpt and text of Rev. Wright’s 1990 sermon, "The Audacity to Hope," a meditation and exegesis of the story of Hannah (1 Samuel 1:1-18) using this painting (below) titled "Hope," by the Victorian artist George Frederic Watts. And also - as fast as you can - get your hands on a copy of Obama's book, Dreams from My Father, and read pages 279 to 295, in which he describes his first meeting with Rev. Wright and that famous sermon on hope.
Relatedly, on the multicultural rift in mainstream feminism, see Assault on Black Folks Sanity:
"Where were Gloria Steinem, Ferraro, and, yes, Ms. Clinton, when a truly historic figure, the FIRST BLACK WOMAN SENATOR EVER (whose seat Sen. Obama now occupies), Ms. Carol Moseley-Braun, ran for the democratic nomination for President? This Senator was marginalized and basically got laughed out of the process. Couldn’t find no Ferraro..., no Clinton... no Steinem... where were they? On the moon? Shucks. ... If Ms. Ferraro, Ms. Clinton, and Ms. Steinem etc, were so committed to putting a woman up for the presidential nomination, why not Sen. Mosley-Braun... Thus the hypocrisy. Clearly then this is not about fielding a woman, it is about fielding a WHITE woman."
I was excited to find a well-informed article in the popular press about the complexity of defining death (it's a rarity!). See: "Fatal flaw" by Timothy Gower in the Boston Globe. It's on the general topic of my undergraduate thesis, which focused on "conscience clauses" that established alternate criteria for the determination of death. As you might imagine, there's substantial disagreement of the question of what is essential to being alive. Demonstrating the debate's intractability, the Boston Globe article quotes Dr. Eelco Wijdicks as saying "There is no controversy about brain death," and then quotes Dr. Robert Truog, who says "There is nobody in the world of philosophy and bioethics who thinks brain death is a coherent concept." You don't have to be a neurologist (both are) to see that one of them has to be wrong. (In fact, they both are.)
A lot of debate over death and organ donation focuses on the "dead donor rule." It says simply that people have to be declared dead before their vital organs can be retrieved. It's an informal rule, but doctors could still be charged with murder for breaking it. Here's the problem: it may soothe our consciences by preventing "death by organ retrieval," but it also reduces our organ yield. Then people die for lack of transplants. This debate has stretched across decades: Halevy and Brody in 1993 and Peter Singer in 1994 argued (on somewhat different grounds) that people should be allowed to become organ donors before they're declared dead. Others want to expand the potential organ pool still further, to include vegetative patients and anencephalic infants. I'm sympathetic to these arguments. A declaration of death may be needed to distribute assets or to dispose of the body, but I'm not convinced that it's necessary to retrieve organs (from consenting people). It'd be nice to avoid this question, but sadly (as is obvious) it's not a do-no-harm kind of world.
I just finished The Gangster We Are All Waiting For, a fictionalized childhood memoir by lê thi diem thúy. Born in South Vietnam in 1972, Lê's family (father and mother) fled to Southern California as "boat people." The novel's protagonist seems to be Lê herself, but that's never quite clear. The narrator's brother (like Lê's own brother) drowned before the family left Vietnam, and much of the book recalls his mysterious presence. Yet she never discloses his name or the precise circumstances of his death. Because the novel skips through time, from her childhood to her adult life to her grandparents in Vietnam, it can be hard to discern the details.
The book's tone is melancholic and sentimental to a fault. It reads with a sort of romantic hopelessness. The author states: "When my father sang at night and I danced in the courtyard, my mother said, 'Stop dancing with your shadow.' But I was dancing with my brother" (148). I found it quite frustrating that the reader knows nothing about this lost brother, but I suppose that's not the point of the book. More than a novel, it's really a meditation on memory and mourning. Ultimately, I think, the book fails because it's trying too hard to be profound.
The little nuggets of eloquent language partly redeem the book. Here's Lê, for example, describing her parents' interaction as her mother greeted her father at a military camp in South Vietnam: "To his disbelieving eyes she says, 'It's me, it's me.' Shy and formal and breathless, my parents are always meeting for the first time, savoring the sound of an name, marveling at the bones of the face cupped by the bones of the hand" (82). Never is there any explanation of why he was incarcerated at a military camp in Vietnam, who was holding him, or how he got out.
If there's any thematic aspect to this book that redeems it, it's the narrator's tenuous relationship with her native country of Vietnam. Whether it's the constant reminder of her name or her parents' illiteracy in English, it's impossible to forget that she's a foreigner in California. But she doesn't seem to belong in Vietnam either. "Vietnam," she writes, "is a black-and-white photograph of my grandparents sitting in bamboo chairs in their front courtyard" (78).
And I think every foreign-born child has an experience like this one:
"I was the only Vietnamese student at my school. On the first day of class, the teacher introduced me to the other students by holding a globe in one hand as she gave it a spin with the other, and then pointing with her finger at an S-shaped curve near a body of water. Was that where I had come from? As I stood before them in a dress the color of an Easter egg, with my feet encased in clear plastic sandals, the other students looked at the globe and then back at me again. Some whispered behind their hands. Some just stared. I imagined the stripes on my underwear flashing on and off, like traffic signals, under my dress" (19).
I have little to add to the morning-after news commentary, except to point out a striking (and I would add, depressing) statistic from the exit polls in Ohio, where Clinton won 54-44:
20% of white voters said race was an important issue in deciding their vote.It sometimes seems that Obama has no trouble winning the support of white voters, except in states with large black populations. Is that right? Is that a commentary on racial polarization in the US?
75% of them went for Clinton.
Last week I submitted my resignation, effective this summer. It was a really tough move, deciding to leave a job I like when I don't know where I'm going. My boss processed the paperwork, and as I carried the forms down the hill to HR, I felt a bit like Jesus carrying his own crucifix. But all things considered, now is my time to seek out a different world. I might head toward some sort of advocacy work or teaching related to criminal justice.
I will have spent the last two years as a research assistant to nine (yep, nine) professors in the bioethics department of a medical school. I haven't written much about my work here, occasionally noting a quiet moment of appreciation, or a more perilous Indiana Jones moment in the library basement. So it's probably worth explaining what I do on a regular basis - and why I love this job.
For the most part, I spend my days working through questions asked by the faculty:
"what's the organ donation acquisition policy in Europe?"
"how many health care workers get HIV on the job?"
"what's case law on the right of prisoners to refuse treatment?"
"what's the penalty for falsifying insurance forms in NYS?"
"of organs recovered, how many are actually transplanted?"
"what criteria do insurance companies use to evaluate requests for coverage?"
"can you track down transcripts for the Abigail Alliance case?"
"which states or cities have banned trans fats?"
"where is donation after cardiac death being done?"
"how does the ratio of working people to retired people vary by country?"
"can you find info on the rising rates of obesity around the world?"
"can you find the text of NY's law on decision-making for developmentally disabled patients?"
"how much money do pharmaceutical companies spend on marketing each year?"
"does the AMA have a position on the matter? other medical professional societies?"
"do illegal immigrants have Medicaid coverage for post-organ transplant medical care?"
"how do insurance companies evaluate whether to respect an appeal for coverage?"
"is there evidence that tobacco companies target African Americans more than whites?"
"can a plaintiff require its medical expert witness to testify for its side only?"
"which countries are least car-dependent? can you find data on vehicles per capita?"
"are poor patients really the beneficiaries of free drug samples?"
"who pays for the court-ordered treatment of a minor patient?"
"how does the Veterans Administration ration its high-cost diagnostic tests?"
"does New York have an 'I'm sorry' law for physicians?"
So I have exciting workdays. The faculty are experts in their niches - global health, medical professionalism, medical creative writing, hospital policy, etc. - but everyone requires background details, especially for survey courses. So snippet by snippet, I meander through the topics. It's a wonderful job. In much of academia, people are driven to become experts in obscure topics, to know a lot about a little. My work is the opposite: I am expected to know a little about a lot.
Finally, I can't understate how wonderful it is to work for a place where people dress in comfortable clothing (well, most of the time; I still tuck in my shirt), where there's often blueberry pie or oatmeal cookies or "Friday chocolate" (or a chocolate-tasting contest) on the kitchenette counter, where the rotating "selections from the Center library" include books like Rafael Campo's book of poetry, What the Body Told and Paul Farmer's Pathologies of Power. I do feel loved and supported in this office - and am so glad to have landed here among mentors and friends.
I just saw the film Unsettled, directed by Adam Hootnick, which follows six Jewish Israelis in the month leading up to the disengagement of 8,500 Jews from the Gaza Strip in August 2005. Hootnick took the stage after the film to answer questions. I had a comment.
"I want to call attention to three omissions in your film," I said.
"Omissions?" he responded. "Should I take notes?" A giggle rippled through the crowd. From the questions and the applause, it was clear he had a supportive, uncritical audience. I looked down on my cheat sheet where I had written "distortions." Shoulda said "distortions."
"First, you don't correct the settler who said he'd be "homeless" after the disengagement. But he was never homeless. Their resettlement was expertly coordinated by the Israeli government."
Hootnick tried to interrupt here. "Wait, what did you say?" I repeated the point. He conceded.
"And not only were they resettled, but they were resettled in Ariel in the West Bank and in Arab East Jerusalem where once again these settlers are greatly outnumbered - which makes the stated rationale of the disengagement - 'maintaining a Jewish majority' - seem rather silly."
[By the way, the film doesn't mention East Jerusalem. That came out in the Q&A.]
"Second, the rationale itself. Your film provides little by way of explanation of why this disengagement was happening. You show footage of Ariel Sharon saying that the withdrawal is necessary to maintain a 'Jewish democracy.' We don't appreciate how ethnocratic and some would say, racist, that justification really is - the need to maintain a Jewish majority."
"Third, the history. Now, it'd take all night to review the history, but your film doesn't even provide a sentence about the impact of the Israeli settlements on Palestinian life."
He interrupted me there. Have I become one of those people who won't relinquish the mic?
The guy who took the mic after me applauded Hootnick on the film's "balanced" presentation. That was his whole comment. Garbage. We have a tendency to believe that if a film shows more than one point of view, it's balanced. But if a film interviews, say, members of the KKK on the one hand, and ordinary white people on the other, that's not balanced. That's skewed. If Hootnick wanted to be balanced, he would have interviewed Palestinians. But he depicts not one Palestinian among the 1.3 million imprisoned in the Gaza Strip, rendering them not only voiceless, but invisible. Of course they do appear in the film, embedded in racist slurs repeated by settlers and their supporters and spray-painted on bus stop walls, that declare the murderous racist Meir Kahane "right."
If Hootnick had wanted to be balanced, he would have interviewed some of the Israeli soldiers who spent their three-year mandated army service defending that outnumbered group of religious extremists in places like Gush Katif and other enclaves that were never viable. Or he would have interviewed the mothers of some of those soldiers who died in that duty.
The lack of context is really appalling. In 1967, the Israeli army conquers Gaza, encourages Jews to settle it, and finally 38 years later, returns the stolen land. Meanwhile, Hootnick thinks the settlers deserve our sympathy. Yes it's true that too many discussions of MidEast politics devolve into an unproductive debate over who's suffered the most, but I think it's also reasonable to say that the settlers, who were moved into new homes at the government's expense, are not the principal victims in this conflict. Not when Gaza Palestinians have a 60% poverty rate.
I wish I had gotten to one final point. I wanted to note the most obscene misconception about the withdrawal of Israeli settlers from Gaza: that the Israeli occupation of Gaza is over. It's not.
Barbara Ehrenreich, while noting Obama's "long legislative history" and "meaty economic program," suggests that the real appeal of Obama's candidacy is his fresh start for America. After years of Clintonian triangulation and Bushian fear-mongering, people are desperate for "change."
Ehrenreich:
"[N]o one checks the weather before leaping out of a burning building."
I think love is form of spirituality - an ineffable gut-feeling that I don't quite get. But before I expose myself as a cold heartless person, let me say that it's not for lack of trying.
Some people seem to fall in love left and right, forever compiling lists of crushes and gushing about sweaty palms and dry mouths and clumsy hands. Other people are much more steady; they hold out for that legendary soulmate and rarely fall in love. Forrest Gump is that sort of lover, longing for Jenny through the decades. Soulmate-lovers, like spiritual people, don't seem to understand that not everyone experiences their euphoria. I have no euphoria, but I think I'm more of the soulmate variety - not because I think there's one person in the world absolutely destined for me, but because I can't imagine that there'd be two. Maybe there's not even one. In my more cynical moments, I imagine love as a hyped-up version of compatibility. But even compatibility is a stretch. That any two people, complicated as they are, can think of themselves as compatible is nothing short of insane, though I suppose, no less of an ideal.
As for less than perfect relationships, Feministing's Ann created this spoof below, inspired by the classic anti-feminist poster that adjures independent women "to take back the date."
Yesterday ABC 7 News and Politico.com interviewed Hillary Clinton (here) and Barack Obama (here). They invited readers to submit questions. Below is my question. It wasn't asked.
Senator Obama,
In past debates, Senator Clinton has criticized you for your past statements [2003 Youtube video below] in support of single-payer universal health insurance. You have replied that implementing single-payer is not feasible in the current political environment. In what way is implementing single-payer not feasible? Do you anticipate that it will (in your view) ever become feasible?
By the way, here's Krugman on "Why not single-payer?" And another take.
Woops! I posted too early and can't remove the link for you RSS readers.
I've been meaning to post about why I favor Obama for all the reasons people usually favor Clinton, namely "experience." But now's not the time. I should get back to my job!
We have every reason to be pissed as hell.
An unnecessary trillion-dollar war. A warming planet. A global gag rule.
In 2004, as Kerry and Bush prepared for the election, Eminem tapped that anger with the music video "Mosh." That video captured the psychosis of a generation: the tired mothers with husbands in Iraq, the furious mobs, the understated aggression, the rage. The lyrics:Let the President answer on high anarchy
Strap him with AK-47, let him go
Fight his own war, let him impress daddy that way
No more blood for oil, we got our own battles to fight on our soil
No more psychological warfare to trick us to think that we ain't loyal
If we don't serve our own country we're patronizing a hero
Look in his eyes, it's all lies, the stars and stripes
They've been swiped, washed out and wiped,
And replaced with his own face, mosh now or die
If I get sniped tonight you'll know why, because I told you to fight
Now in 2008, we should be angrier if anything. We saw our government respond sluggishly to the devastation of Katrina. We saw politically-motivated firings at the Justice Dept. We saw our civil liberties eroded by a government that spies on its citizens with the complacency of telecom companies. We saw our veterans neglected at Walter Reed and on the city streets.
And yet Obama seems to have altered the trajectory of that anger. See this video, "Yes, we can."
Some people think Obama's message is naive, that he won't withstand the GOP onslaught. But having channeled our dismay from anger to hope, Obama seems not only genuine, but shrewd.
Hat tip: Ezra Klein.
Gosh, there's so much to say about the election.
I want to talk about health care policies, but let me run through some preliminary items. I've not been shy about my preference for the black guy from Chicago's south side. I'll support Hillary Clinton if she wins the nomination, but I still dislike how she went negative on Obama and how Bill Clinton bashed Obama on invented grounds. Her campaign supported strong-arm tactics in Nevada, propagated unfounded assertions that Obama wanted a "trillion dollar tax increase on the middle class," and shamelessly distorted Obama's positions on Iraq and abortion. I also favor Obama because he spoke out on Iraq while Clinton was channeling Bush on the Senate floor (without even reading the National Intelligence Estimate). Obama current advisers opposed the war from the start. Clinton's current advisers did not, which says something about her foreign policy (not to mention her vote on Kyl-Lieberman). It's also odd that Clinton has been so unapologetic about her Iraq vote. Given this backdrop, I wonder what possessed her to stand and applaud Bush’s assertion during the State of the Union that there’s "no doubt" that "the surge is working."
As for the merely political, I think Obama is expanding the party base in ways Clinton simply can't. People who vote Democratic in one election are more likely to vote Democratic again. That matters. Obama is also a more effective campaigner and can help Democratic candidates in swing states. And the difference between 55 Democratic votes in the Senate and 51 Democratic votes is larger than any policy difference between Clinton and Obama. I also fear that the Clintons will unify the Republican base and hurt Democratic prospects. We have got to keep Congress blue.
On health care, there have been charges thrown about, especially on the question of mandates. Clinton requires that everyone purchase health insurance while Obama favors a mandate only for children. Clinton has charged repeatedly that Obama's plan would leave 15 million people uninsured. Obama has said that if there are indeed such a large number of uninsured people, he would consider imposing a mandate. Obama is weaker here. Would he require people who opted not to purchase health insurance to pay back-premiums when they eventually get sick? Neither has discussed how such a mandate would work, or how the state would penalize people who did not comply. Obama stresses that health coverage must be affordable before the government decides that it's mandatory. His campaign just released a mailer that says: "Hillary's health care plan forces everyone to buy insurance, even if you can't afford it." It concludes, "Is that the best we can do for people struggling with high health care costs?"
I'm not sure what to think about this whole debate. Hillary Clinton's plan makes intuitive sense. We don't want people gaming the system, betting that they won't get sick, while expecting public services if they ever do. But as Robert Reich says, the combination of purchasing pools, subsidies, easier enrollment, and mandatory coverage of children will cover all but 3% of the uninsured. Is it then better to "to require this 3% to buy insurance, or lure them into buying it with low rates and subsidies"? Meanwhile, 80 of the most respected public policy leaders have put forth the following statement which makes me think twice about the alleged deficiencies of Obama's plan:
"[W]ithout strong incentives to comply and harsh punishments for violation, [mandates] will have little impact on the number of uninsured Americans. Indeed, as the Massachusetts experience illustrates, non-compliance with mandates is a large problem, absent harsh sanctions. There is simply no factual basis for the assertion that an individual mandate, by itself, would result in coverage for 15 million more Americans than would robust efforts to make health care more affordable and accessible."Return for a second to Obama's mailer. It asks: “Is that the best we can do?” Krugman attacks it as "Harry and Louise." But Obama asks a good question. Is it? Answer: No.
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