“Obama is Already Over.”
Would someone care to explain to me convincingly (i.e. without resorting to noise, sneers, and flying spittle) why the following is not true? I’d really like to be convinced, and contemptuous dismissal or diversion by food fight is not going to do it.
Obama is already over. In six short months the now-spattered bumper stickers with “Hope and Change” seem like pathetic remnants from the days of “23 Skidoo,” the echoes of “Yes, we can” more nauseating than ever in their cliché-ridden evasiveness. Although they may pretend otherwise, even Obama’s choir in the mainstream media seems to know he’s finished, their defenses of his wildly over-priced medical and cap-and-trade schemes perfunctory at best. Everyone knows we can’t afford them. His stimulus plan – if you could call it his, maybe it’s Geithner’s, maybe it’s someone else’s, maybe it’s not a plan at all – has produced absolutely nothing. In fact, I have met not one person of any ideology who evinces genuine confidence in it.
On the foreign policy front, it’s more embarrassing. He switches positions every day, such as they are, while acting like a petit-bourgeois snob with our allies and then, when people with genuine passion for democracy emerge on the scene (the courageous Iranian protestors), behaves like a cringeworthy, equivocating creep. Enough of Obama.
Only the Republicans are barely any better. We have yet to hear any original ideas from them and there isn’t a real leader on the horizon, mostly retreads like Gingrich and Romney and disappointments, to put it mildly, like Mark Sanford. I write this only hours after Sarah Palin’s announcement of her resignation as Alaska governor and don’t know yet what to make of that. I certainly agree with those who say the attacks on her were unconscionable, but I challenge her most staunch defenders to say that this is really the kind of person to lead us out of our Twenty-First Century malaise.
Of course, you could argue that it’s just Obama’s honeymoon that’s over. Now the actual marriage to the handsome, seductive stranger begins. Probably both parties to the marriage are going, “What have I done??!”
And a Little Ragged Group Believed It . . .
This has meant the Fourth of July to me since 8th grade, when an inspired music and English teacher, Rose Klowden, got a motley crew of 13-year-olds to perform it. If we could amend the glaring (and telling) omission of the original dwellers in the land, it would be a stirring vision of what America could and should become. Maybe someday.
BALLAD FOR AMERICANS
(Original Version)
(Music: Earl Robinson / Words: John LaTouche)
In seventy-six the sky was red
thunder rumbling overhead
Bad King George couldn't sleep in his bed
And on that stormy morn, Ol' Uncle Sam was born.
Some birthday!
Ol' Sam put on a three cornered hat
And in a Richmond church he sat
And Patrick Henry told him that while America drew breath
It was "Liberty or death."
What kind of hat is a three-cornered hat?
Did they all believe in liberty in those days?
Nobody who was anybody believed it.
Ev'rybody who was anybody they doubted it.
Nobody had faith.
Nobody but Washington, Tom Paine, Benjamin Franklin,
Chaim Solomon, Crispus Attucks, Lafayette. Nobodies.
The nobodies ran a tea party at Boston. Betsy Ross
organized a sewing circle. Paul Revere had a horse race.
And a little ragged group believed it.
And some gentlemen and ladies believed it.
And some wise men and some fools, and I believed it too.
And you know who I am.
No. Who are you mister? Yeah, how come all this?
Well, I'll tell you. It's like this... No let us tell you.
Mister Tom Jefferson, a mighty fine man.
He wrote it down in a mighty fine plan.
And the rest all signed it with a mighty fine hand
As they crossed their T's and dotted their I's
A bran' new country did arise.
And a mighty fine idea. "Adopted unanimously in Congress
July 4, 1776,
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
created equal.
That they are endowed by their creator with certain
inalienable rights.
That among these rights are Life, Yes sir!
Liberty, That's right!
And the pursuit of happiness."
Is that what they said? The very words.
That does sound mighty fine.
Building a nation is awful tough.
The people found the going rough.
And thirteen states was not enough
So they started to expand
Into the Western lands!
Still nobody who was anybody believed it.
Everybody who anybody they stayed at home.
But Lewis and Clark and the pioneers,
Driven by hunger, haunted by fears,
The Klondike miners and the forty niners,
Some wanted freedom and some wanted riches,
Some liked to loaf while others dug ditches.
But they believed it. And I believed it too,
And you know who I am.
No, who are you anyway, Mister?
Well, you see it's like this. I started to tell you.
I represent the whole of ... Why that's it!
Let my people go. That's the idea!
Old Abe Lincoln was thin and long,
His heart was high and his faith was strong.
But he hated oppression, he hated wrong,
And he went down to his grave to free the slave.
A man in white skin can never be free while his
black brother is in slavery,
"And we here highly resolve that these dead shall not
have died in vain.
And this government of the people, by the people
and for the people
Shall not perish from the Earth."
Abraham Lincoln said that on November 19, 1863
at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
And he was right. I believe that too.
Say, we still don't know who you are, mister.
Well, I I've been trying to tell you...you see...
The machine age came with a great big roar,
As America grew in peace and war.
And a million wheels went around and 'round.
The cities reached into the sky,
And dug down deep into the ground.
And some got rich and some got poor.
But the people carried through,
So our country grew.
Still nobody who was anybody believed it.
Everybody who was anybody they doubted it.
And they are doubting still,
And I guess they always will,
But who cares what they say when I am on my way
Say, will you please tell us who you are?
What's your name, Buddy? Where you goin'?
Who are you?
Well, I'm everybody who's nobody,
I'm the nobody who's everybody.
What's your racket? What do you do for a living?
Well, I'm an
Engineer, musician, street cleaner, carpenter, teacher,
How about a farmer? Also. Office clerk? Yes ma'am!
That's right. Certainly!
Factory worker? You said it. Yes ma'am.
Absotively! Posolutely!
Truck driver? Definitely!
Miner, seamstress, ditchdigger, all of them.
I am the "etceteras" and the "and so forths" that do the work.
Now hold on here, what are you trying to give us?
Are you an American?
Am I an American?
I'm just an Irish, Negro, Jewish, Italian,
French and English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Polish,
Scotch, Hungarian, Litvak, Swedish, Finnish, Greek and
Turk and Czech and double Czech American.
And that ain't all.
I was baptized Baptist, Methodist, Congregationalist,
Lutheran, Atheist, Roman Catholic, Jewish, Presbyterian,
Seventh Day Adventist,
Mormon, Quaker, Christian Scientist and lots more.
You sure are something.
Our country's strong, our country's young,
And her greatest songs are still unsung.
From her plains and mountains we have sprung,
To keep the faith with those who went before.
We nobodies who are anybody believe it.
We anybodies who are everybody have no doubts.
Out of the cheating, out of the shouting.
Out of the murders and lynching
Out of the windbags, the patriotic spouting
Out of uncertainty and doubting
Out of the carpetbag and the brass spittoon
It will come again
Our marching song will come again!
Deep as our valleys,
High as our mountains,
Strong as the people who made it.
For I have always believed it, and I believe it now,
And you know who I am.
Who are you?
America! America!
“The Attention Economy”
Seth Godin is onto something I’ve been obsessed with for a while: that attention is the currency of our age, as scarce relative to the demand for it as gold, striven for, competed for, craved. It’s worth more than money — money follows it far more than it follows money — and the result is that people will give their work away for free in a bid for attention.
Instead of “follow the money,” “follow the attention.” We all have a limited amount of it to donate or spend, and everybody’s clamoring for it, bidding for it, courting it.
If you could speed up the sounds of the trees in a climax forest fighting for light, it would sound like the trading floor on Wall Street.
It explains a lot. It explains who’s successful these days, and why. (In our world of cutting-edge media, just think of the birthday twins, Limbaugh and Althouse.) There’s an art to getting attention; you probably have to be willing to titillate, provoke, outrage, or wow — something to raise your profile above the din — but there’s a lot more to it than that. One you get attention, you have to hold on to it, or rather — you can’t hold onto it — reward it so hard it remembers to come back for more. You have to make that brain wet its pants with dopamine.
I’m not saying this is good or bad. Just sayin’.
There are also people whose art is to direct attention the way cops direct traffic. They shunt it, herd it, channel it the way a gifted border collie makes a herd of sheep split, group, and flow. They are the agents, promoters, conductors, impresarios, advertisers, PR people, coolhunters, the ones the rest of us rely on to direct our attention to the oases where it will be rewarded . . . from Oprah to Instapundit.
Down in the understory of the climax forest there’s a smaller-scale attention market going on, busy as a bazaar. Technologies like Twitter facilitate the flow and exchange of attention. Why else is there such a contest for the top spots in Trending Topics? It’s not fifteen minutes of fame, or the fifteen people you’re famous to. It’s hunting or harvesting your share of attention. And on this scale, subtler qualities come into play. You can call out to the fifteen or fifteen hundred people whose attention is snagged by wit or understatement, enigma or absurdity, and they will select themselves out of the crowd and home in on you, like salmon tasting just a few molecules of their birth stream in the ocean.
Seth Godin sounds as over the moon as Silicon Valley dot-com types did in the nineties. I have no idea how you can run an economy this way, You can’t buy milk with eyeballs. Yet we are all acting as if working for attention is even more important than working for money. It’s fascinating, and I’m grateful to Godin for putting his finger on it. He’s scratched my itch.
Tom Sawyer-Worthy? [UPDATED: Weirder, Grosser]
Could I get someone to whitewash a fence for a look at that?
It demands a tall tale. All that happened, though, was that in the struggle to get J to lie down sideways on the bed instead of backwards across it — so I could get the sling for the Hoyer lift under him — he slid off onto the carpet, and then (what the hell) in the struggle to get him properly positioned on the floor, instead, I set the mobile arm of the lift swinging and it swung the point of one end into my forehead. No real harm done, no stars or birdies; just a cartoon egg that popped up almost instantaneously, like in “Popeye.” Nothing compared to the awful sundowner meltdown J had last night — agitated, paranoid, defying reality and me as its two-timing agent until, after two hours or more, he finally wore himself out. Not a trace of that today. What’s a little bump on the head?
“Make sure it doesn’t hit you again right on the same place,” J said as I worked to get him strapped to the lift and up off the floor.
“No, I’m going to make sure it hits me on the other side this time so I look like I’m growing two horns,” I said.
I pumped J up off the floor and got him on the wheelchair and we went off to get summer haircuts at Great Clips.
UPDATE: The inevitable shiner, and worse:
Counter Cultural [UPDATED]
Yesterday I was put in a position where I had to try to explain to someone why it might sometimes be a good idea to choose to do what you don’t feel like doing instead of what you do.
This is to American culture as spitting is to the wind.
We think that freedom is the freedom to follow our inclinations, and that our inclinations are a treasure map to our authenticity. Do what you feel. Go with your heart. Follow your bliss.
The result is that we dig the ruts in our brains deeper and never discover the riches off-road. We’re speeding through our own brains sealed in climate-controlled automobiles, along a self-made interstate system, from attraction to fast-food joint to filling station. What we don’t realize is that the blank spots on the map are “us,” too — parts of us our conditioned inclinations will never lead us to. Obviously we can’t discover every interest and develop every quality, so we say, perhaps too quickly, “That doesn’t speak to me,” “That doesn’t do it for me,” “That’s just not me.”
Only when we’re under compulsion — and Americans are blessed to be rarely under compulsion — do we get off our own beaten paths of reliable, repetitive pleasure (some of which are veins of creative gold, others of waste and self-destruction).
Some of the situations in which Americans can experience compulsion: prison; military service; parenthood; illness; a marriage going through a bad patch. Others? Work you hate. Work you love except when you hate it, which is whenever you start and whenever you’re stuck. Compulsion is different from risk. There are severe constraints on you when you’re climbing a rock face, but that fear and focus is often euphoric. Being under compulsion is dysphoric — at least at first. It’s the imposition of another will (sometimes your own) on your wayward wanting. Everything in you wants to bolt. Your freedom and your very identity feel threatened rather than reaffirmed and reinforced.
Sometimes staying put in those situations enriches you beyond imagining. For one thing, you discover that your identity is deeper than your preferences. For another, you discover that your preferences have been provincial. Your “weakness” for this and not that has weakened you. Your tastes have made you miss the very herb that could heal you.
This is the story of my life. The person I was trying to tell it to had already made up his mind to run rather than change. Change feels like death. It is death. But there’s an afterlife.
UPDATE: Relevant tweet: @lensweet What if we were more open to being “sent on The Way” than “set in our ways”?
Jonathan Chait: Obama is Not Naïve.
I think this is quite a good analysis of what Obama is up to:
The thing that people haven’t figured out about President Obama’s conduct of foreign policy is that it’s the same as his conduct of domestic policy. Obama believes in the power of negotiation and public dialogue to split his adversaries–Republicans at home, Islamists abroad–and strengthen his own position. […]
Obama’s method begins with attempts to find common ground, expressions of respect for the adversary’s core beliefs, and profuse hope for cooperation. […]
Naturally, Obama’s pacific expressions tend to alarm the more hawkish elements of his own camp, who interpret his idealistic rhetoric as naivete or weakness. […]
Obama’s method entails small acts of intellectual dishonesty in the pursuit of common ground. […]
Critics […] are correct that surrendering intellectual ground comes at a cost. Our most successful presidents articulate clear, forceful public rationales for their beliefs […]
It is a mistake, however, to view Obama’s strategy as an act of submission.
Consider how Obama explained his approach toward Iran during a recent interview with Newsweek:
Now, will it work? We don’t know. And I assure you, I’m not naive about the difficulties of a process like this. If it doesn’t work, the fact that we have tried will strengthen our position in mobilizing the international community, and Iran will have isolated itself, as opposed to a perception that it seeks to advance that somehow it’s being victimized by a U.S. government that doesn’t respect Iran’s sovereignty.
This is a perfect summation of Obama’s strategy. It does not presuppose that his adversaries are people of goodwill who can be reasoned with. Rather, it assumes that, by demonstrating his own goodwill and interest in accord, Obama can win over a portion of his adversaries’ constituents as well as third parties. Obama thinks he can move moderate Muslim opinion, pressure bad actors like Iran to negotiate, and, if Iran fails to comply, encourage other countries to isolate it. The strategy works whether or not Iran makes a reasonable agreement.
The results remain to be seen. But it eerily resembles the way Obama has already isolated the GOP leadership. …
Read the whole thing. The only problem is, it’s already out of date. Because it isn’t coming across the way he wanted it to.
Tweeting Obama
In reverse (chronological), unTwitterish order:
amba12“he most definitely means he won’t be doing a damned thing for them.” Would be better if he said he would, but didn’t mean it? Like Kurds?
amba12That’s from @julescrittenden http://tr.im/pvoW But here’s the thing: Reaffirming American values is the part of Prez. job he’s not doing.
amba12It feels weird to have an oratorical Prez who’s so NOT doing that oratorical, rousing, reassuring part of the job, even if it’s hoke.
amba12Now you can say we have to grow up and get over our craving for hoke; or you cn say hoke is part of what binds ppl together, keeps ’em going
amba12Obama is what the French would call a “Fonctionnaire.” There’s this whole civil ministering role he’s deliberately refusing to fill. Weird!
amba12It makes the country feel headless–or heartless–in a most peculiar way. Obama didn’t have a father and is refusing to BE a father–to us.
amba12Also, you can sense his (quite natural) insecurity, his stumbling hesitancy in a role he was really unready to take on. HE WASN’T READY!
amba12Wonder whether, and how fast, he can find his footing and grow into this job? He’s still clinging to his original abstract ideas about it.
amba12Real events are demanding that he let go of those abstractions and start swimming strongly in the strong currents. & he’s too inexperienced.
amba12So he’s running on bravado: He’s entitled to the job ’cause he won it. I think it’s startin to sink in: it wasn’t the ultimate prize he won.
amba12I think he’s in over his head and scared shitless. (For the record, I thought Bush was too, but he was front man for a bunch of heavies.)
So Lucky . . .
. . . still to have my Dad . . .
. . . and his first love, my mom . . .
. . . at 91, 85, and 63!!
And with me, they were just getting started! Don’t get me started!
“Replacing Self-Ownership with Self-Stewardship”
On his new blog, Strike the Root, Funky Dung is doing some really original thinking at the intersection of Catholicism and Libertarianism. He doesn’t ever let himself stop and rest at a comfortable and convenient point; just when you think he’s come to a really pleasing synthesis, he challenges himself to move on. (When I got to the sentence that is the title of this post, my heart started beating faster.) He seems to be trying to figure out if a sort of “I-Thou libertarianism” is conceivable, one that goes far beyond utilitarian considerations and natural selfishness. If there’s a problem with it, it’s the problem of idealism, of basing a political vision on humans at their best, which may be ennobling as an expectation but unwarranted as an assumption. Very much worth reading, and responding to Funky’s invitation to contribute to an idea under construction.
Ambiance 