“If we keep on hiding, they will say we are not here.” -Murdered Ugandan LGBT activist David Kato
Call Me Kuchu (the NY Times)
Filed under Getting 'Deep'
Whither liberalism? (Walter Russell Mead in The American Interest)
Walter Russell Mead has a compelling and skeptical assessment of American nostalgia for the Fordist, post-World War II boom that people on both the left and the right hearken back to with so much regularity and fondness these days:
Finally, in this regard, the blue model has impoverished our lives and blighted our society in more subtle ways. Many Americans became (and remain) stuff-rich and meaning-poor. Many people classified as “poor” in American society have an historically unprecedented abundance of consumer goods—anything, essentially, that a Fordist factory here or abroad can turn out. But far too many Americans still have lives that are poor in meaning, in part because the blue social model separates production and consumption in ways that are ultimately dehumanizing and demeaning. A rich and rewarding human life neither comes from nor depends on consumption, even lots of consumption; it comes from producing goods and services of value through the integration of technique with a vision of social and personal meaning. Being fully human is about doing good work that means something. Is a blue society with our level of drug and alcohol abuse, and in which the average American watches 151 hours of television a month, really the happiest conceivable human living arrangement?
The article is called “The Once and Future Liberalism”. Note that Mead here is talking about small l “liberalism” and not “Liberalism”. Have a look at the full, rather long piece here. I think its worth the time.
Filed under Daily Update, Getting 'Deep', politics
The girl whom I loved the most left me. (Edouard Leve in The Paris Review)
As translated from French by Paris Review editor Lorin Stein. This appeared online at the Paris Review. Though I am a subscriber I cannot remember if it was in print as well:
The girl whom I loved the most left me. At ten I cut my finger in a flour mill. At six I broke my nose getting hit by a car. At fifteen I skinned my hip and -elbow falling off a moped, I had decided to defy the street, riding with no hands, looking backward. I broke my thumb skiing, after flying ten meters and landing on my head, I got up and saw, as in a cartoon, circles of birthday candles turning in the air and then I fainted. I have not made love to the wife of a friend. I do not love the sound of a family on the train. I am uneasy in rooms with small windows. Sometimes I realize that what I’m in the middle of saying is boring, so I just stop talking. Art that unfolds over time gives me less pleasure than art that stops it. Even if it is an odd sort of present, I thank my father and mother for having given me life.
Edouard Leve committed suicide in 2007 days after handing the manuscript for his novel called Suicide.
Filed under Getting 'Deep'
The New York Football Giants are Headed Back to the Super Bowl.
The defining moment.
Filed under Larkful
Newt vs. Romney
“As the original campaign consultant put it, the critical thing in every battle is to know your enemy, to know yourself, and to know the terrain. That means, among other things, refusing to tell yourself fairy tales about how everybody is really on your side and just waiting to discover the fact.” –Kevin Williamson in the National Review
Read the whole piece if you have the time. I always like to no what is going on in the head of Republicans. Williamson is one of the most well-reasoned and sober dudes out there.
Filed under Larkful
Kevin Drum on Andrew Sullivan’s “Long-game” Argument
Andrew Sullivan wrote the cover story for this week’s Newsweek, which was fawning profile of President Obama that argued, among other things, that Obama has governed for the long-game, ie an 8 year presidency and that all of this choices have gone towards making that a reality. Also, Republicans and Left-Wingers should quit all of the deranged criticism of the President (which I totally agree with, except not really). Or something. Kevin Drum of Mother Jones responded:
Why was Obama so conciliatory toward the Republican Party early on? It has nothing to do with long-term strategy. It’s because he needed at least two or three Republican votes in the Senate to pass anything, and if he’d been a fire-breathing partisan from the start he wouldn’t have gotten them. He went down this road partly out of native temperament and partly because he didn’t really have any choice.
Why did health care reform take so long? Not because of any clever strategy on Obama’s part. It was because, right or wrong, he made a rational calculation not to repeat Bill Clinton’s mistakes. So instead of pushing a plan of his own, he let Congress take the lead. And Congress decided to move very, very slowly.
Why was Obama’s reponse to the financial crisis basically pretty centrist? Again, not because of any long game. More likely, it’s because Obama himself is genuinely fairly centrist and business oriented when it comes to financial policy.
What explains Obama’s strategy toward Israel and its West Bank settlements? I’m not even sure what the argument for a long game is here. The more prosaic—and probably correct—explanation is that Obama failed. He tried to press Netanyahu on the settlements because he thought he had the leverage to make him listen. He turned out to be wrong, plain and simple.
Why is Obama now taking a harder, more partisan approach toward his GOP adversaries? Not because he was cleverly playing with them for three years and is now reaping the rewards of an electorate convinced that Republicans are hopelessly obstructionist. In fact, surveys don’t suggest that public opinion has moved much in Obama’s direction at all. Rather, he’s doing it because it’s an election year. It’s now time for contrast, not compromise. This is Campaigning 101.
Also, as people who voted for and donated money to the Obama campaign we have every right to ask more from our president and to push him towards our preferred policy goals. I don’t think the president is a horrible dude who has walked back on all of his campaign promises but I’m sticking to my guns on Gitmo, civil liberties and the fact that he needs to wind down the drug war.
Filed under Getting 'Deep', politics
Income Inequality Under Republicans and Democrats (Via Timothy Noah at The New Republic)
See more here.
Filed under Daily Update
Former Liberian Soccer Great Dies Penniless in Newark Streets (The Star Ledger)
This is a heartbreaking story because for all I know I saw him numerous times as I traveled through Newark Penn Station, where he evidently spent his nights. And I can say from experience that the men and women who spend their evenings keeping warm in Penn Station are a destitute and pitiful bunch, for whom life has been neither easy nor pleasant.
Sacko, 75, had died at St. Michael’s, in Newark’s Central Ward, on Sept. 17, homeless, penniless and almost anonymously.
But a half-century ago and an ocean away, George McDonald Sacko, aka “Wizard,” had a country at his feet.
An elegant and agile midfielder, Sacko had captained the Liberian national soccer team into the 1960s, when the nascent squad supplied the unifying thread to a country fraying at the serrated edge of tribal and political strife.
He had groomed his game barefoot, kicking tennis balls with older boys in the dusty streets of Liberia’s capital, Monrovia. He attended a prestigious high school and befriended government ministers. He had a future president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate as a girlfriend, and played for the country’s best club teams.
“He was flashy,” said June Nwanna, who became his wife and the mother of his two sons. “He was very popular. All the women wanted him.”
Within two decades, those strands of glory and adulation would unspool like so much gossamer.
In the end, Sacko was wandering Newark’s streets, and spending his nights at Penn Station.
Filed under Getting 'Deep'
