Read this and pass it on…

Smart, insightful, and heartbreaking at once:

The Recession’s Racial Divide
By Barbara Ehrenreich and Dedrick Muhammad

WHAT do you get when you combine the worst economic downturn since the Depression with the first black president? A surge of white racial resentment, loosely disguised as a populist revolt. An article on the Fox News Web site has put forth the theory that health reform is a stealth version of reparations for slavery: whites will foot the bill and, by some undisclosed mechanism, blacks will get all the care. President Obama, in such fantasies, is a dictator and, in one image circulated among the anti-tax, anti-health reform “tea parties,” he is depicted as a befeathered African witch doctor with little tusks coming out of his nostrils. When you’re going down, as the white middle class has been doing for several years now, it’s all too easy to imagine that it’s because someone else is climbing up over your back.

The whole column is worth reading…and passing on…especially in any circle frequented by so-called independents.

A Poem for the First Day of School

I’m not cranky about the new term staring…nope not me. Not even a little bit. Not. at. all.

Did I Miss Anything?
by Tom Wayman (b. 1945)
(thanks to my friend luna for sharing!)

Nothing. When we realized you weren’t here
we sat with our hands folded on our desks
in silence, for the full two hours

Everything. I gave an exam worth
40 percent of the grade for this term
and assigned some reading due today
on which I’m about to hand out a quiz
worth 50 percent

Nothing. None of the content of this course
has value or meaning
Take as many days off as you like:
any activities we undertake as a class
I assure you will not matter either to you or me
and are without purpose

Everything. A few minutes after we began last time
a shaft of light suddenly descended and an angel
or other heavenly being appeared
and revealed to us what each woman or man must do
to attain divine wisdom in this life and
the hereafter
This is the last time the class will meet
before we disperse to bring the good news to all people
on earth.

Nothing. When you are not present
how could something significant occur?

Everything. Contained in this classroom
is a microcosm of human experience
assembled for you to query and examine and ponder
This is not the only place such an opportunity has been
gathered

but it was one place

And you weren’t here

On the Nose: Jena Bush’s New Job

Glenn Greenwald over at Salon makes a lot of sense (I found his commentary while reading The New York Times online):

They should convene a panel for the next “Meet the Press” with Jenna Bush Hager, Luke Russert, Liz Cheney, Megan McCain and Jonah Goldberg, and they should have Chris Wallace moderate it. They can all bash affirmative action and talk about how vitally important it is that the U.S. remain a Great Meritocracy because it’s really unfair for anything other than merit to determine position and employment. They can interview Lisa Murkowski, Evan Bayh, Jeb Bush, Bob Casey, Mark Pryor, Jay Rockefeller, Dan Lipinksi, and Harold Ford, Jr. about personal responsibility and the virtues of self-sufficiency. Bill Kristol, Tucker Carlson and John Podhoretz can provide moving commentary on how America is so special because all that matters is merit, not who you know or where you come from. There’s a virtually endless list of politically well-placed guests equally qualified to talk on such matters. . . .

All of the above-listed people are examples of America’s Great Meritocracy, having achieved what they have solely on the basis of their talent, skill and hard work — The American Way. By contrast, Sonia Sotomayor — who grew up in a Puerto Rican family in Bronx housing projects; whose father had a third-grade education, did not speak English and died when she was 9; whose mother worked as a telephone operator and a nurse; and who then became valedictorian of her high school, summa cum laude at Princeton, a graduate of Yale Law School, and ultimately a Supreme Court Justice — is someone who had a whole litany of unfair advantages handed to her and is the poster child for un-American, merit-less advancement.

A poem for the last day of August

Packing and unpacking always unearths “stuff”—stuff you forgot you had and feel happy to see again, stuff you meant to throw away, stuff you thought you’d thrown away, stuff you should have thrown away, stuff that reveals you have an inordinate amount of drinking glasses and cloth napkins.

Among the stuff I found in my recent move was a poem given to me by my friend Megan in my birthday card last year. It was a tough milestone birthday that I dreaded for a full year and a half, but this poem helped give me a wee bit of perspective:

A Lady Who Thinks She is Thirty

Unwillingly Miranda wakes,
Feels the sun with terror,
One unwilling step she takes,
Shuddering to the mirror.

Miranda in Miranda’s sight
Is old and gray and dirty;
Twenty-nine she was last night;
This morning she is thirty.

Shining like the morning star,
Like the twilight shining,
Haunted by a calendar,
Miranda is a-pining.

Silly girl, silver girl,
Draw the mirror toward you;
Time who makes the years to whirl
Adorned as he adored you.

Time is timelessness for you;
Calendars for the human;
What’s a year, or thirty, to
Loveliness made woman?

Oh, Night will not see thirty again,
Yet soft her wing, Miranda;
Pick up your glass and tell me, then–
How old is Spring, Miranda?

Ogden Nash

Hypocrisy on Film: The Grand Old Party on Medicare

For all that the press gleefully reports on how the leaders in the party of “family values” fail to live up to the standards they regularly hold others to, it’s this kind of hypocrisy that makes my blood boil. Preying on the fears of the elderly by claiming Obama’s health care plan will destroy Medicare is evil; preying on those fears as the party that has been trying to end Medicare for years is evil and disgusting.

The good folks over at Talking Points Memo have compiled the GOP, in its own words, on the subject.

On the Nose: Barney Frank on Looney Americans

I’m sure there are legitimate concerns about the Obama Administration’s health care reforms. No plan is perfect, and the problem of health care in this country is so complex that no plan can solve it’s problem. But anyone who thinks that Republican and Right Wing resistance to this plan is about anything but fighting the president is naive or in denial…or both.

The Dark Lords of the Republican party know that if the Democrats can deliver health care to millions of uninsured and underinsured Americans, the world as they would like it to be may never come to pass. They can never whip up the kind of frenzy over gay marriage and gun control and evolution if people can have access to the “best doctors in the world” because people simply won’t care. After a sound economy (or perhaps even more important than a sound economy) people want to have access to health care and, more importantly, they want it for their children.

I think it’s too soon to say Obama and the Dream Team has failed at this endeavor. As Jason Linkins points out over on The HuffingtonPost, the press is chomping at the bit to write the obituary for the Public Option, and their premature announcement of its death is whipping up the anxiety of the left. This is not necessarily a bad thing if it galvanizes people to productive action and forces those Blue Dog Democrats to straighten up and fly left, but what I really want to see more of is the kind of exchange Barney Frank had with some idiot in Dartmouth, MA:

Obama on Healthcare

The White House hasn’t done enough to counter the all the noise about “turning the country Socialist.” This is in part because, as the New York Time reports, the same network of voters who helped propel Candidate Obama to the White House has not taken on the hard work of advocating for President Obama’s health care plans.

I’m not surprised. Health care is complicated and messy, and it doesn’t lend itself to the soaring rhetoric of a political campaign. “Yes we can” has given away to policy prose that the Democrats have not yet learned to distill to catchy phrases.

What we really need is will.i.am.

He needs to come out with a health care video featuring a mix of real-looking Americans who are suffering as a result of our diseased health care system…in poetic prose…to a simple beat…that kind of feels like a Gap ad… and the people have to be attractive and photogenic. See the problem?

I’m not losing faith in the team that took down the Clintons, but the Republicans are at their best when they are whipping up fear and reducing complicated ideas into easily repeated sound bites, and the media has seen something shinier to focus on–screaming citizens (sometimes with guns) wringing their hands about the socialism of America. The truth and common sense are on the verge of completely buckling under the assault of media broadcast ranting.

This week’s town hall meeting in which Obama referred to the current system as a “Disease-Care System” is a good start, but more needs to happen, and the only way for the media to cover the other side, the side of common sense and human decency, is if that side is more interesting to put on camera.

Until then, it’s a good idea to forward Obama’s Weekly address to everyone you know…especially those inclined to disagree with you. It might be more productive than yet another e-mail about how women are better than men or men are better or women or how black people are always late.

Damon Weaver’s Success

I fell in love with Damon Weaver during the election when he interviewed Joe Biden, so I was thrilled to see that, after months of trying, he finally got to interview President Obama. The questions were good ones, and they really seemed to come from Weaver’s point of view, touching on topics from the painful to the adorable.

Seeing Weaver in his pants that are slightly too long seems like a perfect symbol of what his future could hold. He’ll grow into the suit and into his future…and maybe he’ll get better school lunches for his peers along the way…

Home sweet home

I’ve skipped a whole month of writing…anything. I have a good excuse. Really. See, my finances came together in a pretty terrific way (shocking in this economy, I know!), and I found this rather fabulous apartment the first weekend in June. So instead of moving in the dead of winter as I originally planned, I moved in the middle of a wet, hot summer…while teaching a summer course…and trying to put two book proposals together.

But I really couldn’t help it. What would you do if you found a two-bedroom apartment with hardwood floors and a tiled bathroom on the top (fourth) floor of a building on a tree-lined street in funky Clinton Hill? And what if this apartment also had a dishwasher? And it was a mere block from the subway. And it was less than you planned to pay? And the building superintendent pronounced you his first choice and announced that there will be a BBQ in your honor after you move in? Wouldn’t you drop everything, pack up your stuff, and move?

I’m all unpacked, and so, although the place is not all set up, I’ll be writing again very soon. I’ve much to tell about my new digs, my new neighborhood, and the joys of having a fire escape. I’ve got lots to say about Gates-Gate, “Mad Men,” and why it’s anti-Christian to oppose health care reform. I’ve giggled myself silly over Hillary’s Angry Black Woman moment (that’s the only way to describe it) somewhere In Africa.

So much writing, and now I’ve got a room of my own to do it in! More soon.

On the Nose: President Obama

It’s difficult to describe how annoyed I am with all the calls, especially from the so-called left, for Obama to be “bolder” in the face of such complicated problems at home and abroad. It’s depressing and suggests that while Bush’s politics may have been abhorrent, too many people who should know better actually seem to like his style! Our cowboy culture runs so deep that many of us don’t know how to cope with a president who is methodical who is, to borrow words from John Hodges, a nerd and not a jock.

I would like to blame the press, but that’s too easy. They are a large part of the problem because jocks and cowboys are more fun to report on than nerds, and covering real policy making must be like watching paint dry. But (and it’s important here to recall that “but” and “butt” sound the same and that “butt” is another word for “ass”), we make choices and keep ourselves overstimulated by listening to the rhetoric of folks like Bill Maher, forgetting that first and foremost the man is an entertainer who makes his living by arguing against whoever is in power. He is, as I wrote to a friend recently, a professional malcontent, and a very wealthy one who lives in a bubble where his “liberalism” is rarely challenged. All the analysis, even from those who the left-leaning among us might agree with, is less important than we realize, and it’s time to calm down and refocus. It’s time, I think, to read more books and watch less television, and, I think, it’s time for all of us to remember and embrace what Obama told Chuck Todd during yesterday’s press conference:

“I know everybody here is on a 24-hour news cycle. I’m not. O.K.?”

He’s not, and we shouldn’t be either.