I wish I'd come up with the following myself, but the following quotation is an excerpt from Andrew Sullivan, in the Atlantic Monthly--the full article is well worth reading:
"Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can."
Andrew Sullivan, "Goodbye to All That," in The Atlantic Monthly, December 2007. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200712/obama.
I hadn't really considered the international implications of the primaries, but this guy just hit the nail on the head. Even the first female candidate incarnates "politics as usual," both at home and abroad, at a time when the credibility of the country demands a sharp contrast between the last administration and the next.
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Sunday, November 4, 2007
Friday, November 2, 2007
they should put me in charge
I have a few thoughts:
1. Affirmative action should be based on family income, and not on race. Poverty makes it difficult to succeed, no matter what skin color people are.
2. Food stamps should only be good for fresh produce and meat. Maybe that would cut down on the obesity epidemic, and give farmers a boost.
3. On immigration: maybe it's all the holocaust stuff I've been reading, but the idea that we can treat a group of people as less than us because they're not conceptualized as part of the nation strikes me as really disturbing. Especially because it seems to be a politically beneficial position to take, particularly the more extreme someone gets. I was watching the democrats (I'm disappointed in all of them) debate the issue of giving "illegal immigrants" (they objected to the term "undocumented workers" because it de-emphasized the crime) drivers licenses in New York. Hillary Clinton took the position that, while she would not have made the same decision, she understood the governor's impulse to issue licenses--the federal government certainly hasn't come up with any viable solutions, and it's better to know who's in the country than to ignore practical solutions to the problem in order to polemicise better. She was attacked from all sides for having a nuanced position (instead of yes or no, which is something the republicans do to the democrats, and the democrats shouldn't do to each other), and because "getting drivers licenses is a privilege that "these people" haven't earned. My god, you'd think we were talking about a gang of rapists. The only crime committed was crossing an imaginary line, to do a lot of shitty work. The politics surrounding the situation are disgusting to watch, and they echo the Nazi tactic of finding an enemy within to rally against and scapegoat. So lay off my people, jerks.
4. I learned something new today: obese people, when they're so far gone as to not fit into the CAT scan machine thingy, which apparently happens more often than is comfortable to think about, get sent to the zoo to use their machine.
1. Affirmative action should be based on family income, and not on race. Poverty makes it difficult to succeed, no matter what skin color people are.
2. Food stamps should only be good for fresh produce and meat. Maybe that would cut down on the obesity epidemic, and give farmers a boost.
3. On immigration: maybe it's all the holocaust stuff I've been reading, but the idea that we can treat a group of people as less than us because they're not conceptualized as part of the nation strikes me as really disturbing. Especially because it seems to be a politically beneficial position to take, particularly the more extreme someone gets. I was watching the democrats (I'm disappointed in all of them) debate the issue of giving "illegal immigrants" (they objected to the term "undocumented workers" because it de-emphasized the crime) drivers licenses in New York. Hillary Clinton took the position that, while she would not have made the same decision, she understood the governor's impulse to issue licenses--the federal government certainly hasn't come up with any viable solutions, and it's better to know who's in the country than to ignore practical solutions to the problem in order to polemicise better. She was attacked from all sides for having a nuanced position (instead of yes or no, which is something the republicans do to the democrats, and the democrats shouldn't do to each other), and because "getting drivers licenses is a privilege that "these people" haven't earned. My god, you'd think we were talking about a gang of rapists. The only crime committed was crossing an imaginary line, to do a lot of shitty work. The politics surrounding the situation are disgusting to watch, and they echo the Nazi tactic of finding an enemy within to rally against and scapegoat. So lay off my people, jerks.
4. I learned something new today: obese people, when they're so far gone as to not fit into the CAT scan machine thingy, which apparently happens more often than is comfortable to think about, get sent to the zoo to use their machine.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
reading lists
Last summer, President Bush announced that he was reading "The Stranger" by Camus--what a perfect choice, I thought--either he's an idiot, and the irony is sickening, or he's not, and his cynicism blows me away. What a tidy metaphor for the larger debate surrounding this man. Similarly, Clinton, when asked what his favorite book is, couldn't settle on one, and came up with a list. Imagine my glee when Mitt Romney, a MORMON contender for the republican nomination for president in 2008, was asked what his favorite book is. Mormon, to me, already indicates a serious lapse in sanity. Intolerant, you say? Go look up what these people decide to believe. Do it. They're willfully irrational. Anyway, his answer was that the bible is his favorite book (trite, trite), BUT that L. Ron Hubbard's "Battlefield Earth" is his favorite novel. (L. Ron Hubbard being the founder of Scientology, a cult that asks its adherents to believe that traumatic memories stem from tiny bits of alien that exploded way back when and became attached to humans. really.) How perfect is that?
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