Category: Culture

Barack Obama, Style, Change, and Basketball

Rice cover1
I really like Barack Obama – anyone who reads this blog knows that. And it's not just his ideas that are so attractive; his style is just stunning. I'm no starry eyed kid; I've been around the block with many candidates who looked better than they turned out to be.  But in this case, it feels like the more you look the better it gets.  It's scary, in fact, because it can't be true – there are sure to be grim and discouraging moments and long dry periods.  Even so, there is so much room for hope.  I wanted to share a couple of moments that add to that hope as we look forward in these very scary times.

First, last week's issue of the New York Time Magazine included a piece by Ron Suskind, author of A Hope in the Unseen, called Change.  You really should read it, but for now consider this story that Valerie Jarrett told Suskind as evidence that I'm not delusional to be so excited about the basic qualities of this man.

It was in Iowa, just a year ago. Obama was way behind Hillary Clinton. The heavyweights were called in, 200 members of Obama’s national finance committee. The money people. Many had given mightily. And now, it seemed, nothing was working. Obama said that before they
all gathered to pass judgment, he wanted them — all 200 — to meet his grass-roots field team in Iowa.They did, then gathered in a room at an Iowa arts center. The room was tense.
Obama explained that day that they were running a different kind of campaign, a real grass-roots campaign, one that grew from the bottom up, from the dirt, and that it takes time for those roots to take hold. And the heavy hitters nodded; yes, they understood that idea, but it wasn’t working. The polls were the proof. They showed Clinton with a double-digit lead.
And Jarrett can remember how Obama looked at them, hard-eyed, everything on the line. “ ‘Did you think I was kidding when I said this was the unlikely journey?’ ” Jarrett recalls him saying. “‘You thought this would be simple? No, change is never simple. Change is hard.

“
‘Listen, I know you’re nervous,’ he went on. ‘But if you’re nervous, I’ll hold your hand. We’re going to get through this together. And if we win Iowa, we’ll win this country.’ ”

Jarrett said: “He turned their emotion around. He made sense of it. He told them why we were there and what was within our grasp. And people became jubilant. You
never heard cheering like that. That was the turn, where it happened.”

To me that says it all. There's lots more in the piece though; I just read it last night and was just knocked out by it.

Then, thanks to RoadKill Refugee, who always seems to find things no one else has noticed, I came upon this remarkable interview between Obama and my old boss Bryant Gumbel. Again, everything that is revealed seems positive. Wise, funny, unpretentious – a man, as so many have observed, who is comfortable in his own skin; a man who doesn't have to prove anything to anybody.

Make of these what you will – but amid all the staffing speculation and bailout talk, school choice, puppy shopping and Inauguration gossip, this is a look at what appears to be some of the real stuff behind this person we've chosen to lead us for the next four years.

Bye Bye Eli

Eli Stone I know there are more important things in the world – I write about many of them, but losing the enchanting, original Eli Stone makes me sad. ABC announced its cancellation Thursday apparently. I'm a sucker for a bit of the supernatural now and again but how can you abandon a guy who has hallucinations featuring George Michael? I mean really.

There was something sweet and inspiring about this lawyer tilting at the windmills emerging from his hallucinations, and converting those around him to believe in his quests.  The wonderful Victor Garber (Sydney's dad on Alias) and adorable Loretta Devine (also The Chief's wife on Grey's Anatomy) didn't hurt either.   I will miss them all.  Once in a while a TV series speaks to you for no apparent reason; I think in this case I just loved the story and the struggle.  Maybe Eli will find a new life on SciFi Channel or something so we can at least relive his past adventures.  And see him in production numbers with George Michael one more time.

SARAH PALIN, JOE SIXPACK AND GEORGE ORWELL

081002_palinmccain21I used to run a TV news show, and I told my staff (literally) that using the term "Joe Six Pack" in a script or interview was a firing offense.  I probably couldn’t have gotten away with firing them but it made the point.  I grew up just outside a mill town along the Monongahela River — it was the same town so brilliantly portrayed in The Deer Hunter —  and I  went to school with kids whose parents worked in steel mills and coke plants and river locks.  Some of them lived in trailers.  I was the Jewish Girl – a bit of an outsider but usually part of the gang – parties, sleepovers, crazy afternoons sneaking cigarettes in pine-paneled basement "family rooms."

I guess lots of those parents were what Sarah Palin called Joe Six Pack.  But that’s not who they were- who they are.  America is full of hard working people who drink beer.  Bruce Springsteen portrays them all the time – much better than I could.  They are dads and husbands and brothers and sons and they love their kids and their wives and, where I lived, the Steelers.  They often don’t ever move out of their "starter houses" because that’s what they can afford.  The dads that I knew sent their kids to college though – or to "the service" which paid their tuition, and the next generation did better economically – the American dream at work. 

I admired these people, and loved some of them.  When you spend lots of Saturday night sleepovers at girlfriends’ houses you get to know their parents.  And, remembering those dads,  I do NOT understand how Sarah Palin can talk about "Joe Six Pack" and still say she’s one of "the people."  It’s like talking about "Polacks" and then claiming you’re Polish.  The term is a colossal insult, the speaker setting herself above the folks she’s describing.  For some reason, it’s painful — almost heartbreaking, to hear.  I know it’s partially my rage at her for claiming some special channel to working class Americans while, it appears, cynically performing like a parody of them – much like Frances McNormand did as Marge Gunderson in FARGO.  Her "Joe Six Packs" deserve better.

I was going to write about all the Orwellian rhetoric too — McCain and Palin repeatedly claiming untruths and running against things McCain himself helped to put in place.  Here’s what I mean:  They talk about Wall Street malfeasance when they and their party repeatedly squashed efforts to bring it under control.  They talk about change when they’re fighting it and economic insecurity when their policies helped to cause it.  That’s not a working class agenda, it’s just cynical pandering.  Mr. Orwell would be proud.  "Joe Six Pack" — and the rest of us, deserve better than that, too.

TINA FEY, SARAH PALIN, HOME PERMANENTS, AND THE VICE-PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE

Fey_palinWhen I was a kid there was a thing called a "home permanent*."  It was a hair treatment that made your hair curly (horrifying to girls like me who ironed their hair and wrapped it around orange juice can sized rollers [or real orange juice cans] to keep it straight.)  One of the most visible products was called Toni Home Permanents and its ad campaign was at least as popular as a great Saturday Night Live catch phrase.

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Yup.  It asked "Which twin has the Toni?"  That’s a photo of the print version on the left.  The idea was that one twin had a fancy salon permanent and one curled hers at home with Toni, but you couldn’t tell the difference.  Of course, any kid who ever had a sleepover at the home of a friend who’d just done a "home permanent" knows that the chemical smell was gross (and if I remember correctly you couldn’t wash you hair for a couple of days) and their hair was often substantially more dry and brittle than the "salon permanent" girls’.  In fact, there was a difference.

Every time I see Tina Fey being Sarah Palin I’m reminded of that.  The McCain-Palin campaign is asking us to believe that when you spend upscale salon money it’s mostly for snob appeal, because all you need is a Toni and your bathroom sink, and you’re just as gorgeous.  In this context though, the comparison is different — and ironic.  If you saw Chevy Chase being Gerald Ford or Phil Hartman as Ronald Reagan or Darrell Hammond as Bill Clinton, the impressions were great, but you always knew that the real guy was smarter, and more serious, than the comedian.  No trouble knowing which "twin" was which.  But with Tina and Sarah, it’s reversed.  The brains, and the class, go to the comic, not the politician.  The girlfriend of a young friend, asked if she was jealous about another woman in his circle, responded that she’d only worry "if he was hanging around with Tina Fey."  Her intelligence, class and charm are that attractive.  It’s pretty clear that she’s smarter and probably knows more about what’s going on in the world than The Candidate and, for many of us, appears better equipped to serve as Vice President.  Many conservative pundits seem to agree.  And many Alaskans.  And liberals.  Several posts, and tweets, from strong progressives, have described a "cringing" sense of discomfort when watching her stumble. 

So what thoughts, and emotions, do we bring to this spectacle tonight?  What do we, who support her opponents, consider as we watch alone, or with like-minded friends at debate-parties or with tweeters on #Debate08?  From here, it’s complicated.  Angry at her searing convention speech, but sad to see her stumble so pitifully in the Couric interview; fearful of what could happen if she and McCain win, furious that she’s trying to stall the Alaska report about her alleged abuses of power, and, in my case at least, completely detached from the fact that this woefully inadequate candidate happens to be female, we hope the battle is fought on competence and capacity, not gender and one-liners.  Mostly, we’re aware that the copy is far superior to the original, and that the smart, attractive version of the candidate isn’t the one who’s going to be there tonight.

*I just looked it up on Wikipedia and apparently there still are things called home permanents but who uses them??   No clue.

 

BOOK BANNING: THIS IS NOT (EXACTLY) ABOUT SARAH PALIN

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You know this photo:  Nazis burning books in Babelplatz, a large public square across from Humboldt University in the heart of Berlin.  Germany was a highly cultured society, yet it wasn’t too difficult to get to the place where its students willingly burned the books they were to supposed to be studying if they had been written by Jews. 

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The U.S. wasn’t immune in those years either. In the 1930s there were huge battles about James Joyce’s classic Ulysses, a gorgeous and very moving book but so difficult to understand that I took an entire college course on it. Hard to believe that anyone would bother working through it for any but literary reasons.  Even so, copy after copy was seized from trans-Atlantic passengers arriving on ocean liners in Manhattan.  Finally, in 1932, after an edition of the book intended as a model for U.S. publication had been seized along with the others, Judge John M. Woolsey lifted the ban in a famous, highly cited opinion* that appears as a preface in many editions.  There are many such stories, about many books, but most of them well before the 1960s.  After that, it seemed we’d "grown out of" book banning.  Wrong.

Catcher_a
I read Catcher in the Rye in the 7th grade.  Years later I had the privilege of reading it aloud with my own  son at precisely the same age.  Nearly 20 years apart, we both loved it.  Yet efforts to ban it in both school and community libraries have gone on almost as long as the life of the book itself.  BlogHer and book blogger SassyMonkey, in a detailed BlogHer post, reminded us that Banned Books Week is here (September 27 to October 4, 2008).  The American Library Association created this week in 1982, and sadly, we still need it today.  Sarah Palin was not the first, nor will she be the last, government official to fire a librarian after a discussion about removing books from library shelves.  There’s a long history of such behavior, and other, more overt attempts, both here and around the world.

Try to imagine a time where you had to hide the books you love.  Or where you couldn’t get Harry Potter  from the library to re-live the Hogwarts adventure with your own children.  Or you couldn’t get access to published health information from books like Our Bodies, Ourselves.
Imagine no Huck Finn, no Maya Angelou or Toni Morrison or John
Steinbeck or — and this is a biggie in the book banning world, no Judy
Blume.  Right now there are community and school librarians risking
their careers to fight to protect their shelves from marauding
moralists.  Right now.

Continue reading BOOK BANNING: THIS IS NOT (EXACTLY) ABOUT SARAH PALIN

PIGS, LIPSTICK, DICK CHENEY, SARAH PALIN AND THE MOVIES: “BOB ROBERTS”, “A FACE IN THE CROWD” AND WILLIE STARK

Of course by now we’ve all seen this.

I wrote much of what appears below without knowing just how to begin it – and those wacky Republicans solved my problem.  The response to this boilerplate Obama statement was to issue a vicious attack accusing him of sexism because of Palin’s convention speech “lipstick/hockey mom/pitbull” quote.  This despite the fact that the metaphor has often been used by Republicans including Dick Cheney – to say nothing of John McCain – look here:

The McCain campaign, not only in its choice of Sarah Palin but in how they use her, is leaning on very scary  tactics that are similar to the successful exploitation of voters illustrated by some of the most memorable characters in American political films.  Watch this trailer for Tim Robbins’ Bob Roberts; see if it isn’t more familiar than you wish:

Creepy, isn’t it?  A demagogue making his way to the top by lying about his opponent and manipulating the alienation of the American people for his own ends.  That could never happen in real life, right?

Much, much earlier in film history, the beloved Andy Griffith played one of the scariest public personalities ever in A Face in the Crowd — written by Budd Schulberg and directed by On the Waterfront‘s Elia Kazan.  He’s not a politician but watch the trailer and see if it doesn’t seem familiar.  You have to watch until the end to get the full impact.

 

It’s so depressing — and enraging — to watch this campaign peddling pseudo-folksiness to win over its public.  It’s time for that to stop working in our country.  Stakes are too high to permit us (or the press) to fall for the most  approachable (and least honest) over the most excellent.

Finally, remember Robert Penn Warren’s remarkable novel, clearly based on Louisiana’s Huey Long – All the King’s Men?  It portrays a politician on his path to becoming a dangerous demagogue.  Yeah, I know it’s melodramatic but does it feel at all familiar?

Clearly we should consider these archetypal characters as cautionary tales; instructive representations of our future if we allow this kind of campaigning to prevail.  Movies are our largest export (unless video games have taken over while I wasn’t looking)  and often reflect, if not our truths, at least our ghosts, shadows and neuroses.  It gave us The Body Snatchers in the 50’s, Easy Rider in the 60’s and Working Girl and Wall Street in the 80’s.  It’s easy to be seductive, to manipulate language and truth; easy to pretend to be one of the people in order to win them. The vicious, craven strategies of this campaign – and Sarah Palin herself – are  perfect examples; John McCain, whom I used to admire, has allowed, no encouraged, this shameful campaigning in his name and surrendered all the positions of principal that he once held.  If we don’t want (another) Bob Roberts (He does remind me of GWBush) or a cynical populist pretender or a MS Wilie Stark as our government, it’s up to use to exercise vigilance and fierce commitment to fight off these transparent manipulations and to ensure that it does not happen.

RETURN OF THE CULTURE WARS – BUT DID THEY EVER LEAVE?

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Some very smart analysts, including POLITICO and  PressThink founder Jay Rosen, are talking about the current Republican strategy in support of Sarah Palin as a "reigniting of the culture wars."  Attacking with all the code words of past anti-"left" vocabularies.  And here’s Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal:

I’ll tell you how powerful Mrs. Palin already is: she reignited the
culture wars just by showing up. She scrambled the battle lines, too.
The crustiest old Republican men are shouting "Sexism!" when she’s
slammed. Pro-woman Democrats are saying she must be a Another_mother
bad mother to be
all ambitious with kids in the house. Great respect goes to Barack
Obama not only for saying criticism of candidates’ children is out of
bounds in political campaigns, but for making it personal, and
therefore believable. "My mother had me when she was eighteen…" That
was the lovely sound of class in American politics.

When the McCain Summer of Love ad debuted, I wrote this – They Will Campaign Against Us Until We’re Dead, and Maybe After.  If you watch CSPAN, especially Washington Journal, you know from the phone calls how much anger still exists; how much hatred of the generation I grew up in.  Against our opposition to the war, mischief and outrageousness, and even more, our search – no, demand – for peace. Going after all of us, FORTY YEARS LATER, still works.

I guess that since I’ve been posting quite a lot about that time forty years ago, the memories are long on both sides.  But Barack Obama was 7 years old in 1968.  It’s not and never was his culture war.  It is, however, the never-ending flash-point in the conservative playbook, a safe way to rile folks up and re-ignite the hatred and anger manifested in the 60’s and 70’s and again in the 90’s when that Boomer couple, the Clintons, were in the White House.

I’ve given up trying to figure out how to respond.  Most Americans, including us 60’s people, love our country and loved it then.  It was the a desire to return the country to its true nature — just as it is today — that drove us.  But it’s far more useful to the McCain campaign to taunt us — and Barack Obama; and to divide us, too, with these ancient battles.  The tough part is figuring out how to answer.