Tag: Michelle Obama

OBAMA VIDEO, AN AMAZING GOOD DEED, MICHELLE OBAMA, THE INTERNET, JOE TRIPPI AND ORSON SCOTT CARD

VIDEO REMOVED FOR TECHNICAL REASONS.  VIEW IT HERE. 

My younger son sent this ad to me this afternoon.  It really is something, isn’t it?  As I write this I’m listening, on MSNBC, to the mean-spirited, spiteful stump speech that now identifies John McCain.  What a difference.   

Then, the much-admired Liza Sabater at Culture Kitchen posted this and tweeted to be sure we’d all see it.  Since we don’t always travel in the same corners of the blogosphere I’m sharing it with you here.

I keep thinking there must be a catch someplace but I hope she’s right – that it’s part of the impact of what we hope will be the political climate of the next four years.  Respect breeds respect. 
Michelle Obama wrote about it on BlogHer. 

Joe_trippi_big_2 She also reminded that there’s only a week left.  With that in mind, today I went to hear Joe Trippi speak with Simon Rosenberg, founder and president of NDN – mostly talking as if the election were over but so interesting about what would/could happen.  My favorite fact:  You know those Obama-produced videos on YouTube (like the one I’ve posted here)?  TechPresident found that people have watched 14.5 million hours worth!  Think what that would cost if you had to buy the time: somewhere around 46 to 47 million dollars, according to Trippi.  And that doesn’t even count citizen/voter-created videos that voters have watched.  Obama got free, on YouTube, views worth the equivalent of half of McCain’s entire federal campaign budget.  And he got it because he, and his team, have figured out how to use the web.

To Trippi, Obama is a real 21st Century candidate and has built relationships with supporters unlike any ever before.  It’s their campaign too.  I’ve always been enamored of the concept of "taking ownership."  Back when I worked at iVillage in its early days the message boards helped to create communities of women who saw the site as theirs, and helped iVillage become the dominant destination for women online.  They were contributing to the content, and its home became their home.  That’s what is happening, says Trippi, with Obama.  All those volunteers, all those canvassers and phone bankers and sign painters and outreach workers – and all the open conference calls and two-way communication created a new kind of electorate.  Think about this – from Orson Scott Card, author of the beloved Ender’s Game.

Those deep hungers for human connection, for the ability to remake ourselves, for a sense of control over our lives and reputations – those are the senses that the web will speak to does a remarkable job of feeding these senses, despite the relatively primitive technology and laughably low quality of most Web offerings, that people sign on and keep signing on.  They aren’t there for the content.  They’re there for each other.  Trapped in an apartment building or suburban neighborhood of strangers, they come to the Web to find their tribe.

Orson Scott Card in Yahoo Internet Life – December 2000 

What says it better than that?   

THE OBAMA NEW YORKER COVER. YES, THE NEW YORKER

New_yorker_obama_2
OK.  What do we think about this?  I can tell you one thing.  It hurts to look at it, even though I guess I understand what the artist, Barry Blitt, says he was trying to do.  Rachel Sklar’s Huffington Post interview with the magazine’s gifted editor David Remnick explains further.

Obviously I wouldn’t have run a cover just to get
attention — I ran the cover because I thought it had something to say. What I
think it does is hold up a mirror to the prejudice and dark imaginings about
Barack Obama’s — both Obamas’ — past, and their politics. I can’t speak for
anyone else’s interpretations, all I can say is that it combines a number of
images that have been propagated, not by everyone on the right but by some,
about Obama’s supposed "lack of patriotism" or his being "soft
on terrorism" or the idiotic notion that somehow Michelle Obama is the
second coming of the Weathermen or most violent Black Panthers. That somehow
all this is going to come to the Oval Office.

The free speech and marketplace of ideas concepts that I’ve treasured all my life clash with my reaction to all of this; I know that.  The Constitutional protection of freedom of speech exists to guarantee the right both to speak and to hear not only popular, but also unpopular ideas.  We don’t need to protect the popular ones; it’s the ideas that enrage people that need the protection.  And I’m all for that.

But for a responsible and respected publication like The New Yorker to abuse that freedom by offering such blatant stereotypes to make its point, particularly when the subjects are the first African American Presidential (Columbia and Harvard-educated) candidate and his (Princeton and Harvard-educated) wife, an accomplished attorney — each of whose life trajectory suggests two stars who did everything expected of them to grow into exciting, productive citizens — seems to me abusive and dangerous.  In an effort to make a point about the hate that’s being distributed concerning these two, they’re feeding it. 

It will be interesting to see how many right wing websites and publications make use of this image.  There’s been plenty of reaction so far and most of it is far more sophisticated than I could dream of being.  I’m having too much trouble with my emotional, gut sense of right and wrong to be very thoughtful; this just feels wrong – perhaps even more so because of who printed it.   I’ve been a New Yorker groupie since I was a high school kid in Pittsburgh wishing I was in Greenwich Village living the life of Susie Rotolo.  Like this –  walking through the Village with Bob Dylan.   

So it’s particularly disturbing to me that something so terribly offensive was pubished by this beloved icon.

The stereotypes don’t fit the Obamas, obviously.  That’s what the New Yorker is trying to demonstrate by feeding these stereotypes out there in such a naked way.   But even if they did, how many of us who ever cared about anything is willing to stand by every position we adopted in our younger days?

Congressman Bobby Rush was a Black Panther.  Now he’s chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection,  serves on the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet and is a co-chairman of the Congressional Biotech Caucus.  Isn’t that what we want?  Growth.

Even if the Obama’s were flamers back then (and I don’t think they were, by a long shot), isn’t the American way for young activists to rebel, maybe the wrong way, early in their lives then "grow up" to ultimately help to make change from inside?  Justice Hugo Black, one of the great justices of the 20th century, started out as a member of the Ku Klux Klan – then went on to be a staunch defender of civil liberties for all.  If we deny our future leaders the capacity to grow and question while they’re young, we will end up with leaders who may be what we deserve, but not who we need, by a long shot.

I guess what I’m saying is that this effort to force Americans to confront political trash talk by offering up a visual representation of it all is, to me, a terrible mistake.  An image that casts a shadow over the remarkable symbolic gift of this landmark candidacy – an image that lingers like a scar.