The Antidote

If stupidity, racism, and careless bloviation are the disease, here's the cure. Obama's amazing speech on race, religion, and, really, the meaning of America:

By now, everyone's probably either seen it or read it. But if you just let it run while you're working on your computin' machine, it's like a salve that soothes while you sleep. Or you can read the transcript.

That's what I call presidential. If this guy doesn't deserve to lead the country, I'm not sure I want to live here.

Stupid Rhetoric Comes In Every Color

So now the forces of white-wing intolerance are decrying the Afrocentric intolerance of Jeremiah Wright, the pastor at Barack Obama’s church. And the old guy (one of those crazy-charismatic preachers in the call-and-response improv tradition of the black church) has gotten the boot from Obama’s campaign.

It’s about time. It was almost a year ago that I read in the NYT about Obama’s connection to Wright. Why has it taken so long for this to blow up? From what I can gather, the messages that have created the uproar are these:

1. America is a terrorist, racist state.
2. Islamic terrorism against the U.S. is thereby justified (“chickens coming home to roost”) even if it’s wrong.
3. White American oppression of blacks and other minorities is the root of all evil.
4. Hillary is just another rich, white person and can’t understand the African-American experience any better than McCain can.
5. “Not God BLESS America--God DAMN America.”

That last one, of course, is the one that has right-wingers foaming at the mouth.

Obama was on all the cable news shows last night, doing damage control, and I also saw Wright himself on Sham Hannity & All-Bland Colmes. Here’s what I took away from those interviews:

1. Wright is a scholar (he deftly, articulately dismantled criticisms of liberation theology) and a pretty sharp guy, considering how stupid the stuff is that he’s been saying to wind people up over the last five years or so.
2. Obama repudiates these particular messages but not Wright himself. He says that would be like kicking an uncle out of your family because you disagree with him.
3. Obama says Wright is the guy who “brought me to Jesus, brought me to church,” and that he married the Obamas and baptized their daughters. He also says Wright was about to retire when Obama first caught wind of some of these statements. Apparently, this is why Obama hasn't left the congregation.
4. Obama claims that he’s never been present in the church when this kind of message has been delivered by Wright or anyone else, and that if he had, he’d have expressed his disagreement then and there. He says it’s a social justice ministry, and that all he’s heard coming from the pulpit is talk about “Jesus, faith, and helping the poor.”
5. This won’t end here.

If Obama gets the nomination, I bet there'll be 527 groups all over this issue, and at least one of them will land a Swift Boat punch. I really think this crap could be the undoing of the most amazing political moment since 1968. If not, if he survives this, it’s yet another stunning accomplishment by the calmest, fastest-learning man in politics.

Part of me thinks: See how stupid religion is? Look what happens when people stop doubting and get too sure of their own sense of what’s righteous and what’s not. And part of me thinks, isn't religion great, that it can so infatuate people with the noise of their own passionate truths, they don't even pay attention to how stupid they sound? And part of me thinks it could be worse. The preacher could’ve been Fred Phelps.

In his first book, Obama eloquently describes the moment when Wright won him over, with the “Audacity of Hope” sermon (which gave Obama the title for his second book), making a connection between the struggle of the poor with Biblical stories of faith, perseverance, and salvation. As profound and defining as that moment may have been for Obama, the truth is, I wish he’d remained a skeptic.

Wow, Vampire Weekend

My friend Stacey sent me a link to the catchiest, most kinetic music video in recent memory. Two-and-a-half minutes of irrepressible joy.

It reminds me of the early Police, back when they were making really great, thumpy, zippity music and having fun in front of a video camera. "De-Doo-Doo-Doo, De-Da-Da-Da," anyone?

What kills me is the idea that there are dozens of little bands out there, doing bang-up numbers like this, and there's just not enough time to listen or watch or even think about it.

Food of love (and finger-puppet fish), play on.

So Cool, It's Frozen

Why is this so utterly freakin' cool?

I have theories:
1. Because of the scale of the mischief.
2. Because it's disruptive, but essentially harmless.
3. Because of the way it forces a shift in awareness--the wonder and curiosity it elicits.
4. Because of the tension between opposites: stasis amid movement, pointlessness amid purpose, precision amid chaos, art amid commerce, a moment of timelessness in a place that's all about schedules, the unexpected monkey wrench thrown into the quotidian works.
5. Because it has a beginning, a middle, and an end—Aristotelian beauty—and each has a different effect.

Maybe the point about pointlessness is the real thing here. Can something be beautiful just because it's pointless?

William Carlos Williams has a poem that answers: Yes. Here's the first half of "The Crowd At The Ball Game":

The crowd at the ball game
is moved uniformly

by a spirit of uselessness
which delights them—

all the exciting detail
of the chase

and the escape, the error
the flash of genius—

all to no end save beauty
the eternal—

So in detail they, the crowd,
are beautiful

(Nice poem, up to there, and then he kind of loses it, if you ask me.) The ball game is the freeze and the crowd is everybody in Grand Central who's not in on the joke—and the beauty of the crowd = the details of their response. Don't you just love the looks of bewilderment on their faces, the guy poking that frozen girl in the arm, the driver honking and radioing for help, and that great remark at the end by the guy who thought maybe he was the only one seeing it happen? Fabulous.

Up with pointless acts of mind-fuckery! Up with Improv Everywhere!

Bush Comes To Hallmark

Streets blocked, parking lots closed, sniffer dogs sniffin', a motorcade a quarter-mile long (including armored SWAT vehicles, an ambulance, and sinister SUVs with weird black cylinders on the roof), and curtains of tarps hung from outdoor walkways to prevent a long-distance sighting through a rifle scope. Not to give you whiplash after my last post about Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy, but thus arrives George Bush the younger, trailing clouds of much ado about not much.

He was here to make a speech on the state of the economy to a select group of Hallmark employees. At this point, I think "make a speech on the state the economy" means "convince people that there's gold in them thar turds." I was not invited, but I saw a lot of the security detail at work outside my window.

While he was here, the president apparently made a card at Kaleidoscope, our creativity workshop for kids, asking a group of reporters, "Who deserves a valentine?" I guess love is just not gonna be unconditional with this guy.

At the Hallmark visitors center, he had a brief run-in with Maxine, our beloved curmatron, viz.:

I'm trying to imagine what words of wisdom she might have about the experience...

"When life give you lemons, blame Florida."

Dr. King

In June of 1968, my parents took us four kids on a trip to Washington, D.C. My dad had some work to do at the National Archives. We stayed with the family of Jim Everett, a CIA agent recently returned from Europe. There was a lot of political talk around the table that I didn't understand. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated two months earlier, and the primary season was pushing toward the conventions. My parents were Eugene McCarthy supporters. The Everetts (and all us kids) were in love with Bobby Kennedy.

I was a month from turning 12. My brain was almost entirely devoted to girls and sports. I found the two Everett girls (who were maybe five to seven years older--one was home from college, I think) fascinating, especially the younger one, dark and curvy, who spent some time one evening explaining (alas, not demonstrating) what it meant to get to second base, third base, etc. I was enthralled. The whole etc. was really beginning to capture my imagination.

So political ideas were peripheral to me. But I remember being amazed when we saw Resurrection City, the vast tent city that sprawled over the National Mall. Dr. King had helped to organize the Poor People's Campaign, and in the wake of his assassination, a huge march had been organized and had ended in D.C. And now here were poor people and activists from all over the country, living in tents. It was my first real exposure to the civil rights movement. Up until then, it was just stuff that happened on TV.

Our hosts' experience abroad had their whole family interested in political issues, or maybe they'd always been. My mom and the Everett women talked a little feminism here and there. I remember the eldest daughter playing folk songs with her dad one night--a little Pete Seeger, some S&G, Peter, Paul & Mary. My appreciation of this was on the "wow, cool guitars" level. I was still playing my Sears Silvertone and the all-but-untuneable $20 Marco Polo electric I'd found at a garage sale the previous summer. I knew about six chords, and was impressed by the Everett's virtuosity.

We were there about a week. We'd drop Dad at the Archives building and go off to the Smithsonian, the National Gallery, all that. And in the evenings, everyone was closely watching the primaries--instead of baseball. What were they, crazy?

I woke up one morning to the sound of women crying. I came upstairs and the daughters were red-eyed and the moms blowing their noses, watching TV.

Bobby was dead. My mom was really wailing. I was young and stupid enough to think, "But you didn't even want him to win. What are you so upset about?" The whole mood of the trip changed. You'd see people crying on street corners. There were vigils all over, and of course a huge one at Resurrection City.

I saw Jackie Kennedy and her kids on TV, but the images conflate with JFK's funeral somehow. The one thing that stuck was Ted Kennedy's eulogy, the sound of his voice quoting, "some men see things as they are and say 'why?' I see things that never were and say 'why not?'" The sorrow in it! The guy looked like he'd rather have had it happen to him.

I remember thinking, if my brother got shot, I don't think I'd be that upset. But to lose Bobby. To me, Bobby was the future. Young (it never occurred to me that he was actually older than my parents), smart, energetic, handsome--dashing, even. He was like a shiny trophy that the country might win if we were cool enough.

We weren't, of course. We'd already killed JFK and then Dr. King--the ultimate "I see things that never were and say 'why not?'" guy, probably the closest thing to an actual Christ figure ever to appear in U.S. politics. We were in an unjust war that was going disastrously, there were race riots all over the country, and King's legacy was on the lawn in D.C., holding thousands of candles for yet another light that had gone out. At least that's how it looked to me.

I date my interest in politics to that trip. My dad, every day, was going into the National Archives, where (as he'd shown us one morning) he passed a very real-looking copy of the Declaration of Independence in a glass case right up front. Walking around the stunningly designed city, all that classical white-marble architecture, riding that amazing subway system and having my mom point out our own Senator Symington getting off a train (I was just old enough/young enough to chase him down the platform yelling "Senator Symington!" and ask to shake his hand). And I'll never forget standing in the Lincoln Memorial, reading the Gettysburg Address and feeling those magnificent sentences send chills down my spine. I think all of that--the importance placed on the events there, the idea that politics mattered, that protest was woven into it, that it was a life-and-death struggle, really--that was the formative moment for my political awareness.

And that, my friends, is why I think it's a profound moment in American history when two of the leading presidential candidates are a woman and an African-American. To me, it's a fulfillment of the promise Lincoln spoke of and the hope that JFK and Bobby seemed to embody, and of course, the dream Dr. King asked us all to share. All four got shot. But somehow the promise and the hope and the dream didn't entirely disappear--despite relentless efforts to dismantle them. Without Dr. King, there'd be no Barack Obama in serious contention for the White House. Whatever your political views, the mere fact and magnitude of his candidacy is to be celebrated. Martin Luther King, Jr., you continue to rock.

Plus, we get a day off of work because of you, so we can sit around and write stuff.

New Year's Resolution Broken on January 12th

50 push-ups a day. The perfect resolution. Specific, not too demanding (there's a thousand-a-day-club online for obsessive compulsives), and I can do them at home or at the gym I never go to--hence the need for an exercise resolution--or at the office. Wherever there’s a horizontal surface, which means anywhere but mid-air.

Here's a guy who can do them in mid-air. I changed this post and threw in the video just so you could see what I'm aspiring to. Toward the end, you'll see the coolest push-up ever.

My point is, it wasn't all the time I spent levitating on Saturday that kept me from getting to the push-ups. What happened was, I woke up the next day, walked out to get the Sunday NYT, saw my buff gay neighbor getting something out of his car, and realized that I hadn’t done my 50. I actually like doing them. I just forgot.

My buff gay neighbor is older than I am. And although he's no Scott Wills (cuz who is?), he's proud enough of his arms to wear shirts with the sleeves torn off even when it's below freezing. I bet he watches himself in the mirror as he tears the sleeves off. Five shirts = ten reps. The guy is ripped, man.

So I’m back to doing push-ups again, but now having missed a day is bugging me. The whole thing seems pointless, somehow, even though the point was never merely to fulfill the resolution, but to get some exercise for the love of God you lazy bastard why can’t you get off your ass. I’ve failed, and I feel bad about it.

I need to sit for a long period of time and reflect on this. Maybe drink a little, eat something. Grab the laptop, get some writing done. Turn on the tube to distract myself from the shame. It’s going to take some time to get over it. The rest of the year, probably.