Obama - Everyman, yuppie edition

Everyone usede to say that George W. Bush was successful because the average Joe wante dto sit down and have a beer with him. I think Obama's success comes from a similar place, but with a different constituency. This article about this style, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/29/us/politics/29whitehouse.html?th&emc=th, is very yuppy; Instead of taking his job as president seriously and imagining that it is different from where he used to be, instead of having a split between his everyman attitude and his presidential persona, he is treating the whitehouse like any yuppy treats a new job. No special dress code, eye-rolling at the decorative plate collection, and a pragmatic get-down-to-work approach that is results-oriented instead of built on an antiquated notion of protocol. Above the Law, a blog that every big-firm associate reads religiously, nailed it when they pointed out that he's brought BigLaw dress code and hours to the white house... but more than that, it's a professional mentality that he's bringing. Bush may have been an MBA president, but he never conducted himself as a professional, in the technical sense of the word. Obama could be the partner down the hall you do your work for. He's Everyman, yuppy edition.

Articulate

Bernard-Henri Lévy: [...] But we are facing the installment of a new scheme, with new arguments, new reasons, new logic, trying to make anti-Semitism again acceptable, relatively, according to the general mood of the times. In the chapter you allude to, I try to identify the words with which anti-Semitism must express itself in order to gather under its flag a reasonable number of people, which is a real danger, of course.

Guernica: What are some of those ways?

Bernard-Henri Lévy: There are three: which are denial of the Holocaust, the competition of victimhood, and the demonization of Israel. If you put the three together, you have the portrait of a people, a community, who are guilty of three crimes. Which is the crime of being crooks, moral crooks, inventing or exaggerating their own martyrdom, doing that in order to overshadow others’ martyrdom, and the whole thing in the interest of an illegitimate and deeply guilty state, which is Israel. If you can put it into the brain of some people that Jews are people who exaggerate their martyrdom, who therefore [minimize] the martyrdom of other people, all this with the sole selfish aim of saving Israel, you give to some people some new motives, arguments, reasons for feeding the old hatred.

We Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled Programming...

Taking a break from the littany of exes, I'd like to comment on one of my favorite celebrities: Lindsay Lohan.

America likes to get up in arms about how depraved Ms. Lohan has become. "Oh, she parties so much" "oh, she does so many drugs" "oh, she's dating a transexual" "oh, she drinks too much and should go to rehab" "oh, she gets violent when drunk" "oh, she got arrested with a little cocaine".

There isn't a single thing on that list you couldn't say about two thirds of the sophomore class at Barnard. Lindsay Lohan is acting like a normal 21 year old from the tristate area. She just happens to be in the spotlight while she's doing it.

Good distillation of my political outlook

Someone commented on a Feministing post:

This country is fascinated with revolutionary change as the solution to everything. Maybe it's the short attention spans or possibly just a lack of patience that drives it, but quick fix revolutionary change doesn't happen very frequently.
The alternative is incremental change. You make small steps towards your goal and let people get used to the new "normal" so that you can push a little further. This often culminates with a very large change in the end (ie: the slippery slope). This is far easier to accomplish than revolutionary change and can ultimately take less time.

I know I frequently sound like a conservative when I'm faced with my revolutionary brethren on the Left, but this is exactly my outlook: I'd rather accomplish discrete goals than tilt at windmills and ultimately harm the long-term goal more than I advance it. I'd also like to compel my intellectual allies to follow the same course.

This comment came out of a criticism that said that gay marriage shouldn't be a goal because it only helps rich white people-- that is, if you have no assets to pass on as inheritance, you have no health insurance, you have no money to pay in alimony, you have no established homestead or stable child-rearing environment, then it doesn't really matter whether you can marry or not. This... is retarded. I recognize that one of the luxuries of privilege is being able to segment and solve your problems-- the system is in your favor, so whatever problems exist, they're not systemic. Nonetheless, the non-privileged benefit from this too, because the structure of our socio-economic system and its unfair prejudice against disempowered groups is a series of problems, and solving one does concretely advance a revolutionary goal. Revolutionary structural change can only follow revolutionary paradigm shifts in the zeitgeist, which only occur with incremental changes that underline a new ethic or philosophy.

But this also gets into the psychology of revolution, and one of the things I hate to face is that most activism is not sincere, it's temperamental. People aren't revolutionaries because they're reasoned out that revolution is the only way to accomplish real change; people are revolutionaries because they're assholes.

Things Republicans Have Ruined for Me

1. Guns. Idiot gun fundamentalists make me feel guilty for entertaining the idea that some measure of self-defense weaponry is okay; they use this as their justification for collecting arsenals. You don't need the automatic rifle with the night-vision scope and the fingerprint-proof stock/trigger. And you definitely don't need ten of them. In New York.

2. Country music. I have to equate it with hating anyone who doesn't fit into the country-music-universe. Points to Dolly Parton for rolling this back a bit with her embrace of the transgender movement, and to Willy Nelson for touring with John Kerry.

3. Texas. I want to love Texas. I do. Pop Iris' family is there, and Austin is a really cool place. I've seen some beautiful scenery there. Had some excellent times. All the same, I walk down the street and think "the people around me are proud of George Bush".

4. Family values. I would LOVE to talk all the time about family values and the virtue of the nuclear family. It's just that I'd sound like a douchebag who doesn't believe in gays, working women or loving your children as more than objects.

5. Libertarianism. Republicans have co-opted libertarianism to advance a level of economic deregulation that they don't even WANT. The kind of capitalism espoused by Republican libertarians would degenerate into a mafia economy so quickly they wouldn't even have time to say "copyrights are good" before they'd find themselves only being able to shop at Walmart, and Walmart abusing its pricing power like a drug dealer with the police force in his pocket. Meanwhile, these supposed libertarians seem to be fine with government involvement in people's private lives; prayer in public school is GREAT for these guys, who send their kids to private school anyway. Not a whole lot of sympathy for the poor Jewish or Hindu or atheist kid who has to sit there listening to people invoke the name of their savior, and who can't join the school newspaper without signing a pledge to abstain from homosexuality.

6. Economic/Military realism. I'm okay with blood for oil, if it's another country's blood and we get the oil. There will always be rich and poor in this world. I'm on the rich side. I'd like it to stay that way. I'd feel bad if I'd had a role in being born here, but I didn't. If I'd been born poor, I'd want to be rich just as much, I just wouldn't be able to do as much about it. I'm part of the power structure, and unless someone's figured out a way to eliminate power structures, I'm sticking with the one I'm in. It's worked for me. I'm eager to make the existing structure more fair, but I will not give up my place unless I can see I'm accomplishing something in the process. Communism is no option; it trades one kind of elite for another less transparent and more brutal one.

Sue Simmons gets real

So, NBC local news anchor Sue Simmons dropped the F-bomb (hey! look at me using the phrase "drop the F-bomb"! I'm a huge tool!) Monday night on a promo commercial for the 11 PM news... apparantly, they were doing a live feed without a delay, so they couldn't bleep it out. Anyway, there's been lots of news coverage of this slip, but NONE OF IT SAYS WHY SHE WAS CURSING!!!!! Leave a comment to let me know if you have found an explanation.

I am reminded

I am reminded that the reason I set this blog up to be white-text-on-black-background is that black backgrounds use less energy to present on your computer screen. Look here for more information.