Crazy White Folks

With the state of white America in a frenzy still over the Obama--Gates--Crowley beer summit, which is merely symptomatic of the real issue: "the inexorable transformation of America into a white-minority country in some 30 years — by 2042 in the latest Census Bureau estimate." This transformation is causing serious jitters, if not panic, in some white people's bodie, according to Frank Rich in this morning's New York Times. These notions that the Republicans have to defeat Obama rather than save the nation's economy, I believe, are linked to this premise that white men have to make sure that a man of color does not succeed as president, especially where they have botched everything up.

However, as Linda, as irate partygoer at a 60th birthday celebration quipped last night: Obama's half white. Don't we get some credit for his genius and extraordinary talent? Afterall, he was raised by his white mother and white grandparents!

Frank Rich continues: The birth-certificate canard is just the latest version of those campaign-year attempts to strip Obama of his American identity with faux controversies over flag pins, the Pledge of Allegiance and his middle name. Last summer, Cokie Roberts of ABC News even faulted him for taking a vacation in his home state of Hawaii, which she described as a “foreign, exotic place,” in contrast to her proposed choice of Myrtle Beach, S.C., in the real America of Dixie.

Perhaps this will placate nervous white people: the entire cast from the Seinfeld series will be reuniting this season on Curb Your Enthusiasm, according to creator and world's number one cranky Jewish guy, Larry David. This year's script "theme" is the reunion, and members of the cast will appear in five episodes. Will that make it better?

Tuning Out En Masse

As I posted yesterday, I've had to give myself a rest from the outside world this week as some personal issues as well as work took top priorities. That's when I realized that despite all of the personal angst, I was actually feeling better not paying too much attention to daily events. Yes, I knew there had been a shooting at the Holocaust Museum, and I understood what was at stake in the elections in Iran (actually posted on it last weekend before my "news fast" began), and I did see two episodes of Stephen Colbert in Iraq, which made me laugh and warmed my heart, but that was about it.

Here is my suggestion: let's stop watching television news altogether. I don't care what station. Our cable company just took MSNBC off basic cable service, so we lost it unless we use the cable box; digital won't allow the signal in unaided even with a brand new television. Lately Rachel and Keith have begun to sound as shrill as Glenn and Bill, so frankly, I stopped watching them. And some of their segments belonged on The Daily Show and not on a legitimate news show. I've never liked CNN, have only tuned to Fox News when I wanted to get angry, and am not around for The News Hour on PBS.

If we stopped watching, en masse, then perhaps as a country we would allow this extraordinarily gifted president to try to undo the damage done by greed and cleverness, exacerbated by deregulation and cronyism. Maybe he would stop trying to be so centrist and really put his head together with the best and the brightest and solve the real emergencies facing us: carbon emissions, health care, an unsustainable economy, and wars in countries we don't understand.

Maybe we would stop throwing names at each other and begin to listen a bit more.

We can't just label as "racist," "communist," or now "reverse racist" anyone with whom we disagree. And we can't forget that folks like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann are working for "entertainment-news" organizations that crave ratings, because higher ratings mean more advertising revenues.

Public interest isn't in their vocabulary.

So here is my suggestion: turn off the radio and television, and walk around your local community. Have a cup of coffee and begin a conversation with a neighbor. See what we can agree on, and maybe we can end the shrillness, isolate the extremes, and save the planet before it goes the way of Mars.

Take a look at both Paul Krugman and Frank Rich's columns.

Radical Change or Nothing

Some of my dearest friends chipped in and bought me a Kindle for my sixtieth birthday. It's on back order so I have some time to get accustomed to this new electronic device in my life. I'm a reader: I subscribe to The Nation, The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic, and I get the New York Times delivered on Saturday and Sunday. My daughter's subscriptions to The Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair were sent to me this fall since she was studying abroad. Unlike my husband, I do not read every article in every magazine. I skim, I cherry pick, I only read what keeps my attention.

I read several books at a time. I have a well-worn library card, because I have a forty minute each way commute to work and am addicted to books-on-tape, now books-on-cd. I refuse to buy them, because they are far too expensive. Instead I pressure my local library to improve the quality of their purchases, so that I have more choices. This week I am listening to Toni Morrison read her new book A Mercy. Not an easy task since it is breathtakingly sorrowful and so poetic that sometimes I don't quite understand what is happening, and have to wait patiently, until Morrison is ready to fill in the gaps.

With a Kindle, I will have to download books, for a price, from Amazon.com, abandoning my allegiance to my local independent book store and the library, except for my books-on-cd, although I understand I can download those and listen in the car from my Kindle.

Having spent a lifetime touching books--my grandfather, the same one who taught me about opera, gave me a book every time he saw me, using the Kindle will be a radical change for me. I once spent a dismal plane ride, circling Philadelphia for hours because we couldn't land at LaGuardia, seated next to an artist who designed the interior of the bookstore I never opened. Way before anyone else did it, I thought about having a book store and cafe. But like my idea to have a singles bar in a laundromat, I never got around to it.

I won't be touching books anymore, but will have the opportunity, according to my friends, to underline and write notes, and store multiple books on my Kindle, so that I can access them later. I do deface books regularly, which is the reason why I buy many of them instead of relying solely on the public library.

Eating Christmas dinner with friends last night, we talked about what needs to happen in order to change the course of this downward tailspin: retail sales down 5-8% (much of it the result of falling gas prices); Bergdorf Goodman, the most luxurious department store in New York, having an on-line sale advertized on nytimes.com, sharing its spot with the film "Doubt,", Neiman Marcus, and "Revolutionary Road"; daily reports that this charity, every college and university, or that social justice organization begging for funding because of the hedge fund collapse, Bernie Madoff, or the dive in the world stock markets; labor unions panting from the accusations lodged against them after they worked so hard to elect Barack Obama, mostly because unlike most of us, they have fixed-benefit pensions still. The list could go on forever, I suppose.

What we concurred on was this: despairing times call for radical change. It's the only time radical change is feasible. So dump Caroline Kennedy as the choice for New York's new Senator and absolutely forget about Jeb Bush as Florida's Senator in 2010. Haven't we learned that dynasties are a waste of time. Read Paul Krugman about the need to have radical change, but squeaky clean radical change. Read Frank Rich in his suggestion that the brightest might not be what we need right now.

This is our opportunity to think outside the box. To be radical. To move the stream.