Category: The Dish

A reader makes a point about the impact of last week that seems to me as powerful as it is relevant, and it resonates with Chris Caldwell’s point:

I worked four years as a teacher in the Black community in Oakland in the early 90’s and these ideas from Wright’s sermons were endemic. To me the remarkable thing about Obama is that he has positioned himself, and set as a goal for himself, to lead Black culture towards one of participation and non-victimization. You can’t do that if you’re not participating as a member of the Black community, whatever state you find it in.

How do we go forward? 3 percent of all Black men are in prison, and it’s 11 percent of black men aged 25-29. Mostly on drug charges. The community has been in crisis for decades. And here come many conservatives with a message to marginalize the Black community further. 

What is more helpful here? That, or putting into a position of leadership someone who has really heard and understood all these arguments in the Black community, disagrees with them and says so and yet is still respected there, and asks young Black men to take responsibility and shows how it’s possible to live a decent life in America?  It seems pretty obvious.

"We have two great candidates–one a hard working, never give up eager beaver, and one an inspiring, heart-leapingly brilliant stallion… The stallion makes heart-stopping speeches. And the beaver just beavers along. And the stallion is drunk on his own rhetoric. Why not? It’s great rhetoric. We need beavers and we need stallions. Beavers get the work done. Stallions inspire us. And they both have limitations. Stallions have fragile legs (think Barbaro). And beavers are nothing without their teeth," – Erica Jong.

A reader writes:

As a practicing psychologist, I am struck that from what I have heard and read, none of the commentators or political pundits have speculated on the role of Obama’s fatherless upbringing on the strength of his attachment to Rev. Wright.  It is not uncommon for male children with absent fathers to develop strong, idealized relationships with male figures whom they perceive as being both powerful and caring.  I suspect this phenomenon transcends racial and ethnic categories.  Perhaps those who are critical of Obama’s commitment to his relationship with Wright would view it with more understanding and compassion from this perspective.  Oftentimes, the idealizer has blind spots about the idealized individual’s limitations and personality flaws.  Optimally, these blind spots need to be addressed and resolved.  Obama’s speech suggests that he has come to see Rev. Wright in more realistic terms – as an imperfect but emotionally significant figure in his life.  From a professional perspective as a therapist, that would represent a fairly successful resolution of the developmental circumstances which created the need for an idealized male figure.

This video just won a YouTube Video Award. No comment is even possible:

"The clash between science and religion has not shown that religion is false and science is true. It has shown that all systems of definition are relative to various purposes, and that none of them actually ‘grasps’ reality … All the various definitions of the universe have had ulterior motives, being concerned with the future rather than the present. Religion wants to assure the future beyond death, and science wants to assure it until death, and to postpone death. But tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present, since it is in the present and only in the present that you live.

There is no other reality than present reality, so that, even if one were to live for endless ages, to live for the future would be to miss the point everlastingly," – Alan W. Watts, "The Wisdom Of Insecurity."

Don’t miss the finale.

(Hat tip: Ezra Klein)

One of the shrewdest, bravest journalists on the subject:

A reader writes:

My wife pointed out to me that this Sunday will be very telling. The young and thoughtful members of families who have so far flocked to Obama will sit down with their possibly more volatile relatives, and the conversation will turn to the political contest.  Here these Obama supporters, the often passionate and sometimes quiet relations, ubiquitous in every family, will explain Obama’s speech to those who have not seen it.  It will, I can hope and see, raise the level of discourse within these families on this segregated Sunday of all Sundays.  They will see the bright and hopeful faces that I see in Obama supporters.  The elderly will take note and smile indulgently; the middle aged will think, perhaps remembering the earliest moments of their conscious childhoods, that maybe we are not a broken nation, forever splintering.

The kitchen sink has been hurled, and the "worst" that could have happened, what I personally have been fearing since the summer, is over. I have been afraid of a Wright-like controversy for almost a year. These are fears born of being a white man working in a "black" high school in the Bronx. Seeing everyday the unadulterated complexity of black America in its beauty and ugliness. A beauty for which we would not be America, and ugliness all too often demonized in popular culture.  Fears that white America would wake up and realize that a black man was running for president.  I will be showing this speech to my students this week, and I hope they hear it.  It’s not my primary reason for supporting Barack Obama, but next year, when some of my students inevitably start blaming white people for whatever, or talk about thug life as the best life, or wax poetic on the relative virtues of 50 cent vs. Lil’ Wayne, I can  look them in the eyes and say: "What about Obama?" We are not past it all yet, but as far as I can see in my 31 years, we are finally moving.

Honolulu, Hawaii, 4.30 pm.

This controversy really is separating the thoughtful and hopeful conservatives from the others. I can’t believe I’m writing this, but it seems to me to be helping conservatism reform itself as well. Here’s Steve Chapman.