The Post-Boomer

Goodbye to all that indeed. Obama in West Virginia:

One of the saddest episodes in our history was the degree to which returning vets from Vietnam were shunned, demonized and neglected by some because they served in an unpopular war. Too many of those who opposed the war in Vietnam chose to blame not only the leaders who ordered the mission, but the young men who simply answered their country’s call. Four decades later, the sting of that injustice is a wound that has never fully healed, and one that should never be repeated.

The Science Of Literature

A paragraph from Jonathan Gottschall’s article on literary criticism and  its need to embrace science:

Homo sapiens is a bizarre literary ape — one that, outside of working and sleeping, may well spend most of its remaining hours lost in landscapes of make-believe. Across the breadth of human history, across the wide mosaic of world cultures, there has never been a society in which people don’t devote great gobs of time to seeing, creating, and hearing fictions — from folktales to film, from theater to television. Stories represent our biggest and most preciously varied repository of information about human nature. Without a robust study of literature there can be no adequate reckoning of the human condition — no full understanding of art, culture, psychology, or even of biology. As Binghamton University biologist David Sloan Wilson says, "the natural history of our species" is written in love poems, adventure stories, fables, myths, tales, and novels.

Levi Asher comments here. He’s right: the piece is both silly and smart.
 

“Strong Leader”

Obama finally overtakes Clinton on that measure in ABC News’ polling. More good news for the O-team:

Relatively few mainstream Democrats (as opposed to independents) say they’d cross over (13 and 10 percent, respectively). And as many Republicans say they’d defect the other way – 10 percent for Clinton if she faced McCain; 15 percent for Obama vs. McCain…

In another measure, 26 percent say the more they hear about Obama the more they like him – more than say that about Clinton (15 percent) or McCain (14 percent). Obama’s the only one among them to have gained as much as he’s lost in the recent public glare.

And the "wrong track" number is now 82 percent. This has the potential of an electoral earthquake.

It Would Help In Kentucky

Richard Kahlenberg, for the umpteenth time, suggests Obama back class-based affirmative action:

Class-based affirmative action reconciles both points of view. It avoids the explicit use of race that working-class whites resent, moving us beyond the “racial stalemate” Obama described. But a carefully conceived economic affirmative action program would also try to capture the full legacy of discrimination of which Obama spoke. It would be colorblind but not blind to history.

Discrimination has economic manifestations, and college admissions officers could give a leg up to smart students who overcome various obstacles which disproportionately affect African Americans: growing up in a low-income household, one headed by a single-parent, a family lacking in accumulated wealth, and residing in neighborhoods with concentrated of poverty, and attending low quality schools. Under such a program, low-income and working-class kids of all races would benefit — people like the young Barack Obama or John Edwards — but not students like Barack Obama’s own children.

Quote For The Day

"I respect Hillary supporters because they haven’t had the chance to get to know her like I have. She does not have the political skills of her husband. Or Barack. You need somebody who can bring people together. She criticized my health care bill because it wouldn’t achieve universal coverage until 1998. Well, today we’d be celebrating the 10th anniversary of having every American with insurance," – congressman Jim Cooper, of Tennessee.