…getting older too:
In case you missed the reference, it’s to this song (Stevie Nicks is getting older, too…although a whole lotta botox and cosmetic filler helps):
And by the way, Harrison Ford will turn 70 in July. Wow. He looks good. Of course, it probably helps to be married to 47-year-old Calista Flockhart.
One more thing–why does Ford look so much like Will Rogers in that AARP photo?
[NOTE: I actually wrote the draft of this post a couple of days ago, before the news that forms the subject matter of this came out. But it has interesting resonances with it.]
An absurd question, you might say.
And by the way, I’m not referring to the issue of Obama’s actual birth. I’m talking about a person’s concept of him/herself, and his/her presentation to the world. As the offspring of a black father he didn’t know, a white mother and grandparents he did know, and raised in the American and yet somehow exotic culture of Hawaii and then the indisputably foreign culture of Indonesia and then back again, it would be quite understandable if Obama’s identity were unusually fluid, confusing, and mutable.
A large portion of Obama’s memoir Dreams From My Father was about a quest for a more stable identity. But that identity was, as Byron York points out in this article, a story (or a “narrative”) shaped (or “constructed”, as the post-modernists would say) by Obama himself. David Maraniss’s new autobiography, which only deals with Obama’s life until the age of 27, sheds more objective light on the subject:
Obama had a lot of Pakistani friends; Maraniss writes that if Obama and his girlfriend socialized as a couple, “it was almost always with the Pakistanis.” Obama appeared to identify with his friends as fellow non-Americans. “For years when Barack was around them, he seemed to share their attitudes as sophisticated outsiders who looked at politics from an international perspective,” Maraniss writes. “He was one of them, in that sense.”
But Obama was ambitious. Appalled by the “dirty deeds” of “Reagan and his minions” (as he wrote in “Dreams from My Father”), Obama became increasingly interested in, as Maraniss writes, “gaining power in order to change things.” He couldn’t do that as an international guy hanging around with his Pakistani friends; he needed to become an American.
So he did. One of those Pakistani friends, Beenu Mahmood, saw a major change in Obama. Mahmood calls Obama “the most deliberate person I ever met in terms of constructing his own identity,” according to Maraniss. The time after college, Mahmood says, “was an important period for him, first the shift from not international but American, number one, and then not white, but black.”
Mahmood, Maraniss writes, “could see Obama slowly but carefully distancing himself as a necessary step in establishing his political identity as an American.”…Obama chose to become an American in part because that’s what he needed to be to accomplish his goals.
For quite a while, Obama has reminded me at least a little bit of the F. Scott Fitzgerald character Jay Gatsby—that is, not in the details, but in the fact of being a self-constructed man. And this essay by York seems to me to be one of the most insightful things I’ve ever read about Obama. My gut feeling is that it has the ring of truth.
Now there’s a bit of a furor about a blurb from Obama’s literary agent in 1991 that listed him as Kenyan-born, as well as a 2004 AP article from the days of his Senate race against Jack Ryan that does the same.
Most of the pundits discussing this have made it clear that they’re not birthers; they think Obama was actually born in Hawaii. I agree, although I know some readers of this blog have a different opinion. But even if a person believes as I do, the subsidiary issues are quite fascinating, and the parallels with the case of Elizabeth Warren and her claims of Cherokee heritage are obvious.
Each incident raises the same issues: who initially made the claims, and why? Was it Warren herself, and Obama himself? What would have been the benefit to each of them at the time? Or—particularly in Obama’s case—was it a mere error by others (such as his literary agent, who claims to have been the unwitting culprit and to have been in error)? And if so, why was the mistake not corrected till recently?
Roger Simon and Ace both claim that such biographical notes are always vetted by the authors who are their subject matter, even when composed by others. So was Obama just sloppy in not making the correction, or was it to his advantage back in 1991 to have been thought of as interestingly exotic and foreign-born, and to his disadvantage once he decided to run for the presidency (the blurb was only corrected in 2007)?
Will this matter in the 2012 election? I’ll go out on a limb and say “don’t think so.” Only denizens of the blogosphere will deeply care. Nor will it change opinions, even among them. Those who already distrust Obama will continue to do so, and those who like him will go on liking him. But it’s an interesting demonstration of how often the “facts” released by the media are incorrect and yet go unchallenged, and it also reflects what an advantage it is in certain circles to be considered non-American or native American, until it becomes a disadvantage.
Facts continue to be released, and Tom Maguire tries to sort them out.
As he of course knew they would.
It’s interesting, though, what some of the interviewees in the article said. They seem to think he’s just being pragmatic now in his support of gay marriage: i.e. lying.
As I wrote in the “NOTE” after this post, I think he was just being pragmatic before and lying, and that he’s telling the truth now.
No matter. As Obama himself wrote, “”I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”
Oh, I know you love it. But is it good for you, healthwise?
These researchers say the answer is “yes.” But don’t go hog-wild on coffee (although I wonder whether hogs even like coffee); they could change their minds tomorrow and declare it Badforyou.
Or maybe that’s a reason to go hog-wild while you can, before the news reverses itself and guilt is attendant on every cup.
But the methodology in the study is really really suspect, IMHO. Initially, the results indicated that coffee drinkers live shorter lives, not longer ones. However, coffee drinkers also tend to smoke, drink alcohol, exercise less, and eat more red meat, so once those factors were “taken into account,” the results indicated they actually lived longer than their non-coffee-drinking peers.
Sounds a bit fishy to me. But then again, I don’t ever drink coffee, so what do I know?
The autopsy report found that the shot that killed Trayon Martin was fired from what’s called an “intermediate” distance.
That actually means:
In intermediate-range wounds, the muzzle is held away from the skin but close enough that it still produces powder tattooing. This type of wound is also characterized by numerous reddish-brown to orange-red lesions around the entrance to the wound.
Much more here, but the important part is that damage that occurs with a gun that’s any more than two feet away from the victim is no longer an intermediate range wound. So it indicates that the distance in this case was under two feet, but not almost touching or touching.
…an article entitled, “Dangers in your mattress.”
Do you?
It’s not determinative, but it certainly tends to buttress Zimmerman’s claims.
Has New York’s stop and frisk law really reduced crime? After all, remember that correlation is not causation.
And are black men unfairly targeted by it, or is the proportion just about right considering the demographics of crime?
And speaking of the demographics of crime, isn’t it mainly the black population that’s being protected by this law, if it has indeed caused crime rates to go down?
Another interesting question is whether New York crime has gone down more than in other cities that don’t have stop and frisk. And why doesn’t every article on the subject attempt to answer that question? Surely someone must have done some research on that. And if not, why not?
To me, the most important issue is whether New York’s stop and frisk laws are being used to stop people (of any race or ethnic group) for little or no reason, or whether they are being used responsibly to stop people the police have reason to believe are acting unlawfully.
Why am I writing about this post, anyway? Well, today a federal judge “elevated to class-action status a lawsuit accusing officers of using race as a factor in stopping people on the city’s streets, opening the door to a vast number of additional plaintiffs.” Some statistics:
The stops ”“ as a practical matter ”“ are notable for the measure of racial disparity that occurs: black and Hispanic people generally represent more than 85 percent of those stopped by the police though their combined population makes up a smaller share of the city’s racial composition. Critics, including the New York Civil Liberties Union, also point out that the number of those who get arrested or issued a summons hovers around 10 percent of the stops ”“ and that it is proof that the majority of those stopped have done nothing wrong.
Would the NY Civil Liberties Union be happier if the police arrested more of these people rather than fewer? Don’t think so.
By the way, I wonder how many of New York’s finest are black or Hispanic themselves. I haven’t a clue, but I was unable to find that statistic, which surprised me. If it’s a rather high percentage, it would certainly cast some doubt on the “New York cops are racists” meme.
I note also that 93% of those stopped are men. But I don’t see any class action suit by men, although that would be every bit as justified (or unjustified, as the case may be) as the racial suit, wouldn’t it?
[NOTE: I finally found some figures that address the question in my next to last paragraph, although they are outdated (from 2008). But for what it’s worth, here they are:
In the lower ranks, the number of blacks has increased in the department; minorities have represented 53 percent of the officers hired during the Bloomberg administration. The 36,000-member department is 54.3 percent non-Hispanic white, 16.4 percent black, 25.7 percent Hispanic and 4.2 percent Asian-American.
Those figures are getting closer to mirroring a city that, based on 2006 figures from the Census Bureau, was 34.7 percent non-Hispanic white, 23.7 percent black, 27.6 percent Hispanic and 11.6 percent Asian-American.
Mr. Kelly’s tenure has also been characterized by Police Academy classes that more closely resemble the racial makeup of the city’s eight million residents. The class that graduated from the academy in July 2005, which was 18.3 percent black, was the first predominantly minority class in the department’s history. “We have recruits born in 50 countries,” Mr. Kelly said.]
In the lastest New Yorker, John Cassidy writes:
In my neck of artisanal, hormone-free Brooklyn, the latest CBS News/New York Times poll, which shows Mitt Scissorhands leading “The First Gay President” by three points, landed with a nasty thud. “I can’t believe he might lose,” my wife said when she spotted the offending numbers on the Web. “People are really willing to vote for Mitt Romney? They hate Obama so much they’d vote for Romney?”
The rest of the article is an attempt to fire up the troops, an exhortation to liberals to take the threat seriously but not to be afraid, because it doesn’t necessarily mean a whole lot yet. But I focus on the paragraph above because I think it captures the essence of a certain liberal mindset, what we might call the Pauline Kael syndrome.
You may remember that Pauline Kael, film critic at that very same New Yorker, whose lengthy tenure there (1968-1991) was extremely influential in shaping the viewpoints of the cognoscenti, was supposed to have said, in response to Richard Nixon’s 1972 landslide victory, “that she ‘couldn’t believe Nixon had won’, since no one she knew had voted for him.”
Kael’s real quote appears to have been more nuanced. As best we can tell, she may have actually said this:
I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.
That’s a more interesting statement because it owns up to its own insularity. The speaker is well aware that she lives in an echo chamber in which she not only is not exposed to other viewpoints, but can’t even fathom them. Whether she would like to understand better or not is another question; my impression is that the speaker is rather proud of only associating with the elite, and really isn’t interested in finding out what the great unwashed might think, or why. I read into her remarks a certain disdain for those who voted for Nixon; whatever their reasons might be, they certainly couldn’t have been good.
That’s where Cassidy and his wife come in, all these long years later. There’s the same kneejerk dismissal of the views of others, the same concomitant inability to understand them and reluctance to try (conservatives may be intolerant of the views of liberals, or even hate them, and certainly can misunderstand them, but my distinct impression is that they spend an inordinate amount of time at least trying to fathom them, and tend to know many liberals rather well).
The assumption is that no one could possibly have rational reasons to vote for the obviously—obviously what? hateful? incompetent? evil?—Romney, and so the only impetus for supporting him must be hatred of Obama. Which brings us to another interesting point: people who will be voting for Romney are assumed not to merely disapprove of what Obama has done or not done as president, but to hate him. The motive is personal, malevolent—and quite possibly racist (although the article doesn’t say that). Politics as pure emotion.
Again with the race card:
He said this in 2008.
He’s saying it again: “When your name is Barack Obama, it’s [an election] is always tight.”
So that’s the reason he thinks it’ll be tight? Because the public is bigoted against his name?
This is a hard case to make, given that he won in 2008, and not just by a little bit, with the same name.
He seems to think it’s still 2008.
He wishes it’s still 2008.
If you look at the video, though, you could make a case that Obama is joking. But it’s a joke with an agenda. Then, after Barbara Walters has a brief moment in which she remembers she was once an actual journalist, Obama gets more serious. But the video cuts off his answer before we hear the whole thing; my guess is that he goes into some version of his “I inherited the problems from Bush” routine, another old favorite: