Roundup of the latest Obama musings

The New Neo Posted on by

It must be bad when Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift finally gets fed up with Obama—or rather, with his advisers. Ah, if only Stalin knew!

Obama’s not like Carter, he’s like Truman! A more far-fetched presidential comparison can hardly be imagined.

Obama’s foreign policy: hard to be coherent about something so incoherent. Furthermore:

Certainly, no major problem has fallen to solution just because Obama made a speech about it. Indeed, there is scant evidence that the change in tone the President did manage to bring about has sprouted any positive concrete policy consequences at all. Polls have shown that while the President is on balance more popular abroad than his predecessor, his policies really are not””not in the Middle East, not in Europe, not in Asia.

Ya think?

Jackson Diehl is of similar mind:

Still, this administration is notable for its lack of grand strategy – or strategists. Its top foreign-policy makers are a former senator, a Washington lawyer and a former Senate staffer. There is no Henry Kissinger, no Zbigniew Brzezinski, no Condoleezza Rice; no foreign policy scholar.

Instead there is Obama, who likes to believe that he knows as much or more about policy than any of his aides…

Sad thing is, Obama may be correct about that.

Those most powerful women

The New Neo Posted on by

Time magazine offers a list of the 25 most powerful women of the last century.

There’s always something a bit tiresome and arbitrary about such lists, especially if they spotlight some group such as “women” or “blacks,” but even if they don’t.

This one seems a particularly odd document with some odd inclusions. Angela Merkel, for example, isn’t a selection with which I’d quarrel, except for the fact that her power has mostly been in the 21st century, not the last one. But Virginia Woolf? Say what? Her inclusion seems to be sheer political correctness, because she certainly hasn’t had a lot of influence, except on university English departments.

And then there’s Margaret Sanger, whose Time bio constitutes a whitewash of major proportions. No mention by Time of her extreme racism, nor of her eugenics campaign against the mentally defective. Guess they didn’t have enough room.

Does Estée Lauder really belong there? Don’t think so. Coco Chanel, perhaps, for the end of the corset. But Madonna??? Sorry, I don’t see it at all. Rachel Carson yes, for better or for worse, depending on how you look at it (I view a significant amount of her influence as for worse).

I’m an Aretha Franklin fan, but what’s she doing there? Why not—oh, I don’t know, Marian Anderson instead? And how about some trailblazing businesswomen?

For that matter, I would have included Nancy Pelosi, much as I detest her. She was, after all, the first female Speaker of the House. And—assuming HCR has staying power, which I sincerely hope it does not—she was almost single-handedly responsible for its passage, if anyone was.

Secret Service memories

The New Neo Posted on by

We all know what members of the Secret Service do: they protect the President and First Family from attack. But we don’t often think about the details of what that actually involves.

Here’s a very matter-of-fact narrative from Clint Hill, the agent assigned to protect Jackie Kennedy 47 years ago in Dallas. That day, he was standing on the running board of the car behind the president and his wife when he heard the first shot. Here’s Hill’s description:

I heard an explosive noise from my right rear. As I turned toward the sound, I scanned the presidential limousine and saw the president grab at his throat and lurch to the left.

I jumped off the running board and ran toward his car. I was so focused on getting to the president and Mrs. Kennedy to provide them cover that I didn’t hear the second shot.

I was just feet away when I heard and felt the effects of a third shot. It hit the president in the upper right rear of his head, and blood was everywhere. Once in the back seat, I threw myself on top of the president and first lady so that if another shot came, it would hit me instead.

We have seen the photos, and we know what Hill saw up close and personal: the president’s head was explosively blown apart. But as an agent, Hill was trained to go towards the carnage—to throw himself over his charges so that he would die rather than them, and to do this consciously and willingly. This is a level of service and sacrifice most of us can hardly imagine, much less perform.

Sarah Palin’s Alaska

The New Neo Posted on by

I’d read a bit about the TV show “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” before. But I’d never watched it.

Last night I was doing some idle channel surfing, and I happened across the program. The impression I got from it of Palin was of almost unstoppable energy; this woman is a physical force of nature, always on the go, relentless and tireless. Even if Palin had never entered politics, she most likely would have brought her natural exuberance to whatever it was she chose to do. And she would never have chosen to do just one thing.

Palin’s idea of a vacation is a jaunt that would exhaust most people. It was especially fascinating to watch her take daughter Bristol out on a commercial halibut fishing boat for some rather unconventional mother-daughter bonding. The moment when Sarah held a fish’s just-removed but still-beating heart in her hand is likely to make her political opponents shudder.

Commercial fishing isn’t for sissies, and Palin is no dilettante, since she and her husband have worked in the commercial salmon industry. The TV show shows us the enormous halibut, which have to be stunned with a club before being killed so they don’t flop around so much on the deck that they injure their meat. Sarah is fully up to the task (another image that probably doesn’t send joy into the heart of any liberal Democrat watching—Sarah clubbing a jumungous halibut into senselessness).

Watching the show, I got a feeling for the character of Palin’s husband Todd, as well. He’s far more taciturn than she but hardly glum, and they are hotly competitive with each other in a friendly sort of way. Watch them skeet-shooting or kayaking and you see that they each play to win.

When Palin first came on the scene, I noted that she reminded me somewhat of Teddy Roosevelt. Not politically—he was a Republican but a progressive—and not for his ivy-league education, but for their shared gutsy, rugged, outdoorsy nature, and huge level of energy. This is what I wrote back then:

…another president sharing some traits with Palin: the muckracking, hunting, wild Western: Theodore Roosevelt. Other similarities: five children, not a great deal of prior national-level political experience (Teddy’s highest offices before being tapped for VP were Assistant Secretary of the Navy for one year and NY Governor for one year””although his military exploits with the Rough Riders had made him nationally known). Teddy was also extraordinarily young; at 42, he remains the youngest President ever.

And again, there were those wire-rimmed glasses.

It seems to be that in general the show can only help Palin, although it certainly won’t convert the haters to Palin-fans. But it indicated to me how very genuine and unique Palin is as an American type: the gung-ho straight-shooting spunky frontier woman. It’s not a type most of us are familiar with any more, as urbanized as we have now become. But it speaks to our American heritage and values.

Updike on the Kennedy assassination

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a partial repeat of a previous post.]

Here are some of writer John Updike’s reflection on the JFK assassination, originally published at the time in the “Notes and Comments” segment of The New Yorker, and featured again in this New Yorker tribute to Updike published shortly after the author’s death. I think it is one of the best descriptions I’ve ever read of the emotional atmosphere of the event for those of us who lived through it:

It was as if we slept from Friday to Monday and dreamed an oppressive, unsearchably significant dream, which, we discovered on awaking, millions of others had dreamed also. Furniture, family, the streets, and the sky dissolved, only the dream on television was real. The faces of the world’s great mingled with the faces of landladies who happened to house an unhappy ex-Marine; cathedrals alternated with warehouses; temples of government with suburban garages; anonymous men tugged at a casket in a glaring airport; a murder was committed before our eyes; a Dallas strip-tease artist drawled amiably of her employer’s quick temper; the heads of state of the Western world strode down a sunlit street like a grim village rabble; and Jacqueline Kennedy became Persephone, the Queen of Hades and the beautiful bride of grief. All human possibilities, of magnificence and courage, of meanness and confusion, seemed to find an image in this long montage, and a stack of cardboard boxes in Dallas, a tawdry movie house, a tiny rented room where some shaving cream still clung to the underside of a washbasin, a row of parking meters that had witnessed a panicked flight all acquired the opaque and dreadful importance that innocent objects acquire in nightmares.

And here’s Jacqueline Kennedy as Persephone, the Queen of Hades and the beautiful bride of grief:

jackiepersephone-2.jpg

The conspiracy-generator: JFK’s assassination

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s the 47th anniversary of the JFK assassination.

The death of Kennedy marked an abrupt and hugely traumatic transition for all of my generation from innocence to experience. It’s hard to convey to younger people how surprising and shocking it was to us that a president could be blown away like that, especially one as handsome and young as Kennedy.

This makes no sense—the beautiful and young are just as vulnerable to rifle shots as the ugly and old, but that’s the silly way the innocent mind works. The subsequent funeral, the killing of Oswald by Ruby, all the strange twistings and turnings, were heartwrenching and frightening for the nation and especially for my generation of young people, who became jaded and suspicious and conspiratorially-minded.

I date JFK’s assassination as the beginning of the widespread acceptability and popularity of dark conspiracy theories in America. Whether or not they made sense, whether or not the evidence supported them (it turns out it did not), people believe in them. How could a nonentity such as Oswald take down a president? How could he have been silenced right under the police’s noses by a weirdo like Ruby? The facts were too strange and too improbable, the people too insignificant, for their large roles in world history. Something greater was needed, and the imagination supplied it.

Republican presidential candidates, 2012

The New Neo Posted on by

Peggy Noonan points out that in the next few months, Republican candidates will need to be deciding whether they’ll make a run for the presidency in 2012.

Whom would I like to see take a stab at it? Chris Christie, for sure—love that straight-talking, straight-shooting, corpulent New Jerseyite.

Paul Ryan.

And that’s it for me. I don’t think either will be planning a run, though. Unfortunately, because I think either—especially Christie—would be a shoo-in.

Who else? Pawlenty, perhaps. I’m not sure Jindal could overcome the nerd factor. Huckabee, ugh; likewise Romney and Gingrich. Sorry, but they are has-beens.

And, as I think I’ve said before, I think Palin would lose. I believe that if she is nominated for the presidency, the outcome of the race would be much the equivalent of the Nevada Senate results of 2010. I don’t think the country can afford that.

I am being unusually blunt here, and I expect a lot of disagreement with me. If Palin is nominated, I hope I’m wrong about the results of the election. But I think her negatives are not only too high, but they are too set in stone to overcome.

I don’t wanna tawk like a New Yawkah

The New Neo Posted on by

The New York accent seems to be on its way out. Not only is it less common than it used to be, but scads of New Yorkers are hiring speech therapists to rid themselves of theirs, which are seen as liabilities in this global world.

It’s just another example of the homogenization of modern life. Unique regional characteristics still exist, but they are being pushed out by nationwide and worldwide communications and businesses.

Have you been to a variety of malls around the country lately? If so, you’d learn that, for the most part, the word “variety” is a misnomer. If you didn’t know you’d traveled to get there, you would almost swear you were in the same place, over and over and over. Likewise the strip outside of town—you know, the one with the McDonald’s and the Burger King and the Pizza Hut and the Applebee’s.

But many years ago, I also was part of the “leave my New York accent behind in a cloud of dust” crowd. Except for a few details, Lauren LoGiudice’s story is my story:

“I grew up with people who could be the cast of ”˜Jersey Shore,’ ” Miss LoGiudice, 27, said. It was not until she got to Wesleyan University that she realized how much her speech pigeonholed her. And as a young actress who is “tall and Anglican-looking,” she worried her accent would be a roadblock. “If I had looked like Meadow Soprano,” Miss LoGiudice said, “I wouldn’t have had to worry about my accent.”

The differences? I didn’t go to Wesleyan. And I’m not “tall and Anglican-looking” (by the way, I doubt she actually means “Anglican“—perhaps “Anglo-Saxon”?). In fact, I was more the Meadow Soprano type.

However, the rest was the same. When I went off to college, people there teased me about my speech. My New York accent—which, compared to those who had surrounded me when I was growing up, was exceptionally mild—was considered a fine target for mockery and jokes. Some of it was good-natured, but it still got to me, and just a month or two into my freshman year I decided to eradicate the cause.

I didn’t need no steenking speech therapist, either. I did it myself through sheer force of will. I was highly motivated, and within a couple of months my New York accent was no more. So thorough was I in my excision of all traces of the speech patterns of my original home that no one thereafter has ever guessed, on hearing me, where I was born and raised. I am officially generic.

Is marriage fading?

The New Neo Posted on by

Marriage as an institution seems to be fading, and people know it.

But that doesn’t mean they don’t still want it for themselves. A recent Time/Pew poll found that “although 44% of Americans under 30 believe marriage is heading for extinction, only 5% of those in that age group do not want to get married.”

The poll had a number of other interesting findings. Fewer people are married. When they are, the increasing tendency is to marry someone of the same socioeconomic status as themselves, probably because the pool of women making decent salaries is higher than it used to be. The number of unmarried people living together has jumped in the last year, probably as a result of the recession. The rate of unwed parenthood is high, especially among those without college degrees, although the parents often live together for a while. Here’s a depressing statistic:

About 21% of American children will see at least two live-in partners of their mothers by the time they’re 15…And an additional 8% will see three or more.

That sort of revolving boyfriend/stepfather situation does not bode well for American children, nor for their perception of marriage as an institution.

As I wrote back in a lengthy post from three years back, marriage has lost out because so many of the practical benefits it used to confer are no longer so clear, and the costs seem more so:

What’s marriage needed for these days, anyway? Most people can have plenty of sex without getting married, and even become parents (although out-of-wedlock parenthood does not absolve the parent from the duty of child support on the dissolution of the partner relationship). Most people can support themselves without marriage, as well””at a lower level than they can with a working spouse, it’s true; but still, decently enough. And it’s simpler and easier not to have to cater to the wants and needs of another person.

The benefits of a good marriage””which are very real, and very valuable””seem far more amorphous than they used to be, because they now exist primarily in the realm of the emotional, and because the proliferation of divorce means they can’t be counted upon to last. There’s love, and trust, and companionship. There’s the satisfaction of a shared commitment, the deep and rewarding pleasure of knowing another human being intimately over time. There are still some economic benefits, too. But all of this requires a level of emotional maturity that seems more and more rare these days, and an ability to compromise and to regard the needs of another person as equal (or nearly equal) to one’s own.

Divorce was once the target of disapproval and even ostracism. Remember, for example, the days (not so long ago) when it was quaintly but universally acknowledged that a divorced politician would have a very hard time being elected? Likewise, in my youth there were only one or two kids in my entire community whose parents were divorced, and they reported that their status was somewhat pariah-like.

Now, of course, it’s changed, and to a certain extent that’s a good thing; I’m not advocating the shunning of the divorced. But marriage is one of the foundations of our society and especially important to child-rearing. It’s not that children can’t survive and even prosper in a divorce situation; it’s just that it becomes more difficult and less likely. Children more commonly thrive in a situation of stability, where they know that their parents have made a serious commitment to each other. Unfortunately, that is becoming increasingly rare.

[NOTE: I was thinking about that sentence I wrote, “I’m not advocating the shunning of the divorced.” It occurs to me that it’s difficult to know which came first, the relaxation of such shunning or the rise of the divorce rate.

My guess is that they may have been simultaneous. As women’s economic status rose and allowed them more often to support themselves, and the so-called sexual revolution allowed men easy access to sex outside of marriage, divorce become more desirable, easier to obtain legally, and society no longer disapproved all that much.

The shunning of the divorced had worked to discourage divorce. But it was only one piece of an integrated system all of whose parts discouraged the dissolution of marriages. Putting a single piece back in place in isolation would be ineffective and probably impossible, even if we wished to do so.]