2008 was a mighty big year for him, so perhaps he feels that time stopped then. I must confess that something similar happened to me. For a few years after I gave birth to my son, I had to fight the urge to date checks the year he was born, when life as I had previously known it changed so very much.
But checks are one thing, and signing ceremonial guestbooks at Westminster Abby as President another. Anyone and everyone makes mistakes, but Obama seems to make the oddest ones. Come on: 2008? 57 states? corpse-man?
Forgive me if I yawn; another big ho-hum. Giuliani’s time was last time, and he lost momentum, partly because he just didn’t seem to want it. If he enters now, it’s an afterthought.
It strikes me that Obama is exceptionally lucky in his opponents. There is no question in my mind that he would be extremely vulnerable in 2012 to a strong candidate, but it’s not at all certain that such a candidate will enter the fray. This has been Obama’s pattern for his entire political career, with a single exception (the only election he ever lost): the primary in which he ran against the popular US Congressman Bobby Rush and was roundly defeated. As Bobby Rush said:
He was blinded by his ambition…Obama has never suffered from a lack of believing that he can accomplish whatever it is he decides to try. Obama believes in Obama.
Yes.
It was the first and only time (except for the presidential race of 2008) that Obama had a bona fide opponent. In his earlier primary race (the Democratic primaries are the real battle in the Chicago districts where Obama first cut his political teeth) he managed to use legal shenanigans to disqualify the entire field and ran unopposed (see this if you’re unfamiliar with the story—it’s a lulu). After the Rush interlude, from which Obama learned how vulnerable he could be, his opponents in his Senate campaign (both Republican and Democrat) mysteriously collapsed in response to the unveiling of previously-sealed records that showed their private lives in a bad light.
…[I]t later came out that Obama’s campaign was directly involved in what the press did to torpedo Hull’s chances (and lest you accuse me of right-wing extremism, please note that the link and quote is from the NY Times):
[Obama’s campaign manager] Axelrod is known for operating in this gray area, part idealist, part hired muscle. It is difficult to discuss Axelrod in certain circles in Chicago without the matter of the Blair Hull divorce papers coming up. As the 2004 Senate primary neared, it was clear that it was a contest between two people: the millionaire liberal, Hull, who was leading in the polls, and Obama, who had built an impressive grass-roots campaign. About a month before the vote, The Chicago Tribune revealed, near the bottom of a long profile of Hull, that during a divorce proceeding, Hull’s second wife filed for an order of protection. In the following few days, the matter erupted into a full-fledged scandal that ended up destroying the Hull campaign and handing Obama an easy primary victory. The Tribune reporter who wrote the original piece later acknowledged in print that the Obama camp had “worked aggressively behind the scenes” to push the story. But there are those in Chicago who believe that Axelrod had an even more significant role ”” that he leaked the initial story.
And then there’s the matter of Obama’s next opponent, Jack Ryan, to whom the same thing happened. I must be careful here; there is documentation that Obama’s staff pushed and promoted the Hull revelations by the press, but there is no evidence so far of the same involvement occurring with the Ryan outing. However, unless it’s a strange coincidence (always a possibility), it is mighty suspicious; Obama’s staff certainly had the tools, the connections, the motivation, and the experience.
What kind of campaign can we expect from Axelrod in the general election? Overtly positive themes and public posturing complemented by covertly delievered and mercilessly negative “stiletto” attacks against key people around John McCain that are not directly traceable to Axelrod. The model for this strategy is the previous Obama senatorial campaign in Illinois, where Obama’s two most formidible, centimillionaire, rivals, Democrat Blair Hull and Republican Jack Ryan were personally destroyed in the primaries when salacious details from their sealed divorce records were mysteriously leaked to the media, which then pressured for their full release, notably in the pages of the Chicago Tribune.
So Obama’s previous good luck seems to have been some combination of dirty tricks on his part and actual good luck. It’s unclear what the ratio of the first to the second was; suffice to say there was a goodly amount of each.
Which brings us to the present. The relative weakness of the Republican field may be an accident. Or it may be fear of the smear machine keeping the stronger candidates away. Everyone has something in his or her past that could lead to trouble if the harsh and partisan spotlight of the media were turned on it. But Obama, who’s got plenty of skeletons in his closet, feels immune. He knows the MSM has always covered for him, doing the opposite of what it does to his opponents.
Harry Reid’s “rebuke” of Obama seems relatively mild to me, however, although the AIPAC crowd seemed to like it. Was Reid merely playing good cop to Obama’s bad?
I continue to think that none of this will hurt Obama with the vast majority of Democratic voters. Nothing seems to.
But one thing everyone on left, right, or in-between needs to realize: all bets are off after Obama is elected to a second term, should that undesirable event occur. Whatever statements, promises, or assurances he has given previously to whatever interest group, no one should feel that his word has any meaning whatsoever. He will have cast off the need to appeal to any constituency save himself.
Peter Fonda has been generating a little buzz today because of a murky and unclear statement he made at Cannes that seems to be about his training his grandsons to shoot Obama if some sort of class war starts up. As best I can tell, this Hollywood has-been (or never-quite was, with the possible exception of the movie “Easy Rider,” which IMHO was a big yawn) blew his mind quite some time ago with drugs and a few other things and isn’t worth much attention at all.
So why am I giving him some? It’s because of another statement of his that caught my eye. While all the attention was focused on his stupidly incendiary remark about Obama, I noticed the following [emphasis mine]:
It’s more of a thought process than an actuality, but we are heading for a major conflict between the haves and the have nots. I came [to Cannes] many years ago with a biker movie and we stopped a war. Now, it’s about starting the world.
What the movie “Easy Rider” had to do with stopping the Vietnam War I don’t quite know, and I was around at the time. Perhaps Fonda is confusing himself with his sister Jane, who was somewhat more active in that particular cause. But he, like so many boomers from those times, appears to be quite proud of how things turned out.
Hollywood people are funny, and I don’t mean funny ha-ha. The Fondas got a double or maybe a triple dose, having been raised as Hollywood royalty in a home so dysfunctional as to have been deeply traumatic. An inflated sense of their own importance in the world no doubt goes with the territory.
Fonda may be unusual in his personal background, but he’s hardly unusual in his attitude towards the end of the Vietnam War. In fact, I wrote a piece about that in November of 2009, which I think bears repeating here. It was called “Vietnam: they lost the war, but won the battle.”
Who are “they?” The Left.
What war? Vietnam.
What battle? The one that determines who gets to write history.
It’s said that history is written by the winners, and that’s true. But Vietnam just may have been the first war in which those who opposed the conflict “won” in the forum of public opinion by convincing their fellow citizens and government to abandon the war itself, and then got to write most of its chronicles.
Case in point: this piece in the NY Times Magazine, which states the following foregone conclusion [emphasis mine]:
In the decades after Vietnam, despite having been proved right about the war itself, a generation of Democrats who opposed the war nonetheless struggled mightily to find a credible response to armed conflict, to reconcile the breach that separated the antiwar left from the broader swath of Americans who disdained reflexive pacifism.
Proved right? Hardly. But the Left and even most Democrats consider it axiomatic that those who opposed the war have been “proved” right. I’ve spent many hours and many words discussing the proof that exists for the opposite side: that our abandonment of Vietnam in the mid-70s was an unnecessary tragedy and a shame (see the category “Vietnam” on the right sidebar). And I’m hardly the only one.
But word doesn’t seem to have penetrated a huge swath of liberals and the Left that there still might even be another side—much less that it might have some validity, and that it offers arguments that require responses.
I’ve encountered this “everybody knows” attitude about Vietnam many times before, including on the occasion of John Updike’s death. Updike, a liberal Democrat, had angered most of his fellow literati during the 60s by offering a principled and compelling argument that the war may have been a well-intentioned effort by the US to allow the South Vietnamese to maintain their freedom from tyrannical Northern Communists. Updike got much condemnation and little praise for his pains, even after his death, at which time I wrote the following:
Last night…as I was watching a Charlie Rose tribute to John Updike that featured a panel composed of Updike’s editor Judith Jones, former New Yorker editor David Remnick, and New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus, the latter casually mentioned, amidst the praise and reminiscence, that “of course, Updike was on the wrong side about the Vietnam War.”
Of course. Everybody who’s anybody knows that.
[NOTE: See this for Updike’s position on the war, in his own inimitable words.]
The Democrats are happy. As the Republican field shapes up, it looks either weak or strange, or in some cases both.
Mitch Daniels has now pulled back for whatever reason—perhaps the fact that his family has decided they would be inevitably trashed a la Palin and the prospect does not exactly please them. So in destroying Palin, the left has gotten a twofer (or perhaps a threefer or fourfer or morefer), discouraging most sane people from entering the fray.
In, in alphabetical order: Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Gary Johnson, Ron Paul, Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum.
Probably in: Michele Bachmann, Jon Huntsman.
Probably not in: John Bolton, Sarah Palin.
Out: Haley Barbour, Mitch Daniels, Mike Huckabee, Mike Pence, John Thune.
Declared out but still being wooed: Chris Christie, Rick Perry, Paul Ryan.
I think the wooing of the latter three is going to be completely unsuccessful, although nothing would completely surprise me with politicians, who sometimes play hard to get and are not known for reluctance to change their minds. Of the other “outs,” the only one I really liked and am therefore disappointed in is Mike Pence. John Bolton and Sarah Palin, both of whom I think courageous and with whom I often agree, I consider to be polarizing figures who cannot and will not appeal to enough voters to win (I know, I know; many of you differ very strongly, especially about Palin).
As for the rest—at the moment, Pawlenty seems the best bet to me. But none of them are especially familiar to the American people with the single exception of Mitt Romney. And there is still a year and a half before the election.
Today’s earlier post presented me with one of my least-favorite grammatical dilemmas: which pronoun to use in concert with a non-gendered word such as “anyone” or “someone.” The sentence in question was, “And anyone who believes his promises deserves what they get: betrayal,” which is grammatically incorrect.
It wasn’t always such a problem. The default position used to be the pronoun “he,” which for centuries had stood in quite nicely for both men and women. But years ago it became a sexist no-no, and that left us with the PC but horribly graceless construction “he/she.”
Those of us who care about words and grammar are faced with a terrible dilemma. Do we go with the old-fashioned “he” or do we choose abominable “he/she,” or do we circumvent both by allowing ourselves the error of using the plural “they,” which does not conform to the singular “anyone,” but at least agrees with it in its lack of gender specificity? Or do we finesse the problem altogether by doing away with the sometimes-useful word “anyone” and go with a plural such as “people,” which allows us to use the gender-neutral “they?” I find myself alternating among the solutions rather randomly, sometimes choosing one and sometimes another, none of them particularly satisfactory.
You may laugh at these archaic little agonies of the grammatically persnickety. But those of us who care are stalwartly manning (that is, manning/womaning) the ramparts against the chaos of a linguistic free-for-all.
[NOTE: As usual when writing about grammar, I have checked and double-checked this post—because it is invariably the case that such essays are fraught with grammatical errors that seem stubbornly uncatchable.]
Talk about the sins of the fathers! In this case, it’s the sins of the grandfathers.
I’ve never quite understood blaming children or grandchildren for the evil their ancestors did. But nevertheless, I can understand why descendants might feel tainted by that history and find it hard to shake.
I’ve noticed a strange phenomenon in life: the least at fault are often the most tormented by guilt, and vice versa.
[NOTE: Here’s a book by the brother of a notorious murderer that reflects deeply on the issue of familial guilt by association.]
And Ed Koch says he won’t be supporting Obama in 2012, but will instead cross party lines:
I believe this is the most dangerous and critical period that Israel has ever faced and regrettably it does not have the support of the President of the United States, which in past difficult situations it could count on.
It’s not strange that Koch is abandoning Obama. What’s strange is that he ever supported him in the first place:
I supported President Obama, believing he would be good on foreign policy, particularly with respect to the support of Israel. It turned out badly.
Let’s take a little trip back in time and take a look at the relevant parts of Koch’s endorsement of Obama in 2008:
One foreign policy issue that particularly concerned me in 2004 was the security of Israel. I thought in 2004 that issue was better left to President George W. Bush, and I believe I was right. President Bush understood the need to support the security of Israel and did so. I did not feel that way about Senator John Kerry.
That is not an issue in this election. Both parties and their candidates have made clear, before and during this election campaign their understanding of the need to support Israel and oppose acts of terrorism waged against it by Hamas and other Muslim supporters of terrorism.
So the issue for me is who will best protect and defend America.
I have concluded that the country is safer in the hands of Barack Obama, leader of the Democratic Party and protector of the philosophy of that party…
If the vice president were ever called on to lead the country, there is no question in my mind that the experience and demonstrated judgment of Joe Biden is superior to that of Sarah Palin. Sarah Palin is a plucky, exciting candidate, but when her record is examined, she fails miserably with respect to her views on the domestic issues that are so important to the people of the U.S., and to me. Frankly, it would scare me if she were to succeed John McCain in the presidency.
Anyone paying a particle of attention prior to the election should have known it would “turn out badly.” Thinking Obama would support Israel was wishful thinking and self-delusion of a high order.
And I wonder what Koch thinks of Palin now. Which would scare him more, a second term for Obama or a Palin presidency? Maybe he’ll get a chance to make that choice when he votes in 2012.
[NOTE: This is a repeat of a post from February of 2007. At the time I first wrote it, I didn’t know how to upload YouTube videos here. Since then, I’ve certainly mastered that skill. So I’m now able to include a video at the end that illustrates one of the scenes I was talking about.]
One of the most famous misunderstood lines in all of literature is Juliet’s balcony query: “Oh Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?”
As most of you may know, the archaic “wherefore” means “why.” But the misconception that the word means “where” persists, even though the latter would make no sense in the context of the scene: Juliet is musing to herself and Romeo is eavesdropping, overhearing her words without her knowledge. She’s certainly not searching for him at that moment.
Shakespeare is difficult, and it’s not just because of his use of outdated words that require explanation in order to understand (well, we can hardly blame him; they weren’t outdated at the time). We’re simply not accustomed to hearing such sophisticated speech and being able to divine meaning from its poetry, its playful images and complex metaphors. Apparently in Shakespeare’s day people were more adept at that, but it’s since become a lost art.
Studying Shakespeare with a good teacher can bring the words and their meaning alive in a way that makes the plays the beloved masterpieces that they have been for centuries. I once had such a teacher; we’ll call him Mr. Jones.
Mr. Jones was an ex-actor with a vaguely British accent crossed with a hint of a Jamaican lilt. He was also a black man at a time when African American teachers weren’t all that common, back in my junior high school days. How he ended up at my school I don’t know, nor do I know much else about him except that he lived with his elderly mother.
Mr. Jones was very big on reading aloud. He had an old-fashioned over-the-top rhetorical style, a huge voice left over from his days treading the boards of un-miked stages, and a fearless disregard for giggle-prone eighth-graders. He would declaim in that commanding voice, and his presence would stifle any desire to laugh. The sounds would wash over us impressively, even if the meaning eluded us.
But he wanted us to understand the meaning, as well. And to this end we spent months studying Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.” One would think that this work would be the best choice among all Shakespeare’s plays for a bunch of eighth-graders, and one would be right. After all, Juliet, at fourteen, could have been an eighth-grader herself.
But she wasn’t like any eighth-grader we’d ever known. And Romeo was no better. What were they talking about? It seemed an impenetrable thicket of verbiage.
Mr. Jones tackled the whole thing by making us read every single word aloud. He called on some students to act out each part for a few pages, then switched to other students, and on and on, right to the last line. It took months. No matter how embarrassed we were, or what poor actors we were, or how we stumbled and faltered, we had to read those words. And he was big on non-traditional casting, too; he’d sometimes call on the boys to read the female parts and vice-versa. Talk about embarrassment!
One boy, Carl Anderson, who had the platinum hair and fair skin of his Norwegian forebearers, blushed scarlet every time he was called on to read. Then he’d blush even more startlingly scarlet as embarrassing words were revealed (“Sleep dwell upon thine eyes, peace in thy breast! Would I were sleep and peace, so sweet to rest!”). But read he did.
Some read in monotones, some gave it pizazz. And then, after every couple of lines, Mr. Jones would have them pause and try to explain the meaning. If they couldn’t guess, the class would tackle it. If all else failed, Mr. Jones would tell us. But, line by line, the wonderful and sorrowful story emerged, and we slowly got better at deciphering it.
As the characters came alive for us, line by line, Shakespeare (and Mr. Jones) managed that feat at which the writers of so many modern movies fail abysmally: making us care about the characters, and making us believe the lovers actually love each other, and showing us why. We loved Romeo and Juliet, too; and we could see that they were exceptionally well-suited to one another, each able to express emotions in ways no other teenagers ever have or ever will.
When Romeo and Juliet first meet at the ball, they have a conversation in which both show an equal adeptness at imagery and playfulness. The whole scene is an extended metaphor that compares the religious (the hands in prayer) with the sexual (the lips in a kiss).
Classier pickup lines were never heard, at least not in my life:
ROM: If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
Juliet plays hard-to-get with an equally witty rejoinder:
JUL: Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.
Ah, but Romeo is not so easily put off from his goal:
ROM: Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?
But again, Juliet is equal to the task of parrying him:
JUL: Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in pray’r.
But Romeo is not to be dissuaded. He cleverly extends the image in an attempt to get what he’s looking for—a kiss (to understand what he’s getting at here, think of two hands clasped together in prayer):
ROM: O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do!
They pray; grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.
Ah, who could resist? Certainly not Juliet, who clearly doesn’t even wish to hold him off, although she pays some final lip service (pun intended; after all, Shakespeare liked puns!) to restraint:
JUL: Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.
And Romeo sees his opportunity:
ROM: Then move not while my prayer’s effect I take.
Thus from my lips, by thine my sin is purg’d. [Kisses her.]
Are they not well-matched? Precocious and intensely emotional, they exude the essence of heady young love, love that has as yet no experience of sorrow or betrayal (although they’ll know sorrow soon enough). These two love with all their hearts; they are made for each other, and the audience knows it immediately through their words.
A few years later when I saw the Zefferelli film version of “Romeo and Juliet,” I marveled at the scene as it was acted out with suitable hand gestures (oh, so that’s the way it works!) by the achingly-young Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting. If you’ve never seen that film, please take a look. Yes, it was roundly criticized for leaving at least half the play on the cutting-room floor and changing a few of the more archaic words here and there. And for including nakedness (as I recall, a rear shot of Romeo during the post-wedding rendezvous in Juliet’s bedroom). And for casting unknown actors who were so young they lacked the requisite Shakespearean gravitas.
But for me, the film made the play come alive. You believed they loved each other. You believed their desperation. And in the death scenes, you could not help but cry at the waste of these two beautiful young lives.
In the film, the meaning of all those Shakespearean lines was clear; a testament to the actors’ skill. But they wouldn’t have been anywhere near as clear to me—or as wonderful—without those efforts of Mr. Jones.
The very core of your writing whilst appearing agreeable originally, did not work well with me after some time. Someplace throughout the paragraphs you managed to make me a believer but just for a short while. I nevertheless have got a problem with your jumps in logic and one would do well to fill in all those gaps. In the event that you actually can accomplish that, I will undoubtedly end up being amazed.
Cornel West has long been known to be a loose cannon, but this is pretty vile, even for him:
Cornel West, a Princeton University professor and leading black intellectual, is harshly criticizing President Obama, a candidate he once supported but now calls “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats…I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men…It’s understandable. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white”¦When he meets an independent black brother, it is frightening.
Does this make West racist? I certainly think so. It also makes him a self-aggrandizing blowhard, but anyone who follows West’s career already knew that about him.
West, 57, has spent most of his life in the halls of rarified academe, Princeton and Yale and Haverford and then Harvard again and now Princeton again. But he has taken pains in the past to establish his black bona fides:
“Owing to my family, church, and the black social movements of the 1960s”, he says, “I arrived at Harvard unashamed of my African, Christian, and militant de-colonized outlooks. More pointedly, I acknowledged and accented the empowerment of my black styles, mannerisms, and viewpoints, my Christian values of service, love, humility, and struggle, and my anti-colonial sense of self-determination for oppressed people and nations around the world.
West is mad at Obama for a lot of reasons. One of them is the old “you never call, you never write:”
I used to call my dear brother [Obama] every two weeks. I said a prayer on the phone for him, especially before a debate. And I never got a call back. And when I ran into him in the state Capitol in South Carolina when I was down there campaigning for him he was very kind. The first thing he told me was, ”˜Brother West, I feel so bad. I haven’t called you back. You been calling me so much. You been giving me so much love, so much support and what have you.’ And I said, ”˜I know you’re busy.’ But then a month and half later I would run into other people on the campaign and he’s calling them all the time. I said, wow, this is kind of strange.
And who is Obama friendly with instead? Why, take a guess:
He feels most comfortable with upper middle-class white and Jewish men who consider themselves very smart, very savvy and very effective in getting what they want…He’s got two homes. He has got his family and whatever challenges go on there, and this other home. Larry Summers blows his mind because he’s so smart. He’s got Establishment connections. He’s embracing me. It is this smartness, this truncated brilliance, that titillates and stimulates brother Barack and makes him feel at home. That is very sad for me.
Perhaps I should have gotten used to it by now, but I continue to be astounded at some of the things that pass for intelligent discourse among the intelligentsia.
[NOTE: This rant by West makes Larry Summers look like a genius for taking him to task at Harvard. Does the following start sounding familiar?:
Summers refused to comment on the details of his conversation with West, except to express hope that West would remain at Harvard. Soon after, West was hospitalized for prostate cancer. West complained that Summers failed to send him get-well wishes until weeks after his surgery, whereas newly installed Princeton president Shirley Tilghman had contacted him frequently before and after his treatment.[ In 2002 West left Harvard University to return to Princeton. West lashed out at Summers in public interviews, calling him “the Ariel Sharon of higher education” on NPR’s Tavis Smiley Show.]
