Senator Winfrey: the politics of celebrity and identity

The New Neo Posted on by

When governors have been called on to appoint senators in the past, they’ve tended to stick with party regulars and other established politicians.

But I suppose, after the serious consideration given to neophyte Caroline Kennedy to replace Hillary Clinton, it should come as no surprise that Governor Blagojevitch of Illinois thought about appointing TV superstar Oprah Winfrey to fill Barack Obama’s senatorial shoes—and that Oprah thought herself qualified to have accepted the offer, although she wasn’t really all that interested. She’s too busy doing other things.

Well, Oprah is indeed a busy gal. She’s got a lot of clout, and a vast number of projects over which she exercises a great deal of control. So I can hardly blame her for not being eager to take on the somewhat boring career of Senator. It involves a lot of down time, and one person usually can’t accomplish a whole lot there (actually, a hundred people often can’t accomplish a whole lot, either—but that’s another story).

The whole question got me wondering just who is best qualified to be appointed senator.

When a person runs for election to the Senate, the public uses its judgment to make that decision. Often (as with Barack Obama), the winner has at least some experience at the state legislative level.

But not always. For example, Hillary Clinton was judged qualified by the voters of New York. But she hardly lacked political experience; although she had never run for office before, she certainly had watched the sausage of government being made (as it were).

War heroes are the type of celebrities that have often entered politics successfully. But in recent years non-military celebrities, usually in the entertainment field, have sometimes been elected governors—witness Arnold Schwarzenegger of California (who also married into a celebrity political family), and wrestler Jesse Ventura of Minnesota. And then of course there’s the most successful celebrity of all, actor Ronald Reagan, also of California.

Minnesota has the additional distinction (a dubious one, IMHO) of having just (probably) elected a celebrity senator in Al Franken. He’s not the first, though; consider former basketball player (and Rhodes Scholar—always mentioned in nearly the same breath) Bill Bradley, who served for nearly twenty years as New Jersey’s senator. As for celebrity members of Congress, Sonny Bono comes to mind. But he worked his way up in time-honored fashion in local politics—even if his venue was celebrity-town Palm Springs.

But at least all these people slugged it out in the arena of open elections, and won. Now we’re talking about bypassing that process and relying entirely on celebrity and identity—including racial identity in the case of Winfrey and the non-celebrity pol who was actually appointed instead of her, Roland Burris. Both are a racial match for the outgoing Obama.

The same pattern is true in the gender arena for Hillary’s replacement. Caroline Kennedy is a woman, although not a politican. Non-celebrity politician Kirsten Gillibrand, the actual appointee, also matches in gender, although her political orientation is less liberal than Hillary’s or Kennedy’s. Perhaps actual political policy is considered less important than identity these days.

Tale of the camps: Guantanamo, al Qaeda, and Saudi re-education

The New Neo Posted on by

It should come as no surprise that one of the released Guantanamo prisoners has set up camp as deputy head of al Qaeda operations in Yemen. How these people must laugh at our delicate—and self-destructive—sensibilities!

One of the things in the article that caught my eye was that Said Ali al-Shihri, the “militant” in question, passed through a Saudi re-education/rehabilitation program on his way from Guantanamo to Yemen. Suffice to say he is not their most successful graduate, at least according to Saudi lights.

I became curious as to how these operations work, and found this description. It seems they are run by psychologists (good luck, folks) and religious teachers. They feature attempts to counter the incorrect religious notions of terrorists with passages from the Koran that challenge their beliefs and replace them with a kinder, gentler form of Islam and jihad.

Not a bad idea, actually. The Saudis report great success. Wonder if it’s true.

Those Crayola colors and the 50s childhood

The New Neo Posted on by

The other day I came across this chronology of Crayola crayon colors. Although I must confess that Crayolas were something I hadn’t thought of in decades, it all came back in a rush.

First there was the initial pack for the toddler, those big fat crayons with an exceedingly limited palette. Their lack of pointiness made it extra-challenging to color and keep within the lines, not to mention the difficulty of finding a suitable tint for filling in faces and other skin:

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Ah but then, finally, after various transitional packages, I graduated to the wonder of the 64-pack, the one with the sharpener in the back:

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They were skinny and suitably pointy. But best of all was the variety of the beautiful colors. There was one called “flesh” that eased, without totally solving, the problem of filling in skin (the hue is still there, but renamed “peach” in 1962, for obvious politically correct reasons).

Some of these crayons—the least favored ones—seemed to last forever. But the most attractive and/or most useful got broken and worn down to nubs very quickly. It was a sad day when a favorite got so small it could no longer be sharpened.

Of the ones I loved (and “loved” is really the correct word), the top of the heap were the deep rich tones of “Burnt Sienna” and “Prussian Blue.” The latter has, for some inexplicable reason, been renamed “Midnight Blue” (hard to believe it’s a reaction to storms of protest by storm troops of angry Prussians, but who knows?)

“Burnt Sienna” seems to have survived, as have the red-brown roofs of the town that gave it its name. But I hestitate to offer any attempt at showing you this or any other Crayola color online. All the sites I checked were every bit as inadequate as this one, which purports to offer the proper shades but is so far off as to be worse than useless.

It’s hard to overestimate the importance Crayolas had in the life of the child of the 50s. Looking back, I recall that we (at least we girls) colored almost incessantly—that is, when we weren’t busy with our other major concerns, which were: jacks, jumprope, card games (Canasta and War, primarily) and hopscotch, listed in no particular order. Television was a distant fifth, although good for the times when we couldn’t scare up partners for our usual pursuits, which tended to be done in groups.

One would think that coloring with Crayolas would be a mostly solitary activity. But if one would think that, one would be wrong. We crayoned in groups, too, in a sort of parallel play—or at least in pairs. We used the supposedly creativity-draining coloring books. We drew our own pictures freehand. We made paper dolls and then we designed fanciful clothes for them, and colored them all with our trusty Crayolas.

We often faced the knotty choices of the Crayola aficionado: press down hard and make the color dark and true, and risk fatigue of the hand and arm, not to mention boredom? Or take the easy way out, and use less force? And, if the latter, was it better to fill in the page completely or would a few strokes do, in a sort of impressionist (or perhaps expressionist?) minimalism?

[NOTE: I am sorry that I missed the 50th birthday of the 64-pack last April. Or perhaps it’s just as well, since the ever-moving-forward Crayola folks celebrated by issuing eight new colors with the following sappy and non-descriptive names, reflective of the sentiments (and failings, in my humble opinion) of the present generation: Super Happy, Fun in the Sun, Giving Tree, Bear Hug, Awesome, Happy Ever After, Famous, and Best Friends.

You may be pleased to note, however, that Crayola has addressed and more or less solved the knotty political problem of skin color. The following photo is not a joke, nor is it photoshopped:

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It offers a nice sampler of eight shades suitable for coloring the peoples of the world: White, Apricot, Peach, Mahogany, Tan, Burnt Sienna, Sepia and Black.]

Obamaphiles: it’s only love, and that is all

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a rapturous account of Obama’s inauguration from ex-uber-editor Tina Brown (hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

Remember, as you read it, that the author was once at the helm of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, among other credits.

Brown’s fulsome prose is an excellent example of what I’ve been thinkng for quite some time, and that is this: if what we’ve seen in Bush Derangement Syndrome is hatred (and I believe it is), then what we are seeing among Obamaphiles is love.

I don’t mean that metaphorically; I mean it literally. Case in point, the besotted Brown:

…all day [Obama] was surrounded with astonishing poetic symbolism…[such as] the helicopter bearing away the ills of his predecessor in democracy’s spell-breaking moment of regenerative wizardry…[He is] the first president who has seemed to be in charge from the day he was elected, not, like other presidents from the day he was sworn in. The rest of the world, of course, elected him a year ago and have just been waiting to see their longing ratified…

[O]ur relief exploded yesterday into national outpourings of relief…

I was struck by how much less casual Obama looks behind the big, world beating smile. He exudes purpose and authority now. I told him my husband still has the contract he signed as president of Random House when their imprint Times Books acquired Dreams from My Father. “Worth something now, huh?” he told me, as he draped a long arm to gather me in between himself and his even taller vice president and easefully lit up for the camera. I felt safer and calmer than I have for eight years.

Love is not rational. The lover does not think he/she is idealizing the loved object. Instead, the perception is that the beloved represents a sort of objective perfection. Love’s bubble can burst, of course, when reality meets illusion. But usually it takes a fairly harsh dose of it before the love object is seen with clear eyes.

Why does Obama inspire love, rather than mere admiration? Some of the Obamalove is engendered by his youth, his good looks, his deep voice, and his coolness (in that piece I wrote, “choosing a President is now mostly about style rather than substance,” and that would be a good description of Ms. Brown’s career as well). But I submit that those who suffered most from hatred (rather than mere dislike) of Bush are the same people who are now in love with Barack Obama.

This is not a coincidence. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and that’s a goodly part of what gives the love for Obama its full force.

Bush was hated for many reasons, among them his Texas style, his supposed frat-boy personality, and his alleged lack of intelligence. Obama is seen as the corrective to these things, his exact opposite. But I have come to believe that a very substantial part of the motivation for the depth of the hatred for Bush is that he forced the American people to confront the reality of terrorism, the rot in the fundamentalist Muslim world, and the need to combat it at times with violence.

These things are so markedly un-PC, so dreadfully distasteful, that they must be negated by the intelligentsia of the Left. Bush himself becomes the repository of evil rather than our enemies. Now that he’s gone, the whole thing can be regarded as a bad dream that has miraculously melted away. And ironically, it helps a lot that Bush’s war on terror has been markedly successful, which allows his haters to convince themselves that it was unnecessary.

In Tina Brown’s essay on Obama, she uses a word that struck me initially as very odd. I have highlighted it in bold in the following excerpt:

This was 9/11 in reverse. The last time I turned round and saw so many people behind me, it was that terrible day in New York when the twin towers burned and we poured out of our offices downtown and swarmed up Fifth Avenue. Then the faces were distraught. Now they were joyful. Then America had been assaulted by terror. Now it had been renewed by hope.

Ms. Brown is making the observation that the demeanor and emotional tenor of the two crowds are in contrast. Well, of course; why even bother to mention that? One was a group of people witness to a terrifying surprise attack in which thousands died; the other is watching a planned celebratory and ceremonial event.

If Brown had written “This was very different from 9/11″—indisputably true, but so what?—that statement would not have caught my attention. But the “reverse?” Did the three thousand dead spring to life? Did the planes fly out of the buildings, miraculously made whole, fires quenched? Have we returned to the innocent unawareness of 9/10?

For Brown, that return is a consummation devoutly to be wished. But Brown herself is not all that important, despite her status as a former star in the world of print journalism. The significance of her piece is that she has succinctly expressed what is behind much of the love for Obama: the depth of the need to undo 9/11 and its consequences, and to counter eight long years under the yoke of the dread and hated Bush.

[Note: Dr. Sanity appears to agree—with me, that is, not with Tina Brown. The doctor has written a wonderful post on the psychological phenomenon known as “undoing” (and although she wrote the following before the Tina Brown piece even appeared, it is nevertheless a perfect description of it):

[The intense feeling of Obama supporters] is not normal excitement or enthusiasm over an inauguration–even a very special or historic one. This is not even normal relief that now things are somehow going to be different. This is emotional excess that disguises a severe, disabling anxiety; an anxiety that has been tenously held in check by the psychological denial that came before. It is as if the bizarre national depression the media have been hyping for the last eight years suddenly flipped into a full-blown mania–with all the euphoria, grandiose ideas and plans, delusions of grandeur, wildly impulsive spending, irritability and inappropriateness one sees in an acute manic episode….

They will even go so far as to erase any evidence of events that have transpired since the beginning of the millennium when Bush took office and including 9/11–especially 9/11–so as to pretend they never happened.

They will simply ‘undo’ the last 8 years; rewrite the history and take us across the bridge back to the 20th century.]

Obama and the detainees: reversing Bush?

The New Neo Posted on by

Barack Obama has wasted no time reversing some of President Bush’s most controversial policies concerning the interrogation, imprisonment, and trials of foreign terrorist detainees.

Or has he? If you read the linked article carefully, you’ll see that the thrust of many of Obama’s actions so far has been to halt things in order to study them for a while, and with the plan to make more permanent decisions later.

Yes, coercive techniques such as waterboarding have been prohibited, and Guantanamo is supposed to close in a year. The CIA’s network of alternate detention facilities can no longer hold prisoners long-term. But:

…[Obama’s] orders leave unresolved complex questions surrounding the closing of the Guanté¡namo prison, including whether, where and how many of the detainees are to be prosecuted. They could also allow Mr. Obama to reinstate the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation operations in the future, by presidential order, as some have argued would be appropriate if Osama bin Laden or another top-level leader of Al Qaeda were captured…

The decision to stop the commissions was described by the military prosecutors as a pause in the war-crimes system “to permit the newly inaugurated president and his administration time to review the military commission process generally and the cases currently pending before the military commissions, specifically.”

I’ve written extensively on many of the legal issues involved in the detainment and treatment of terrorists (see this, this, this, and this, for example). My main concern with Obama and the approach I think he will take is that he sees dealing with captured terrorists as a task for our regular criminal justice system. But that system was never designed to deal with terrorists, and there is a perfectly good—and far more appropriate—legal system in place for that: military law.

The fine tunings of how military law ought to apply in each case can be argued. But the full protection of the laws designed to protect our own civilian citizens, and most especially the very open rules concerning discovery (what the defense is allowed to know in a criminal case), are destructive and dangerous when applied to terrorists. It remains to be seen just how far Obama will go in the direction of allowing terrorists access to those rules and those protections.

What Michelle Obama should have worn: channeling Jackie?

The New Neo Posted on by

Not to belabor the point (oh, maybe just a little), but this is what Michelle Obama should have worn to the Inaugural Ball. Although a different color might have been in order, the cut and drape would have been just perfect:

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The dress has the added attraction of being historical: designed by Oleg Cassini, it was worn by Jacqueline Kennedy in 1962 at a White House dinner honoring Nobel Prize Laureates of the Western Hemisphere.

While looking for that dress, I noticed that all of Jackie’s clothes on display at the Met exhibit were beautiful. What taste that woman possessed (not to mention the money to indulge it)! And she had the model’s figure to go with them, both in the rarely-seen casual moment:

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And on the formal state occasion (note her posture in the following photo, as well):

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I’m not saying Michelle Obama needs to be Jackie Kennedy. She most assuredly does not (and for starters, remember that Jackie was only thirty-one years old when her husband was inaugurated). But during Obama’s campaign, Michelle showed a tendency to follow in Jackie’s footsteps in terms of style of dress, and it really suited (pun intended) her. Perhaps now she’s searching for her own fashion identity—but if so, she’s looking for it in all the wrong places.

Inaugural verse: poetry and power all the way

The New Neo Posted on by

I applaud yesterday’s attempt to inject poetry into the inaugural proceedings. But the poem that Elizabeth Alexander composed and read was trite, the sort of thing that helps me understand why many people decide they hate poetry.

When I took a look at the written text of the poem, it appears it’s close to being a prose poem—not that there’s anything especially wrong with that. But these sorts of lines don’t cut it for me as poetry:

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, “I need to see what’s on the other side; I know there’s something better down the road.”

Reminds me of nothing other than that old chicken joke.

But perhaps I’m being too harsh towards Ms. Alexander, because in general, inaugural poetry is a very tough gig. Maya Angelou hardly did better in 1993, for example. The tendency is to go all grandiose and portentous. And even the very great poet Robert Frost (although Alexander and Angelou may be wonderful people, very great poets they are not) was somewhat defeated by the assignment back in 1961.

Those of us old enough to remember JFK’s inaugural recall the image of the elderly white-haired poet, faltering in the bright light, and reading (actually, as it turns out, reciting from memory, although we didn’t know that at the time) his poem “The Gift Outright:”

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But that was an older poem, not the one composed for the occasion, the draft of which he was unable to see clearly enough to read it. Here is the text of the new poem, called “Dedication,” that he had composed in honor of the day.

I think we can safely say it is not among Frost’s greatest works (I think the same of “The Gift Outright,” by the way—although the latter is at least a good poem and “Dedication” really is not). “Dedication” suffers from the usual problem of being too long to sustain the interest of most people who are listening to it rather than reading it, and it’s almost light verse—Frost in his semi-Ogden Nash mode. The poem’s unabashed message of America being a force of power for good in the world, however, seems both archaic and also somewhat neoconnish.

Here’s the story of how Frost came to be the first poet to read at an inauguration. More than a year and a half before the election of 1960, he was on record as predicting that JFK would win, even though Kennedy had not yet formally declared himself a candidate:

Among the questions asked [of Frost] was one concerning the alleged decline of New England, to which Frost responded: “The next President of the United States will be from Boston. Does that sound as if New England is decaying?” Pressed to name who Frost meant, he replied: “He’s a Puritan named Kennedy. The only Puritans left these days are the Roman Catholics. There. I guess I wear my politics on my sleeve.”

A correspondence sprung up between the two, initiated by JFK. Frost also repeated his prediction many times in subsequent public appearances. Kennedy reciprocated by quoting Frost’s lines from “Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening” (“But I have promises to keep/And miles to go before I sleep”) at the close of some of his speeches. Then after the election, Kennedy invited Frost to read at the inauguration, and even offered the poet some editorial suggestions:

Kennedy asked if Frost planned to recite a new poem. If not, could he recite “The Gift Outright,” a poem Frost has called “a history of the United States in a dozen [i.e., sixteen] lines of blank verse.” Kennedy also requested changing the phrase in the last line to “such as she will become” from “such as she would become.” Frost agreed.

Frost died in January of 1963, so he did not live to see JFK’s assassination, which cut off the President’s life while he should have had miles to go before he slept. But before that, the two men had a few more dealings with each other.

Frost called on Kennedy to present him with a framed copy of “Dedication” and to give him some more advice: “Poetry and power is the formula for another Augustan Age. Don’t be afraid of power.”

Hmmm. And Kennedy responded by adding in his own handwriting, at the foot of a typed thank-you letter he sent to Frost: “It’s poetry and power all the way!”

[NOTE: Speaking of poetry and power, Rudyard Kipling wrote perhaps the best poem composed for a ceremonial occasion of state. His effort, “Recessional” was written not for an inauguration, but rather for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.

Kipling had cojones; instead of merely praising Victoria and the empire, the poem is a warning about the dangers of power when not tempered by humility, judgment, and genuine religious feeling. It features the haunting and repetitive refrain: “Lest we forget—lest we forget!”]

Michelle Obama’s gauzy gown

The New Neo Posted on by

Okay, I’m a woman, and I notice these fashiony things. So sue me.

I happen to think Michelle Obama usually dresses beautifully. She’s tall and slender and toned (although hardly model-thin, especially the lower half of her body). If carefully chosen, clothes tend to drape and show well on her.

But beginning with election night, when she wore the outfit generally referred to as the Black Widow Spider Dress, her taste in ensembles for ceremonial occasions has gone sadly awry:

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But I really thought she’d pull it out for the ball, and that she’d return to the simple and classically elegant look that served her so well during the campaign. Instead, we got this fussy, figure-obscuring, girlish bit of fluffery :

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Michelle, Michelle, whatever were you thinking? Where did the Jackie Kennedy influence go? Instead, you seem to be looking for inspiration in all the wrong places, like here:

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Or perhaps here:

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And then there’s here:

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Open thread: the Obama inauguration

The New Neo Posted on by

For those of you who are near a TV and are planning to watch, here’s a thread where you can talk amongst yourself about the inaugural festivities.

A few liveblogging thoughts:

I find the expressions on the faces of the people while they are inside the Capitol, before they see the crowd and get their special public faces completely arranged, to be informative.

Bill Clinton looked especially grim, and then he bit his lip and started to flash the usual smile as he stepped outside. Obama’s face was a combination of mostly unreadable but serious emotions; he only started to look relaxed and smiley as he went before the crowd, just as Clinton had.

In contrast, Hillary looked happy from the start. Perhaps she actually is; who knows? Laura Bush was her customary gracious and lovely self, with a serenity that was reflected in her simple outfit. Michelle Obama looked pleased, but I have to say her yellow sparkly brocade extravaganza, complete with leather gloves of a hideous green hue, did the usually elegantly-dressed First-Lady-to-be no favors (and speaking of fashion, Aretha Franklin is certainly not given to shy and retiring headgear, although she’s in fine voice).

But the person whose demeanor impressed me most of all was President Bush: it was consistent and unchanging. He looked relieved and happy, both as he walked through the Capitol and when he emerged into the daylight. There is no question in my mind that he is overjoyed to be out of it at last. The man never had a moment of peace during his two terms of office.

Oath of office completed, with a few glitches. Let the wild rumpus start!