The following audio tape is from a 2001 Obama radio interview. It’s already featured on Drudge, so it’s sure to reach quite a few people.
But I’m doing my little bit by posting it here. You can do yours by sending it to everyone you can think of who isn’t already one hundred percent in the Obama camp. Continue reading →
More on mothers and daughters and the passage of time.
The following photo, however, is my favorite in the piece. What carriage and natural elegance the woman had!
[NOTE: Oops! Trying to have a nonpolitical weekend, and here I somehow slipped back into the political again—sorta.]
My mother has always loved the telephone. In the more leisurely era in which she lived most of her adult life, she touched base with about a dozen friends a day.
Not to mention the need to talk to her daughter—me—a lot. When I went away to college, I was required to phone home every Sunday, collect. And although this was back in the days when long-distance phone calls were quite expensive relative to other items, these calls were hardly short: my mother could talk. In addition, there was usually one and often two more phone call a week from her to me.
Later on when I was a young mother and phone rates had gone down, I heard from my mother at least every other day. Continue reading →
Separated at birth? You decide. Continue reading →
Alicia Alonso is a Cuban ballerina who has defied time. Her early career took place in this country, but she returned to Cuba after Castro came to power and he rewarded her by treating Alonso and her company very well.
The first and only time I saw her dance in person was in the 1970s, when Alonso was already in her 50s and way past her prime. I did not like her dancing; I found her style mannered, old-fashioned, and nearly frozen with control. She had an eerie masklike face and a somewhat ferocious look.
But the following video of Alonso is extraordinary. Continue reading →
Got pre-election angst? Want some hope for the future? Something to counter the idea that each generation is less likely to use critical thinking than the one before it, that the search for truth has been replaced by relativism, and that we face an unstoppable progression of the The Closing of the American Mind? Continue reading →
Today’s hatred of Palin is driven at least partly by a host of elements connected to class, despite our protestations that we’re a relatively classless society. This particular class consciousness, which disregards Palin’s formidable accomplishments as governor as though they had not occurred, isn’t necessarily about money or family origins. The source of this special contempt seems related to what is known as style, and to a lesser extent to education.
Palin has a college degree, but to her detractors it’s significant that it’s from a non-elite school (of course, attending an elite school didn’t save the hated Bush, who was hated partly because he came from a patrician family but didn’t act like it). Continue reading →
…the news weren’t bad enough already, now New England must contend with this.
Oh, for the days when a “beetle invasion” meant this:
The mind reels.
I’m beginning to wonder if there is any effort to find truth any more. I’m beginning to wonder if there are any standards involved in being on the editorial board of a major newspaper any more. I’m beginning to wonder if we are seeing the triumph of Orwell’s dystopia, where language has lost all meaning except for the goal of obfuscation in the service of political talking points. I’m beginning to wonder if we have passed Through the Looking Glass into a land where newspapers and politics have been taken over by a host of Humpty Dumptys who are determined that a word will “mean just what [they] choose it to mean””neither more nor less.”
What am I talking about? Continue reading →
Orwell knew full well how important this sort of erasure of history by the Obama campaign is, although he didn’t envision the help of the internet’s wayback machine in reconstructing the vanished past. Do Obama’s scrubbers realize that such a tool exists, and that their work is transparent to those who know how to find the “disappeared” evidence despite their intense efforts to hide it?
It’s likely that they do. Continue reading →
…Pahkeestan wasn’t enough to win their hearts.