Like Hope
Monday, Monday
It is easy for cynics to write off Obamania as a passing fad, as lofty rhetoric that can’t and won’t hold up on close inspection — another bout of the kind of naive and romantic enthrallment that occasionally claims American voters until common sense sets in. This is surely what Hillary Clinton and my friend from forty years ago are counting on. But if the Clintons stop to think back to what they felt and understood in those years leading up to 1968, they may come to a different conclusion, as have I.
Neither John F. Kennedy nor his brother Robert were idealists. They were realists who understood the importance of idealism in the service of realism. They grasped the central political fact that little can be achieved in Washington unless or until the public is energized and mobilized to push for it; the status quo is simply too powerful. The ideals they enunciated helped mobilized the nation politically. That mobilization contributed to the subsequent passage of civil rights and voting rights laws, Medicare, and environmental protection. For purposes of practical electoral strategy as well as high-minded moral aspiration, they never tired of reminding the nation of its founding principles — most fundamentally, that all men are created equal.
Robert Reich, February 23, 2008
Obama is different, really different, and that in itself represents “change.” A Kenyan-Kansan with roots in Indonesia and multiracial Hawaii, he seems to be the perfect answer to the bumper sticker that says, “I love you America, but isn’t it time to start seeing other people?” As conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan has written, Obama’s election could mean the re-branding of America. An anti-war black president with an Arab-sounding name: See, we’re not so bad after all, world!
So yes, there’s a powerful emotional component to Obama-mania, and not just because he’s a far more inspiring speaker than his rival. We, perhaps white people especially, look to him for atonement and redemption. All of us, of whatever race, want a fresh start. That’s what “change” means right now: Get us out of here!
Barbara Ehrenreich, February 14, 2008
We are definitely cursed by interesting times. I feel like I have to mark this odd moment in some way, perhaps so that I can come back to it in a year or so and try to figure it out. I definitely don’t like the Clinton brand of corporate politics. They messed up national health care and brought us NAFTA and the end of welfare as we know it, among other things.
Yet I confess that Bush has left me longing for the Clinton’s, well, professionalism and competency, however technocratic. Maybe they are market fanatics, but at least they did not leave such a huge mess in their wake. I think that’s why Obama is so unappealing. His calls for unity ring hollow; he wants unity with people that I feel ought to be in jail. Maybe that just makes me an old-fashioned partisan.
Obsolete Skills
Robert Scoble came up with the idea in a recent blog post to make a list of ‘obsolete skills.’ He describes these skills as things we used to know that no longer are very useful to us, and provided a few examples including:
* Dialing a rotary phone
* Putting a needle on a vinyl record
* Changing tracks on an eight-track tape
* Shorthand
* Using a slide rule
* Use a product or service before doing a blog post?
* Optimizing 640K-worth of memory
* Using Wikitext?
* Refilling a fountain pen
* Operating a dictaphone
* Using the eraser ribbon on a typewriterThe community has started to create a much larger list of these obsolete skills, check out the full A-Z list. Feel free to contribute more if you can, and if you have the time, please make a page with a short description of the skill.
I drove to Chicago for an interview a few weeks ago and just before I got there a slow, steady snowstorm started. It’s freaky enough on the tollway, even in good weather, but in a snowstorm it’s a nightmare. One reason it’s so difficult is that windshield wipers just can’t keep up with the snow and slush.
You have to pick just the right speed, and even then the windshield goes dark periodically, obscured by buckets of gray muck thrown up by the semis. And all of this is happening at 50 miles an hour or more, although step by step the traffic was slowing down to 30 or 40 miles an hour.
In the midst of all of this I notice that my windshield wiper fluid had run out. This means that each time the windshield fills with the gray muck I can’t wash it off. Instead, the muck smears like thick mud. Now I am peering franticly through dark smears on the windshield, barely able to see to drive.
I’ve got to get off– that in itself is no easy matter on the tollway– and get some water. I make the exit and, after three or four tries, realize that the convenience stores that sell gas have air hoses but not water. It seems like such a simple thing: water. But it’s not available.
I briefly considered bottled water and then, at the last moment, looked up to see the familiar blue jugs of fluid. It had been so long since I even opened the hood of my truck, much less fill up the windshield wiper fluid– that I had completely forgotten what I needed to do!
It seems like a stupid mistake but, on reflection, it makes perfect sense. I bought my truck about six years ago on an extended warranty that required– and paid for– regular service at the dealer. They were wonderfully efficient, maintaining and filling every possible fluid and oil. No news was good news.
I thought about all of this when I found out about the obscure skills website, which lists odd little abilities many of us used to rely on regularly. I used to change and set the spark plugs in my car, and I’ve done brake jobs and replaced water pumps. No more.
Partly, of course, because I’m older and occupied with other things. Whatever the reason, I’m not sure how sentimental I can be about these changes. On the one hand, I don’t like ‘sealed box’ technologies. On the other, it just seems like a kind of hobby I once loved.
Sometimes, too, even an oil change could be a nightmare; it wasn’t always as easy as it sounds. I can remember laying on the driveway in the heat of the Texas summer, struggling to turn that odd wrench that we used for oil filters. It was irritating and messy. It’s not the technology we miss, I think, it’s something else.
Fugees: Vocab