(via Marc Ambinder) His name is Barack Obama, and I endorse his message [e.a.]:
Jake Tapper: Governor Palin and her husband issued a statement today saying that their 17 year old daughter Bristol who is unmarried is 5 months pregnant. Do you have a comment?
BO: I have heard some of the news on this and so let me be as clear as possible. I have said before and I will repeat again, I think people’s families are off limits, and people’s children are especially off limits. This shouldn’t be part of our politics, it has no relevance to governor Palin’s performance as a governor or her potential performance as a vice president. And so I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories. You know my mother had me when she was 18. And how family deals with issues and teenage children that shouldn’t be the topic of our politics and I hope that anybody who is supporting me understands that is off limits.
A lot of Obama’s supporters do not understand that, but I forgive them [even when they make fools of themselves after being reminded of the fundamentals of biology, and still want a doctors letter? Yes, even then. And I'm not even a Christian! ---ed.] They’re passionate about their candidate, and they’re human.
On one level, it’s good that they care enough to get engaged in the messy process that is our democracy—a process that, alas, also gives rights to those caught up in a mob mentality.
The proper remedy to their antics is to outsmart them, and to accomplish your goals: the success of your cause is always the best revenge.
Fairey told me he thinks it’s solely his use of red that makes some people uneasy. I’m not so sure. He’s an artist; his adoption of propaganda tools — the graphic style, the underground distribution, and, OK, the color red — is at least in part ironic, a comment on political-machine communiques, a subversion of them. Although, let’s be honest, most people don’t look at the world through the meta-tinted glasses that this genre of art requires. They may get a whiff of critique, but what if they get a stronger whiff of something they can’t quite identify? And what if that confusion leads to some form of heebie-jeebies when it comes to Obama?
Still, the most radical aspect of this whole phenomenon is not the artwork itself but how it conveys Obama’s sharp divergence from the generic, easily digestible cultural coding that’s always been associated with getting elected. As Fairey says, Obama has “radical cachet.”
But if you like Obama and you’d like to see him elected president, it’s worth asking yourself exactly why none of the other candidates has dipped an ironic toe into agitprop, and whether their freedom from images that conjure mass idol worship, however archly, might not help them in the end. [e.a.]
One of those images was mounted on a fence around the corner from my polling place. It creeped me out—because I know agitprop, and I didn’t like it associated with Obama: it was a huge turnoff.
Daum claims there’s Hillary merchandise too, so:
It’s all commodity. As a result, no one’s commenting.
The ACLU filed a brief Tuesday supporting Craig. It cited a Minnesota Supreme Court ruling 38 years ago that found that people who have sex in closed stalls in public restrooms “have a reasonable expectation of privacy.” …
“The government cannot prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Senator Craig was inviting the undercover officer to engage in anything other than sexual intimacy that would not have called attention to itself in a closed stall in the public restroom,” the ACLU wrote in its brief.
So that makes it okay then. Cool! Power to the people!
The notion of an “information war” is not limited to the battlefield of the Middle East. Increasingly, politics will be fought through PR-Bordering-on-Propaganda.
“The pressures of modern life sometimes seem to be weakening the links which have traditionally kept us together as families and communities. As children grow up and develop their own sense of confidence and independence in the ever-changing technological environment, there is always the danger of a real divide opening up between young and old, based on unfamiliarity, ignorance or misunderstanding. It is worth bearing in mind that all of our faith communities encourage the bridging of that divide.”
That’s why Britain’s Channel 4 offers an alternative each year to the queen’s annual Christmas message, which is broadcast on BBC and ITV. Yesterday, it was presented by this woman,
I want to be part of this society - this is where I choose to live. I hope that the society is more accepting of my personal choice. It’s not about separation. … [A]s a society we need to be more tolerant of people’s personal choices.
Funny, but I thought it’s exactly because we in the West are tolerant of people’s personal choices that “news organizations” like Britain’s Channel 4 showcase the in-your-face antics of “spokespersons” like Ms. Feels So Liberated While Hiding Behind a Mask, pictured above.
Actually, we love your “personal choices.” We—via the media, the globalized news-entertainment complex, and the blogosphere—feed off them. They’re political porn: cheap entertainment. The weirder you are, the higher the infotainment quotient. Just ask Fox News.
update: typo correction in bold in penultimate paragraph
Pajamas Media has the scoop (including PDFs of witness reports) on the six imams and their extravagant efforts to cause a media sensation about profiling and Islamophobia. The Washington Times report, which I linked to here, is corroborated by the accounts gathered by PJ Media.
Clearly, this event was staged. The participants went to exaggerated lengths to make sure they were noticed. They called attention to themselves as a group in the terminal and then kept attention on themselves individually when they spread out to seats all over the airplane and talked loudly and requested seat belt extenders, which they didn’t need. And after they were detained, they quickly had a lawyer/spokesman at their disposal to make their case…to the media.
At the very best, this incident was designed merely to attract sensational media attention, in order to underscore the evils of profiling in general and of profiling Muslims in particular.
At the very worst, it was “psychological terrorism,” according to one air marshal, designed to intimidate Americans into being even more polite and tolerant than they already are about decidedly odd behavior from “foreigners,” who have a different “culture” and don’t understand “our” ways.
On that phenomenon, see Borat,
Sacha Baron Cohen’s PC Probe Attack (TM) on the limits of Americans’ tolerance of the “Other,” in which he suggests not, as has been claimed, that Americans are intolerant and bigoted (against Jews, for example) but that we are perhaps a little too tolerant, and grotesquely naive…but lovable. So much for the fake PC Probe Attack (TM).
Reading over the witnesses accounts and reports about the “six imams” case, what I find most interesting is that they all describe a number of suspicious things they saw or heard before they (individually) determined that there might be a problem. In other words, no one on the plane—passengers or crew—jumped to conclusions rapidly or panicked or got agitated. The decision to call for the removal of the imams was reached through a consensus, after a number of people connected dots that led them to feel uneasy. The imams weren’t targeted for suspicion; they called attention to themselves.
Another fascinating aspect of these reports is that they show the extent to which individual Americans “profile” their fellow human beings and what role the “profiling” plays in their behavior. All the witnesses knew that the suspicious men were Muslims. That may have been at the foundation of their anxieties, but it was not the thing that made them decide that the six were trouble. It was the behavior of those individual Muslims, not their Muslimhood, that made them suspect.
This proves exactly the opposite of what the six imams and their attorney (and, to a lesser extent, Sacha Baron Cohen, claim. Americans do not appear to be reflexively prejudiced against the “Other.” No—they’re not “Islamophobic,” not even after all the bad press Muslims have gotten, and continue to get, since 9/11. Indeed, they prove to be just as polite as any of Sacha Baron Cohen’s victims.
That does not make them unobservant, or foolish about their personal safety.
Finally I hear some people making sense about Jesse Jackson’s sad and stupid appropriation of the Michael Richards’s racist rant “crisis” for his own (well-intentioned) ends (racial harmony). Perhaps people were reacting to the means he suggested for attaining those ends—the first of which was his ban on the word “nigger.” Period. (What? you got free speech issues? Jackson claims the word is “unprotected.”)
As usual, though, he made it into a crusade and took things too far: Withholding his forgiveness of Richards last weekend even after the washed-up comedian had spent two hours “confessing” and repenting on Jackson’s radio show; urging a boycott of the new Seinfeld DVD, and accusing CNN (while on CNN’s air) of being “all day, all night, all white”—it was a massive overreaction.
The L.A. Times reports that some of Jackson’s detractors are prominent blacks (not that you’ll see them on television—they’re too rational, and the media would rather cover the hysteria, and the repeated confessions of Richards. Because it’s great television):
Joe Hicks, vice president of the civil rights organization Community Advocates Inc., called the move to ban the word “just silly and outrageous.” Outside the stray white bigot, the N-word is pervasive only in black communities and among hip-hop and rap artists, “not in the business world, not in the American court system, not in the government.”
Hicks, an African American and former director of the Los Angeles Human Relations Commission, said Waters and others shouldn’t be trying to alter the course of contemporary urban culture and accused them of “racial opportunism.”
Hicks finds the essence of the problem:
“Here’s this guy [Richards], who’s been nearly out of work with virtually no career to speak of, who’s hand-grenaded his career in front of the whole world … and he’s supposed to be some sort of barometer for race relations? It’s the ultimate absurdity,” Hicks said.
Randall Kennedy, a professor at Harvard Law, who’s written about the use of the “n” word, is troubled by the brouhaha over this “crisis”—and specifically about the drive to ban its use—because it doesn’t actually address racism. It addresses only our behavior in the public square.
“There is something troublesome going on,” Kennedy said, “when this amount of energy is targeted toward people and a phenomenon that in the overall scheme of things is probably marginal.”
The call for the boycott of Seinfeld DVD hasn’t worked, either.
Ironically, the publicity over Richards’ tirade may help spur sales of “Seinfeld: Season 7″ on DVD, which Jackson encouraged holiday shoppers to refrain from buying.
After less than a week on the market, it had zoomed to the 11th most popular DVD selling on Amazon.com.
As culture war issues go, the use of the word “nigger” (among other slurs) is actually a really important one to consider and to discuss openly, as John Ridley wrote recently. I wrote about it here.
Meanwhile, we’ve got a new phenomenon to consider [see Hicks above]: “racial opportunism.”
So we as a society need to “de-stigmatize” the obese. So, naturally, there should be entire university departments devoted to the study of those who have a lot of adipose tissue.
“Why should I be ashamed?” said Ms. Director, 22, a graduate student in women’s studies at San Diego State University, who wields the word with both defiance and pride, the way the gay community uses queer. “I’m fat. So what?”
During her sophomore year at Smith College, Ms. Director attended a discussion on fat discrimination: the way the super-sized are marginalized, the way excessive girth is seen as a moral failing rather than the result of complicated factors. But the academic community, she felt, didn’t really give the topic proper consideration. She decided to do something about it.
In December 2004, she helped found the organization Size Matters, whose goal was to promote size acceptance and positive body image. In April, the group sponsored a conference called Fat and the Academy, a three-day event at Smith of panel discussions and performances by academics, researchers, activists and artists. Nearly 150 people attended.
Even as science, medicine and government have defined obesity as a threat to the nation’s health and treasury, fat studies is emerging as a new interdisciplinary area of study on campuses across the country and is gaining interest in Australia and Britain. Nestled within the humanities and social sciences fields, fat studies explores the social and political consequences of being fat.
When the larger issue—i.e., which subjects warrant in-depth academic research and study?—is addressed, however, we get an alternative view from Stephen H. Balch, president of the National Association of Scholars:
“Ethnic studies, women’s studies, queer studies — they’re all about vindicating the grievances of some particular group. That’s not what the academy should be about.
“Obviously in the classroom you can look at issues of right and wrong and justice and injustice,” he added, “But if the purpose is to vindicate fatness, to make fatness seem better in the eyes of society, then that purpose begs a fundamental intellectual question.”
And that question is
[w]hether activism is an appropriate goal for academia.
Which is
a controversial notion.
And I’m going to all this trouble to quote the New York Times phrase by phrase because this issue of activism by academics and in academia is sure to raise its head again.
"Even in the most civilized societies the demagogues are
always in wait, ready and testing. They are indefatigable and we will never entirely prevail over them. And that is OK.
But if we stop resisting them, they will prevail over us. And that is not OK."
a British convert to Islam, who 
