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Sunday, May 4. 2008
Obama in 2008!
It’s 1 a.m. Sunday Morning, May 4, 2008. The Kentucky Derby is over, Big Brown is the winner, Eight Belles is dead, and this is the first time in over a decade I didn’t pay any attention to the race.What do you write about at this time of the day (or night)? Hard to think of anything really. Spent the last few hours contemplating the meaning of life, in particular the hard reality of my personal economy. Some may believe it is all a personal thing, with no real outside influence. I do too, to a great extent, but it’s hard to be who you want to be (professionally) when you’re not getting any meaningful hits on Monster or CareerBuilder.
My friend Dan insists I write about my life, give up the dirty details, write about the various people who populate my reality. In reality, my Humble Mac is my refuge from the population of my reality and its public transit system.So I’m going to bed and will figure it out later this morning.
Later that morning ...
Had a chance to see Barack Obama do an hour interview on Meet the Press this morning. Of course the interview started with the Reverend Wright controversy. What’s different about Obama is that he didn’t try and spin Wright’s remarks nor spin his own. He in fact spoke frankly about not knowing Wright as well as he thought.
The big issue the conservatives will use against Obama, should he be the Democratic nominee in the fall will be his patriotism, and much of their criticism will be the controversy surrounding the senator’s former pastor. Reverend Wright, after Obama spoke about him in March, came out just a week ago and upped his vitriol, in the same tone that brought all the publicity the first time. Wright even mimicked presidents Kennedy and Johnson, the Johnson impression being the funniest.If you watch the entire speech, which took place in front of the NAACP in Detroit, Wright was talking about how Black children are derided for not speaking correct American English when the two presidents Wright parodied had very distinctive tonalities and linguistic peculiarities.
On the face of it, Wright is right. But, for the most part, the differences in the vocal patterns of Kennedy and Johnson have more to do with their regional background and less to do with their educations. Less so with Kennedy. Johnson liked to use Texas colloquialisms from time-to-time, drawl a little longer and stickier than usual to make a point, but both spoke clearly and succinctly in the formal fashion of the American version of the Queen’s English.Ebonics, first identified 35 years ago, the American style about a decade later, consists of not only regional inflections, but misplaced syntax and grammar as well. In fact, using Ebonics has become fashionable, many of its catch phrases have found their way into common American usage: You Go Girl!, Don’t Be Snitchin’, Where You Be? Wassup! among the few off the top of my head.
If it’s a catchy phrase in a rap, or hip-hop song, you can bet it will become a staple in the Young American lexicon, even among racists. I’ve actually heard some Whites, who use the word “nigger” with virtual impunity when talking about African-Americans, do so in the rhythm and vocabulary of the hip-hop culture. And they also listen to some of the most popular Black rappers and reggae artists on the radio these days. Sometimes the hypocrisy is so staggering it can only be comedy.
And not to be a hypocrite myself, I’ve used some “urban” colloquialisms here in this blog. They can make a succinct point in an appropriate tone that might otherwise go unwritten.
Wright, in his divisive tone, makes some valid points about how Blacks are treated as compared to the ruling race, but the tone, and some of his accompanying remarks overshadow those valid observations, some of the very points Obama addresses when he speaks of race and culture and the ever-widening chasm between the two distinct economic classes.
And that’s too bad. We need a grown-up, sincere dialogue about race in America and it must include all ethnic groups, including European stereotypes. For instance: “You don’t have to be Irish to be an alcoholic, but it helps.” Yeah, that’s funny, but 100 years ago one of the most popular signs on companies looking for employees, “Irish need not apply.” Bigotry has been in our national DNA from the beginning.
Obama addressed a few other important topics, one being the environment, which sprung from a question from Tim Russert concerning the gas tax “holiday” proposed by Senator McCain and endorsed by Senator Clinton. According to Obama, the suspension of the federal fuel tax would only save the average American $30.00 over the proposed time period (the summer), and only if the gas retailers didn’t raise their prices to fill in the gaps. In a refreshing change from the politics-as-usual style, Obama admitted making that mistake when, as a state legislature in Illinois, he voted for a temporary suspension of that state’s gas tax only to watch the gas retailers raise their prices. The public didn’t save a dime.
That evolved into a discussion about getting off our dependence on foreign oil and the burgeoning ethanol market which is now claiming so much of the world’s corn crop, the cost of all food is rising faster, causing food riots in many countries. And that eventually morphed into a discussion of other alternative fuels, including nuclear power. Obama criticized the American auto market for not keeping up with the Japanese with fuel-efficient vehicles and nearly laughed at the fact that China has better café standards for the vehicles motoring on its roads.
The interview came to the end with a discussion on foreign policy, most specifically, Iraq and Iran. That’s the subject that will set Obama apart from John McCain if Obama becomes the nominee. McCain and Clinton are talking about blowing up Iran; McCain is talking about an endless occupation in Iraq. Obama repudiated Clinton’s use of the word “obliterate” as an extension of Bush’s “yee-haw cowboy” foreign policy philosophy. The Illinois senator is so far out in front of the other two candidates it’s hard to see how he could lose were he the nominee this fall.For a while Senator Clinton was the favorite punching bag of … just about everyone, until Obama became the front-runner in the Democratic primaries. Had to smile when Obama claimed to be the underdog in the race. He shed that title three months ago when he started winning elections and amassed more delegates than Clinton.
Well, it’s almost noon. Time to do something productive, like find a better paying job. Or maybe ogle some little hotties … like Heather Bauer.
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