Obama's a better symbol than president: On Tuesday many Americans will vote for the two-dimensional Obama - the image, the idea. (MARK STEYN, 10/31/08, OC Register)
In Tokyo last week, over 1,000 people signed a new petition asking the Japanese government to permit marriages between human beings and cartoon characters. "I am no longer interested in three dimensions. I would even like to become a resident of the two-dimensional world," explained Taichi Takashita. "Therefore, at the very least, would it be possible to legally authorize marriage with a two-dimensional character?"Get back to me on that Tuesday night. We'll know by then whether an entire constitutional republic has decided to contract marriage with a two-dimensional character and to attempt to take up residence in the two-dimensional world. For many of his supporters, Barack Obama is an idea. He offers "hope, not fear." "Hope" of what? "Hope" of "change." OK, but "change" to what? Ah, well, there you go again, getting all hung up on three-dimensional reality, when we've moved way beyond that.
Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author Terkel Dies at 96 (CARYN ROUSSEAU, October 31, 2008, The Associated Press)
For his oral histories, he interviewed his subjects on tape, then transcribed and sifted. "What first comes out of an interview are tons of ore; you have to get that gold dust in your hands," he wrote in his memoir. "Now, how does it become a necklace or a ring or a gold watch? You have to get the form; you have to mold the gold dust."He would joke that his obsession with tape recording was equaled by only one other man, a certain former president of the United States: "Richard Nixon and I could be aptly described as neo-Cartesians. I tape, therefore I am."
Terkel also was a syndicated radio talk show host, voice of gangsters on old radio soaps, jazz critic, actor in the 1988 film "Eight Men Out," and survivor of the 1950s blacklist.
In 1999, a panel of judges organized by the Modern Library, a book publisher, picked "Working" as No. 54 on its list of the century's 100 best English-language works of nonfiction. And in 2006, the Library of Congress announced that a radio interview he did with author James Baldwin in September 1962 was selected for the National Recording Registry of sound recordings worthy of preservation. Terkel's other interview subjects included Louis Armstrong, Buster Keaton, Marlon Brando and Bob Dylan.
Terkel's politics were liberal, vintage FDR. He would never forget the many New Deal programs from the Great Depression and worried that the country suffered from "a national Alzheimer's disease" that made government the perceived enemy. In a 1992 interview with the AP, he advocated "pressure from below, from the grass roots. That means the people who live and work in cities _ that used to be called the working class, although now everyone says middle class."
Terkel was born Louis Terkel on May 16, 1912, in the Bronx. His father, Samuel, was a tailor; his mother, Anna, a seamstress. The family moved to Chicago in 1922 and ran a rooming house where young Louis would meet the workers and activists who would profoundly influence his view of the world.
"It was those loners _ argumentative ones, deceptively quite ones, the talkers and the walkers _ who, always engaged in something outside themselves, unintentionally became my mentors," Terkel wrote in "Touch and Go."
He got the nickname Studs as a young man, from the character Studs Lonigan, the protagonist of James T. Farrell's beloved trilogy of novels about an Irish-American youth from Chicago's South Side.
Terkel graduated from the University of Chicago in 1932, studying philosophy, and also picked up a law degree. But instead of choosing law, he worked briefly in the civil service and then found employment in radio with one of his beloved "alphabet agencies" from the New Deal, the WPA Writers Project.
His early work as a stage actor led to radio acting, disc jockey jobs and then to radio interview shows beginning in the 1940s. From 1949 to 1952, he was the star of a national TV show, "Studs' Place," a program of largely improvised stories and songs set in a fictional bar (later a restaurant) owned by Studs. Some viewers even thought it was a real place, and would go looking for it in Chicago.
"People were never put down," Terkel recalled in the 1995 book "The Box: An Oral History of Television, 1920-1961." "The stories were about little aspects of their lives. There was no audience and no canned laughter. ... It was one of the most exhilarating times of my life."
The McCarthy-era antipathy toward activists cost him his national TV outlet. But his radio interview show flourished, first at WFMT in Chicago and then, through syndication, in many markets.
In 1939, he married social worker Ida Goldberg, a marriage that lasted 60 years even though she couldn't get him to dance and always called him Louis, not Studs. "Ida was a far better person than I, that's the reality of it," Terkel later wrote of Ida, who died in 1999.
In his first autobiography, Terkel noted that he had concealed some things. “There is a private domain on which I’ll not trespass,” as he put it 30 years ago, “nor does it, I feel, matter very much to others.” But the problem with either of his tellings of his own story is that the reader is rushed past some very important matters in his public life. I will come back to that narrative blindspot in due course. [...]Terkel is a good storyteller, and it is a life full of raw material.. But there are points when his gifts as a performer (to use a word that subsumes his activity in front of the typewriter as well as the microphone) permit him to avoid as much as he expresses. When Talking to Myself appeared 30 years ago, Terkel’s way of discussing McCarthyism was rather jaunty. C’est la vie! How how lucky he was to have been blacklisted! Otherwise, think of the wonderful opportunities he might have missed. He might have ended up respectable and dull.
As the critic John Leonard pointed out at the time, however, that element of jokiness rang false. It seemed to be avoiding engagement with memories of what to have been a painful experience. In the new memoir, it sounds as if Terkel halfway concedes the validity of that point. Almost in so many words:
“I was fading fast,” he recalls. “During the blacklist, you’re not working for a time, you start thinking maybe you ain’t got something you thought you had. I knew my work troubles were for political reasons, but the situation seemed somewhat hopeless. There’s something that’s interesting psychologically, moments when you feel self-doubt: that is, was your talent there to begin with? Maybe you’re not that good....”
Terkel also admits that having the FBI show up at your door was hardly very pleasant. And then the jokey tone returns.Why, he’s afraid that his wife may have been rude to the agents, at times — and that could be embarrassing.....
So the wall of reserve comes down, for a moment, only to go right back up again. No doubt this is a matter of both generational style and personal temperament – of being the product of an era when discussing your troubles was considered bad form, especially for a man. Let alone one whose nickname reflected an enthusiasm for James T. Farrell’s trilogy of novels about a tough Irish working-class kid named Studs Lonigan.
But the reticence goes deeper than that. To get some perspective, we might have a look at an incident in the life of Terkel’s fictional namesake. I’m thinking of a scene near the end of the final novel in Farrell’s series. Studs Lonigan is close to the end of his days — about to succumb, at an early age, to illness and a hard life. It is the early part of the Depression. He’s hanging out with some friends when they see a demonstration. They watch people march by, carrying banners and placards with slogans:
DOWN WITH THE HOOVER WALL STREET GOVERNMENT
We Want Bread Not Bullets
DEFEND THE SOVIET UNIONThe sight of a Communist rally has a complicated effect on Lonigan. He barely has words to express it. He has a sense of his own life being deep in a rut — indeed, almost over — while the lyrics of their revolutionary anthem proclaims that “a better world’s in birth.” They seem not just angry but happy. It is a strangely affecting moment, perhaps charged with the author’s own complex feelings. (Farrell himself did not join the party, but was sympathetic to it through the mid-1930s, after which he switched allegiance to Leon Trotsky’s following for a dozen years before settling into a kind of Cold War liberalism.)
So a reader of the novel gets a sense of the ambivalence that one guy named Studs feels upon encountering the Communist movement. But anyone looking for a comparable moment of insight in Terkel’s memoirs will have no such luck.
Now, it is possible that Studs Terkel was never a member of the Communist Party. But someone who mentions, as Terkel does, that he worked in left-wing theater groups, raised money for the Soviet-American Friendship Committee, and supported Henry Wallace’s presidential campaign in 1948 (the last gasp of any serious Communist influence in American political life) was fully integrated into its support network.
He had a relationship of some kind with the party – even if, for whatever reason, he was not a member. Most people who joined in the 1930s and ‘40s were in and out within a few weeks. (The problem of retention was a source of much grief to Communist leaders.) But Terkel’s references suggest a serious and long-term involvement, whatever his formal status may have been.
All things considered, it’s perhaps surprising that he is even as candid as he allows himself to be about his activism. But the lack of any clear sense of when he became affiliated with the movement, and why (and when he parted ways with it, and why) leaves the reader with only a vague sense of what must have been a profound fact of the man’s life.
At one point, Touch and Go quotes the journalist Nicholas von Hoffman: “Once a person joins a group, a demonstration, or a union, they’re a different person.” Terkel endorses the sentiment. “You become stronger as a result,” he adds, “no matter what the outcome.” Unfortunately Terkel leaves this only at the level of general advice, rather than showing how it applied in his own experience. [...]
Terkel was close to the Communist movement during the phase known as the Popular Front – when it abandoned the preposterously belligerent slogan “Towards a Soviet America” for the altogether more palatable catchphrase “Communism is Twentieth Century Americanism.” Its artists and writers and musicians tried to work in popular idioms. As good disciplined cadres, they would still read Stalin’s pamphlets; but they knew that radical doctrine, as such, would only get you just so far.
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Palin aide: She's just like Jeb (Joe Follick, October 29, 2008, Herald Tribune)
In an online interview with the original Wonkette, Ana Marie Cox, one of McCain’s top aides – Nicolle Wallace – said Sarah Palin reminds her of former Gov. Jeb Bush.Wallace, nee Devenish, worked for Bush in the late 1990s.
“Sarah Palin reminds me a lot of Jeb Bush, who was very hands on. He was always in direct contact, email-wise, with reporters. He'd often get back to them before I'd get back to them. She's like that. She's very hands on. Reminds me of my time working for Jeb Bush. She doesn't like a lot of bureaucracy. She gets on her email and deals directly with press and the staff and it's very, very impressive. Very appealing.”
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Poll: Obama leads McCain by one point in battleground states (Mike Sunnucks, 10/31/08, Phoenix Business Journal)
A Halloween Day poll shows John McCain trailing Barack Obama by one point in the “toss-up” states that could decide Tuesday’s presidential election.The George Washington University Battleground Poll gives Obama and running mate Joe Biden 47 percent, with 46 percent for McCain and running mate Sarah Palin in those states and 4 percent undecided. [...]
The Obama campaign also announced Friday it would run home-stretch advertisements in Arizona (McCain’s home state) and two other traditional “red states” — Georgia and North Dakota — in the last days of the campaign.
'US strikes' on Pakistan villages (BBC, 10/31/08)
More than 20 people have been killed in two suspected US missile attacks in northwest Pakistan near the border with Afghanistan, security officials said.About 15, including an al-Qaeda leader, were killed in an attack near the village of Mirali, North Waziristan.
In a second attack, seven people were killed in South Waziristan.
News To Obama: The OECD Says The United States Has The Most Progressive Tax System (Scott A. Hodge, 10/29/08, Tax Foundation)
Barack Obama's admission that his policies would "spread the wealth around" has ignited a nationwide discussion of how progressive the tax system should be and how it should be used to redistribute income among Americans. Obama has been very successful in bolstering the conventional wisdom that the U.S. tax system does not place a significant enough burden on wealthier households and places too much of a burden on the "middle class."But a new study on inequality by researchers at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris reveals that when it comes to household taxes (income taxes and employee social security contributions) the U.S. "has the most progressive tax system and collects the largest share of taxes from the richest 10% of the population." As Column 1 in the table below shows, the U.S. tax system is far more progressive—meaning pro-poor—than similar systems in countries most Americans identify with high taxes, such as France and Sweden.
Even after accounting for the fact that the top 10 percent of households in the U.S. have one of the highest shares of market income among OECD nations, our tax system is second only to Ireland in terms of its progressivity for households.
The table also shows that the U.S. collects more household tax revenue from the top 10 percent of households than any other country and extracts the most from that income group relative to their share of the nation's income.
Daily Presidential Tracking Poll (Rasmussen Reports, October 31, 2008)
It is impossible to overstate the importance of Obama's tax cut promise to his current lead in the polls. Thirty-one percent (31%) of voters now believe that their taxes will go down if Obama is elected. Only 11% believe that will happen if McCain wins (see crosstabs). Obama has made remarkable progress on this issue in recent months. In August, only 9% believed Obama would cut their taxes.
One does enjoy though the repudiation here of the idea that the Reagan formula doesn't work anymore. The Unicorn Rider is running on Reaganomics. The Other Brother and I were talking the other day and noted that if you knew nothing of the two men except what you see in NH tv ads, you'd think Senator Obama was a rightwing Republican.
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Kurdistan Would Welcome U.S. Troops Without Pact (Congressional Quarterly, 10/31/08)
The president of Iraqi Kurdistan said Friday that his semi-autonomous region would welcome U.S. troops if Iraq and the United States cannot finalize an agreement governing U.S. troops in Iraq after 2008.“If the United States requests, I am confident the Kurdish regional parliament and people of the Kurdistan region . . . would welcome that,” Massoud Barzani, president of the Kurdistan Regional Government, said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
Barzani said he hopes that the two countries do conclude a status of forces agreement to govern the future U.S. troop presence beyond the Dec. 31 expiration of a U.N. mandate. And despite expressing doubts about whether the Iraqi parliament will approve the draft accord, Barzani gave it a strong endorsement.
“This agreement is better than any other alternative available,” he said through a translator, saying its approval by Iraqis was still possible.
While the practical implications of basing U.S. troops in Kurdistan are not clear, the mere discussion of it could strengthen perceptions of Kurdish autonomy.
CVS slashes generic drug costs, escalates price war: Using the products as loss leaders, the drugstore giant will sell 90-day supplies of more than 400 medications for $9.99 and offer discounts for cash-paying patients at its in-store medical clinics. (Lisa Girion and Andrea Chang, 10/31/08, LA Times)
One of the nation's largest drugstore chains ratcheted up a price war Thursday, offering deep discounts on generic prescriptions amid national concern about the spiraling cost of healthcare.Drugstore giant CVS Caremark Corp. announced it would sell 90-day supplies of more than 400 medications for $9.99 and offer discounts for cash-paying patients at its in-store medical clinics.
The price war was unleashed by Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the country's largest retailer, a few years ago. Since then, many grocery stores have followed suit.
The price competition makes generic drugs just about the only healthcare bill that isn't escalating. The lower prices provide a measure of relief to consumers who are struggling with rising health insurance premiums and other out-of-pocket expenses or have lost coverage altogether.
Now savvy shoppers can buy many prescriptions for less than laundry detergent, face cream or a pound of deli meat.
When policymakers at the Federal Reserve voted to slash interest rates at their Oct. 28-29 meeting, it's a good bet the threat of deflation played a role in the decision. That concern is bound to get more attention in coming months as inflation begins to fall amid a progressively weaker economy and the financial crisis. Deflation is an economic disease caused by a sustained drop in overall demand and falling prices that forces businesses to cut prices ever deeper. It was last seen in the U.S. in the 1930s and in Japan in the 1990s, when the inflation rate fell to zero and then turned negative for several years.Deflation is a nasty situation that can give central bankers palpitations. It's especially onerous for borrowers. Because prices are falling, people who already owe money have to pay back loans in dollars that will buy more goods than the dollars they borrowed. For new loans, it raises the real, or inflation-adjusted, cost of credit, the opposite of what monetary policy needs to do to combat falling demand. Plus, in the effort to boost spending, policymakers cannot cut the target rate below zero. At that point, negative inflation can keep the real rate high enough to restrict economic growth.
"The world is shifting from an era of structural inflation to one of deflation, in which prices for most manufactured goods and tradable services fall rather than rise," observed Eisuke Sakakibara, Japan's former vice-finance minister. Chief Executive Jack Welch got it right several years ago when he ran General Electric: "Inflation has yielded to deflation as the shaping economic force."Of course in the current environment you can almost hear the sound of Wall Street veterans scoffing. They are fond of quoting the legendary investor John Templeton, "The four most expensive words in the English language are 'this time is different.'" They've been burned by too many new eras, new economies, and revolutionary transformations. Inflation is the economic condition we know.
Many baby boomers and Wall Street traders remember when inflation reached double-digit levels in the 1970s, peaking at over 14% in 1980. Inflation was eventually contained through a combination of factors, including a tough anti-inflation battle waged by the Fed under the leadership of Paul Volcker and his successor Alan Greenspan. The consumer price index averaged 7% in the '70s, 5.5% in the '80s, 3% in the '90s, and 2.5% in the early 2000s. The odds of another bout of double-digit 1970s-style inflation are remote. Still, now that the economy is picking up steam and the job market is getting better, the widespread expectation is for resurgence in inflation. Rising prices are such an embedded part of our society that we all assume inflation is the economy's natural state.
Yet every once in a great while the established economic order is overthrown. Within a span of decades, technological changes, organizational upheavals, and new ways of thinking transform economies. From the 1760s to 1830s, steam engines, textile mills, and the Enlightenment produced the Industrial Revolution. The years 1880 to 1930 were shaped by the spread of electric power, mass production, and mass democracy.
This time is different. Or maybe I should say, it's back to the future. From 1776 to 1965, America's overall price level was essentially flat. Inflationary flare-ups were mostly associated with major wars until the post World War II era. These inflationary conflagrations were quickly extinguished in the aftermath of war. The rest of the time stable to falling prices dominated, especially in the latter part of the 19th century, the last time there was a tightly integrated global economy.
It's sometimes obvious when a historic divide is crossed. The 1929 stock market crash. The 1973 oil shock. Far more often, "change creeps upon us incrementally, punctuated by upheavals that, often as not, are rationalized as part of business as usual," said the late, legendary financier Leon Levy. "Only later do we realize that the world has been turned on its head." Levy called these events "a tap on the shoulder." Deflation may have taken a lot of people by surprise in 2003, but the price trend didn't emerge overnight. It had been building for years, a secular undertow to all the cyclical twists and turns in the economy. There were many deflation taps on the shoulder.
Among the most important were the chairmanship of two inflation hawks at the Federal Board: Volcker and Greenspan; the rise of retailing giant Wal-Mart and its low everyday price strategy; the commercial embrace of the Internet, an inherently deflationary technology; a falling price level in Japan in the late 1990s; the vicious global price cutting wars that erupted following the financial collapse of Asia's emerging markets; China transforming itself into the developing world's leading economic juggernaut; and Corporate America's outsourcing high-pay, high-skill white-collar and skilled jobs to low-pay, well-educated workers in developing nations like India, China, and Malaysia.
The emergence of deflation as the dominant price trend will dramatically impact businesses, workers, investors, the government, and the economy over the next several decades. "Of all the recording devices that can reveal to an historian the fundamental movements of an economy, monetary phenomena are without doubt the most sensitive," wrote the French historian Marc Bloch. "But to recognize their importance as symptoms would do them less than full justice. They have been and are, in their turn, causes. They are something like a seismograph, which not only measures the movements of the earth but sometimes provokes them."
Deflation, like inflation before it, is taking on a momentum of its own. The promise of a fast growing deflationary economy is enormous. But so are the pit falls for everyone from the worker on the factory floor to the CEO of a major multinational corporation to the head of the Federal Reserve Board.
Deflation in America reflects fundamental changes on the economy's supply side. At the same time, a new international monetary system has evolved that contains a bias toward lower prices. Deflation is built on three fundamental changes dating back to the late 1970s and early 1980s: (1) the embrace of market capitalism at home and abroad; (2) the spread of information technologies; and, most importantly for understanding the economy of the next half-century, (3) the triumph of the financier. None of these factors is new, but what is surprising is how powerfully each change has informed and reinforced the other.
Northern Star Rising (Eugene Robinson, October 31, 2008, Washington Post)
My view of Sarah Palin has changed in the two months since John McCain named her as his running mate. I'm guessing that McCain's view of Palin may be changing, too, and not entirely in a good way.I thought Palin was a lightweight; she's not. I thought she was an ingenue; she is, but only as long as her claws are sheathed. I thought she was bewildered and star-struck at her sudden elevation to national prominence; if she ever was, she isn't anymore. I thought she was nothing but raw political talent and unrealistic ambition; it turns out that she has impressive political skills. I thought she was destined to become nothing more than a historical footnote; I now think that Democrats underestimate her at their peril.
At this point, only McCain's most loyal lieutenants could have been surprised when Palin told ABC's Elizabeth Vargas that she's already looking beyond Tuesday's election toward her own political future. Asked whether she would just pack it in and go back to Alaska if she and McCain lose, Palin replied: "I think that, if I were to give up and wave a white flag of surrender against some of the political shots that we've taken . . . I'm not doing this for naught."
No, she's doing it for Sarah -- and doing it increasingly well.
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Mood Shift Against Free Trade Puts Republicans on Defensive (GREG HITT and BRAD HAYNES, 10/31/08, Wall Street Journal)
From Oregon to Georgia to upstate New York, skepticism about the benefits of free trade is rippling through campaigns for several House and Senate seats, many of them races where Democrats are running strong. Lawmakers elected on promises to slow down on trade could find it hard to walk back from those pledges once in office -- particularly if labor unions and other Democratic constituencies critical of the Bush and Clinton Administrations' open trade policies keep a focus on the issue.President Bush's efforts to win passage of trade deals with South Korea, Panama and Colombia stalled after trade concerns helped to put Democrats in charge of the House and Senate in 2006.
Most Democrats don't call for blatant protectionist measures such as steep tariffs, or a return to import quotas such as those that governed automotive trade in the 1980s. Instead, Democrats, starting with Presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, talk about the need for trade to be fair, and insist that trading partners be required to meet higher standards for environmental controls and workers' rights to unionize.
Republican candidate Sen. John McCain is a free trader and has surrounded himself with like-minded advisers such as Stanford University economist John Taylor. Mr. Taylor headed international economic policy in President Bush's first-term Treasury Department and is a candidate to be Treasury Secretary should Mr. McCain win the White House.
Other McCain economic advisers, such as former Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former eBay Chief Executive Meg Whitman and former Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Carly Fiorina, are longstanding proponents of open markets.
Sen. Obama has hedged his bets on trade.
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The PLO's Professor (Philip Klein, 10.31.08, American Spectator)
Liberals have defended Khalidi as a "respected academic," and amid all of the political noise and accusations flying back and forth between the two camps, it's easy to see how some voters would tune out when conservatives refer to him as a former "PLO spokesman." But without engaging in the semantic debate over what word should be applied to his complex and long-standing relationship with the terrorist group, a TAS analysis of contemporaneous news accounts dating back to the 1970s as well a look at Khalidi's own writings leave no doubt that a close relationship existed.While living in Lebanon from the early 1970s through 1983 (where the PLO was based at the time), Khalidi was frequently cited in the press as being close to the organization, and he even used the word "we" while speaking on the group's behalf. He was described as a "director" of Wafa, the PLO's official news agency, and he thanked Arafat for research assistance in the preface of one of his books. In 1991, Khalidi was part of the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid peace talks with Israel -- by his own account, he did so at the request of the PLO.
Before delving into the details, it's worth entertaining the legitimate question of why Khalidi's background and writings should raise concerns about Obama himself.
The L.A. Times story from April about their relationship answers this question quite clearly. Not only did Obama know Khalidi, but the professor was his "friend and frequent dinner companion" who Obama was close enough to that he attended the 2003 going away party thrown when Khalidi was moving to New York.
In his toast, Obama went out of his way to thank Khalidi (and his wife Mona) for "consistent reminders of my own blind spots and own biases," and he added that the conversation they engaged in was necessary around "this entire world." Given that America is on the cusp of electing Obama, a man of little experience about whom very little is known, it is perfectly fair to learn more about Khalidi, whose viewpoints Obama thought the whole world needed to hear.
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The tale is as complex and as simple as a Charles Williams novel, which this story remarkably resembles. A viewer could (just) possibly interpret it as the psychotic delusions of a teenaged paranoid schizophrenic, one who sees visions of a six-foot rabbit who tells him to perform such acts as destroying his school's water pipes and planting an ax into the skull of the school mascot's statue, while writing on the ground, "They made me do it." Frankly, if I were Donnie, I would like the credit myself. Well, could be just a story about a nutty kid. But nowhere as interesting as the alternative interpretation, internally consistent, that a highly disturbed young man has become the genuine conduit for saving the universe.
This reading of the action so enriches the meaning that, after my fourth viewing of the movie, it continues to reveal new insights. But one must accept the plot on its own terms by not coming to it with preconceived notions of how a time travel story usually plays out. This requires a little information so as to get oriented: an airline engine inexplicably falls on Donnie's bedroom and he wakes on a golf course, where he begins having visions of Frank (the bunny rabbit from Hell). What unfolds is that somehow an unstable tangent universe has been created, and Donnie gains access to understanding what is happening and realizes that, unless someone (Donnie himself) can permit a portal for the disappearance of that world, our universe will be destroyed. Oh, we even get an explanation for Frank that is plausible in the context of the story.
What we have then is a profound understanding of a basic Christian concept, to which St. Paul refers when calling the Church "the Body of Christ," and Charles Williams extends to all creation in his concept of Coinherence--all being interrelated and interlocking as each part depends on all the other parts. I cannot see how Kelly could have put it there by accident.
It's been our experience that it isn't uncommon for an artist to stumble into telling the One Story accidentally.
Why White Supremacists Support Barack Obama: How do racists, anti-Semites and all-purpose hate-mongers view the possibility of America’s first black president? Not necessarily the way you think they would. (David Peisner, 10/31/08, Esquire)
"The corporations are running things now, so it’s not going to make much difference who's in there, but McCain would be much worse. He’s a warmonger. He’s a scary, scary person--more dangerous than Bush. Obama, according to his book, Dreams Of My Father, is a racist and I have no problem with black racists. I’ve got the quote right here: 'I found a solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against my mother’s white race.' The problem with Obama is he’s being dishonest about his racial views. I’d respect him if he’d just come out and say, 'Yeah, I’m a black racist.' I don’t hate black people. I just think it’s in the best interest of the races to be separated as much as possible. See, I’m a leftist. I’m not a rightist. I hate the transnational corporations far more than any black person." [...]"White people are faced with either a negro or a total nutter who happens to have a pale face. Personally I’d prefer the negro. National Socialists are not mindless haters. Here, I see a white man, who is almost dead, who declares he wants to fight endless wars around the globe to make the world safe for Judeo-capitalist exploitation, who supports the invasion of America by illegals--basically a continuation of the last eight years of Emperor Bush. Then, we have a black man, who loves his own kind, belongs to a Black-Nationalist religion, is married to a black women--when usually negroes who have 'made it' immediately land a white spouse as a kind of prize--that’s the kind of negro that I can respect. Any time that a prominent person embraces their racial heritage in a positive manner, it’s good for all racially minded folks. Besides, America cares nothing for the interests of the white American worker, while having a love affair with just about every non-white on planet Earth. It’d be poetic justice to have a non-white as titular chief over this decaying modern Sodom and Gomorrah."
MORE:
Loathing Sarah Palin: The Two Months Hate of feminists. (Joseph Epstein, 10/27/2008, Weekly Standard)
The liberal women I know--and most of the women I seem to know are liberal--loathe Sarah Palin. They don't merely dislike her, the way one tends to dislike politicians whose views are not one's own, they actively detest her. When her name comes up--and it is they who tend to bring it up--their complexions take on a slightly purplish tinge, their eyes cross in rage. "Moron" is their most frequently used noun, though "idiot" comes up a fair number of times; "that woman" is yet another choice. A wide variety of adjectives, differing only slightly in their violence, usually precede these epithets. [...]Strongly liberal women get most agitated over the issue--though of course to them it is no issue but a long since resolved matter--of abortion. Abortion, to be sure, is the great third-rail subject in American politics. But when a male politician is against abortion, these women can write that off as the ignorance of a standard politician, if not himself a Christian fundamentalist, then another Republican cynically going after the fundamentalist vote. A woman not in favor of abortion is something quite different.
And it is all the more strikingly different when the same woman not only holds this opinion on abortion but acts on it and knowingly bears a child with Down syndrome, a child that most liberal women would have thought reason required aborting. What else, after all, is abortion for?
A few months ago Vanity Fair ran an article about the discovery that the playwright Arthur Miller, with his third wife, the photographer Inge Morath, 40 or so years ago had a Down syndrome son. Miller promptly clapped the boy into an institution--according to the article, not a first class one either--and never saw the child again. Most people would have taken this for a heartless act, one should have thought, especially on the part of a man known for excoriating the putative cruelties of capitalism and the endless barbarities of his own country's governments, whether Democratic or Republican. Yet, so far as one can tell, Arthur Miller's treatment of his own child has not put the least dent in his reputation, while Sarah Palin's having, keeping, and loving her Down syndrome child is somehow, by the standard of the liberal woman of our day, not so secretly thought the act of an obviously backward and ignorant woman, an affront to womanhood. "Her greatest hypocrisy," proclaimed Wendy Doniger, one of the leading feminist lights at the University of Chicago, "is her pretense that she is a woman."