Kaufman also reiterated his belief, expressed in several previous floor speeches, that the only way to “truly eliminate” the problems of “too-big-to-fail” banks is to break them apart, thus limiting their size and leverage. “The Great Depression of the 1930s must be avoided at all costs,” said Kaufman. “If you believe these mega-banks are too big, if you reject the choice of bankruptcy that will lead to a recession or depression, then breaking them up is the logical answer. That’s the only way that greatly diminishes the future probability of financial disaster.”
It’s early on, but this strikes me as good news. If Mitt were to win the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, disgruntled teabaggers would surely need to run a third party against Socialist Mitt. Splitting the right-wing vote promotes the idea of a viable third (or fourth, or fifth) political party, and all but assures four more years of Obama — good results all around. Go, Mitt, go!
An added bonus: while it’s hard to smile knowing that this might mean we’ll be subjected to the crazed ramblings of the teabagger-endorsed ticket for months on end, at least Mitt seems capable of wiping up Santorum in the primaries. My mother’s honor rests on us getting that man out of the political picture as fast as possible.
I’ve spent my first two and past 12 years in Wisconsin, but my mother was raised in New Jersey, and I still return (not as often as I’d like) to visit my cousins and friends who live there. I’ve enjoyed a few summer weeks on the Jersey Shore, as well as on Wisconsin’s middle-coast cheddarized version thereof. Perhaps that’s why I want to point out one or two more deep connections between what appear on the surface to be culturally distant states. Or a third:
I was angry when Ralston-Purina, focusing their energies on the chocolate chip flavor, stopped production of vanilla Cookie Crisp. I was nine years old. I wrote them a letter.
And so began my political activism, and relative indifference toward chocolate.
My admiration of Emma Thompson helped me to overcome my reluctance to watch the movie Stranger than Fiction. Watching the movie was a small triumph over my fear that Queen Latifa would settle for yet another roll that might call into question her royal designation.
Last week, my friend John and I were discussing the movie at a favorite local restaurant, whose kitchen, by the way, is lovingly managed by my friend, the culinary genius Chef Jen. The restaurant sits across the street from Madison’s Barrymore Theater, whose marquee is more likely to advertise a sold-out John Prine or Moe show than something I’d be more likely to attend. (For the record, I’ve seen a few amazing shows there during my time in Madison: I’ll never forget dancing to Moby’s “Go,” after which he commented on the appropriateness of the faint, twinkling light’s on the theater’s ceiling, nor could I ever forget Cibo Mato’s sexily slogging hard-core cover of “Welcome to the Jungle” — if anyone is able to find a clip of them playing that song, please send it my way.)
Anyway, the movie includes a few scenes where Dustin Hoffman’s character gives us a lesson on narrative, and John and I were discussing one of the main (and self-referential) themes of the film: does this particular screenplay (and the fictional novel whose writing the screenplay examines) have to be a tragedy — this kind of tragedy, not this — for the story to have any value?
Staring across the street at The Barrymore, I remembered how Michael Franti had recently performed there. I missed the show, and the accounts of my many friends who attended suggest I missed a good time. I’ve never listened to much of Franti’s music, in part, I suppose, because what I’ve heard is a little too overtly political lyrically for my ear to nuance it in a way that can make the music enjoyable for me. (Franti’s audience might’ve been an issue for me some years ago, but these are different times, and I’d like to think I’m over my old hang-ups.)
Drawing on our respective fields of study, John and I discussed a few plots and heroes before I suggested that our mutual distaste for the “Hollywood ending” was arguably rooted more in a distaste for predictability than a belief that a character has to die.
I thought about the first time I’d heard “We Don’t Stop,” which was one of only a few Franti songs I’d heard when it came out in 2003, a year by which many of us had come to internalize the sense of depression and futility with which the Bush regime was weighing us down. No one seemed to listen to our complaints, and the few heroic voices we could seek out were so faint they didn’t need to be silenced. They just were ignored.
“We Don’t Stop” struck me as different. Its message was political, critical, and even artistically expressed. The music demanded we remember we could still dance, and not simply to escape the reality that we’d somehow allowed W to not only come to power, but to take away our own. I won’t entirely dismiss Franti’s neo-neo-Adornian critics (of the non-academic world — I admit they might not call themselves that), that his music is so polished, poppy, and over-produced that the lyrics are rendered trite, or somehow inauthentic. Still, the song is a good opening for a discussion of contemporary artistic responses to tragedy. Do heroes have to die? Is it wrong to experience joy if we seek to accept responsibility for our political sins?
“We Don’t Stop,” like Stranger then Fiction, makes a good case for preserving the life of the hero. Who could possibly wish harm upon this guy, who was inspired by the song to do, um, whatever this is:
Compare “We Don’t Stop” to “Positive,” a Franti song he recorded (when his band made music under the name “Spearhead”) nearly a decade earlier. I liked it then and I like it now, even though it’s one of those songs it’s hard to lose yourself in, on account of its direct (even if smooth) commentary on another globally shared personal and traumatic cultural experience.
Props to Franti for directly confronting AIDS at one of those recurring moments where society begins to ignore it, and for doing so in a style that self-consciously reached out to a demographic that was beginning to realize it was disproportinately afflicted by AIDS, and needed to fight back. We certainly don’t want the protagonist of “Positive” to die, but I struggle to hear anything in the music that tells us he won’t.
The funky beats of “We Don’t Stop” give us permission to accept that there really is hope.
With Pennsylvanians about to decide whether to goad Hillary into extending the run of the Clinton Circus another month or two, let’s pause to remember how good this guy used to be.
If the internet is a race, I should’ve posted this a few days ago. Maybe that only matters if you’re blogging for money. I’m not, which is why I didn’t post this a few days ago when, well, I was working for money.
But yeah, there was this interview. I realize most of you weren’t sitting around like I was, waiting for this interview to be published. I certainly wasn’t alone in my anticipation, though. The Advocate‘s opening question asked Obama to address what had become a growing criticism of his making us wait so long for an interview with what many consider to be the flagship news magazine of the LGBT press.
The Advocate: Let’s start with what’s hot — why the silence on gay issues? You’ve done only one other interview with the LGBT press. I know people wish they were hearing more from you.
Senator Obama: I don’t think it’s fair to say “silence” on gay issues. The gay press may feel like I’m not giving them enough love. But basically, all press feels that way at all times. Obviously, when you’ve got a limited amount of time, you’ve got so many outlets. We tend not to do a whole bunch of specialized press. We try to do general press for a general readership.
But I haven’t been silent on gay issues. What’s happened is, I speak oftentimes to gay issues to a public general audience. When I spoke at Ebenezer Church for King Day, I talked about the need to get over the homophobia in the African-American community; when I deliver my stump speeches routinely I talk about the way that antigay sentiment is used to divide the country and distract us from issues that we need to be working on, and I include gay constituencies as people that should be treated with full honor and respect as part of the American family.
So I actually have been much more vocal on gay issues to general audiences than any other presidential candidate probably in history. What I probably haven’t done as much as the press would like is to put out as many specialized interviews. But that has more to do with our focus on general press than it does on… I promise you, the African-American press says the same thing.
The three-page interview ends on the same theme. Has this guy been reading my mail, or what? It’s weird, really, and certainly unexpected to have a presidential candidate reaching out to me this way, as a member of that slowly but steadily growing constituency group comprised of people who will no longer think a certain way simply because of who we are (nor decide who we “are” based on somebody else’s checklist).
Do you have any regrets about the South Carolina tour? People there are still sort of mystified that you gave Donnie McClurkin the chance to get up onstage and do this, and he did go on sort of an antigay rant there.
I tell you what — my campaign is premised on trying to reach as many constituencies as possible and to go into as many places as possible, and sometimes that creates discomfort or turbulence. This goes back to your first question. If you’re segmenting your base into neat categories and constituency groups and you never try to bring them together and you just speak to them individually — so I keep the African-Americans neatly over here and the church folks neatly over there and the LGBT community neatly over there — then these kinds of issues don’t arise.
The flip side of it is, you never create the opportunity for people to have a conversation and to lift some of these issues up and to talk about them and to struggle with them, and our campaign is built around the idea that we should all be talking. And that creates some discomfort because people discover, gosh, within the Democratic Party or within Barack Obama’s campaign or within whatever sets of constituencies there are going to be some different points of view that might even be offensive to some folks. That’s not unique to this issue. I mean, ironically, my biggest … the biggest political news surrounding me over the last three weeks has been Reverend Wright, who offended a whole huge constituency with some of his statements but has been very good on gay and lesbian issues. I mean he’s one of the leaders in the African-American community of embracing, speaking out against homophobia, and talking about the importance of AIDS.
And so nobody is going to be perfectly aligned with my views. So what I hope is that people take me for who I am, for what I’ve said, and for what I’ve displayed in terms of my commitment to these issues, but understanding that there’s going to be a range of constituencies that I’m reaching out to and working on issues that we have in common, even though I may differ with them on other issues. And that’s true, also, by the way … well, I think that’s going to be true so long as I’m reaching out beyond the traditional Democratic base.
Remember (he seems to say), there are other people in this country, and they don’t always agree with you. Why don’t you invite each other over for a conversation instead of yelling unintelligibly from your sound-proof boxes? It might not be as bad as you think. Moreover, you might quickly learn that your neatly compartmentalized community isn’t as heterogeneous as you once thought.
It sure doesn’t hurt that he stays calm when talking about the attacks levied at him. I’ll admit to usually arguing this point a little less eloquently in debates with my more stubbornly issue-based-voter friends, perhaps a bit like Claire on “Six Feet Under” when she calmly explained to her brothers in this brief (NSFW) clip, “Newsflash! Other people exist!”
There will undoubtedly be more occasions when we wish he would’ve phrased the truth a little differently. I hope by then we’ll have learned to get his back when he stumbles. If we don’t, we’ll lose yet another election, plain and simple, if not fair and square. Saying different things to different groups is easy, and they’ll all love you for it. But for how long? What happens when word gets out you’re speaking out of both sides of your mouth? Do you brazenly laugh in the faces of the special interests who support you? I choose respect over condescension any day.
