Many of us describe ourselves as our jobs. We don’t say “I work as a baker,” but instead “I am a baker.” Or “I am an accountant/engineer/police officer/cook.” There is a lot of “is” in our work. It’s part of the modern construction of identity, a construction quite pronounced in the United States. Read More »
A recent Republican National Committee fundraising document obtained by Politico blogger/reporter Ben Smith reveals a couple things.
1) The Republican Party doesn’t seem to respect its own donor base, calling them “ego driven” and able to be lured by “tschotches” or swag.
2) The Republican Party also seems comfortable with using childish graphics like the one above in an official presentation.
But while the Republicans are selling the idea of the Democrats as the Evil Empire, some traditional Democratic constituencies wish the party had the cojones of Storm Troopers. For example, The Hill starts an article on the latest jockeying over healthcare reform this way:
President Barack Obama will be more assertive with Congress after disappointing members in his first year with mixed signals during the healthcare debate, Democrats say.
Obama made a crucial mistake not rallying the party behind a detailed healthcare reform proposal earlier in the debate, Democrats in both chambers broadly acknowledge.
The Democrats still have a majority in Congress. We’ll see if and how they use it… which will then affect if and how the Republican Party can attack.
A new memoir by former Presidential candidate and Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney includes this zinger:
The multiculturalism movement must be unmasked for the fraud it is. There are superior cultures, and ours is one of them.
Part of me wants to go oh, sigh, but another part figures if a man who actually got a decent number of votes in the Presidential Primaries wants to stake his claim on bashing multiculturalism, it’s worth a short reply.
Unlike European nations, America was never all-white, never monocultural. (European cultures are actually historically quite mixed among themselves… the Irish ending up in Spain and the Romans in Ireland, etc….but until recently less historically multi-racial.) So, it’s impossible to talk about America without talking about a multi-cultural America. You can ignore it. You can ignore the fact that the decision to institutionalize slavery provoked a Constitutional crisis, a war, and a slew of amendments. You can ignore the history of warfare against Native American tribes; the Chinese Exclusion Act; Bracero programs; and internment camps for Japanese Americans.
To the extent that we have clarified some of our positions on human rights in this country, it is often as a result of the crucible of multiculturalism. We are better off for having struggled… struggled with our own identity. It’s a Census year. We’ll get new numbers soon, but the current Census figures show a nation that is a third Latino and non-white; two-thirds non-Hispanic white. By the year 2042, according to the Census, America will have no racial/ethnic majority.
So, you can invent the past… a past where only white people did things, and where our Constitution did not have to evolve in order to embrace the humanity of all Americans. You can invent a future where multiculturalism is an enemy. But then, you’d be living in a world of your own invention… a lonely, colorless place indeed.
I like this series of lists on how to write fiction from The Guardian, via writers including:
The number one thing most of these folks say to do is to write… to be faithful to your craft, to be disciplined, to keep going even when it seems impossible.
Cheers to that.
This comes from the National Telecommunications and Information Agency (NTIA). Predictably, broadband use grows by income, but there are also some interesting stats re: race, ethnicity. Read more:
tracks the life of Sophie "Sky" Lee, a thirtysomething black rock musician making a comeback in New York City in 2000. There are a few hitches to her plans: Sky's guitarist is her mercurial, drug-abusing ex-husband; her manager is also her boyfriend; and Sky herself is frightened of the cost she'll pay to reach the pinnacle of fame.
