So it's more or less official: Hillary is pulling out and endorsing Obama. I share Megan McArdle's take and appreciate her pointer (though no link!) to Ezra Klein's smart comment on Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. I'm old enough (two years older than Obama) to have the race of my (McCain-aged) parents carefully noted on my North Carolina birth certificate. I remember a time when not supporting legally enforced white supremacy was a controversial position. So, yes, it's a big deal to have a black major-party candidate with a good chance of becoming the next president.
That said, Barack Obama is a real candidate running for the real presidency, not a fictional character, and I am not optimistic about his world view. Dreams from My Father
suggests a deep-seated belief that economic and social dynamism inevitably and unrelievedly produce chaos, disorder, and despair. Here's a heart-felt and disturbing passage:
Before we left, Angela asked about the possibility of part-time work for the youth in Altgeld [a housing project]. Mr. Foster looked up at her like she was crazy.
"Every merchant around here turns down thirty applications a day," he said. "Adults. Senior citizens. Experienced workers willing to take whatever they can get. I'm sorry."
As we walked back to the car, we passed a small clothing store full of cheap dresses and brightly colored sweaters, two aging white mannequins now painted black in the window. The store was poorly lit, but toward the back I could make out the figure of a young Korean woman sewing by hand as a child slept beside her. The scene took me back to my childhood, back in the markets of Indonesia: the hawkers, the leather workers, the old women chewing betelnut and swatting flies off their fruit with whisk brooms.
I'd always taken such markets for granted, part of the natural order of things. Now, though, as I thought about Altgeld and Roseland, Rafiq and Mr. Foster, I saw those Djakarta markets for what they were: fragile, precious things. The people who sold their goods there might have been poor, poorer even than folks out in Altgeld. They hauled fifty pounds of firewood on their backs every day, they ate little, they died young. And yet for all that poverty, there remained in their lives a discernible order, a tapestry of trade routes and middlemen, bribes to pay and customs to observe, the habits of a generation played out every day beneath the bargaining and the noise and the swirling dust.
It was the absence of such coherence that made a place like Altgeld so desperate, I thought to myself; it was that loss of order that had made Rafiq and Mr. Foster, in their own ways, so bitter. For how could we go about stitching a culture back together once it was torn? How long might that take in this land of dollars?
Longer than it took a culture to unravel, I suspected. I tried to imagine the Indonesian workers who were now making their way to the sorts of factories that had once sat along the banks of the Calumet River, joining the ranks of wage labor to assemble the radios and sneakers that sold on Michigan Avenue. I imagined those same Indonesian workers ten, twenty years from now, when their factories would have closed down, a consequence of new technology or lower wages in some other part of the globe And then the bitter discovery that their markets have vanished; that they no longer remember how to weave their own baskets or carve their own furniture or grow their own food; that even if they remember such craft, the forests that gave them wood are now owned by timber interests, the baskets they once wove have been replaced by more durable plastics. The very existence of the factories, the timber interests, the plastic manufacturer, will have rendered their culture obsolete; the values of hard work and individual initiative turn out to have depended on a system of belief that's been scrambled by migration and urbanization and imported TV reruns. Some of them would prosper in this new order. Some would move to America. And others, the millions left behind in Djakarta, or Lagos, or the West Bank, they would settle into their own Altgeld Gardens, into deeper despair.
Obama's memoir is not a policy tome or a campaign biography but an emotional journey. It does not offer alternatives, only bleak observations and predictions. It is pessimistic, conservative, nostalgic. The theme running through Dreams from My Father is the search for order, for stability, for roots in an undisturbed pre-modern culture. How that yearning for stasis translates into presidential policy is not clear, but I worry. But then I have no nostalgia for the order into which my grandparents were born--even though the old factories have moved away and people no longer grow their own food.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 04, 2008 • Comments
The DMN's Paige Phelps wonders why there's no sex in Sex in the City: "The clothes became the sex. Which isn't as interesting to me as, say, the sex." (I haven't seen the movie and have pretty much decided to catch it on HBO.)
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 04, 2008 • Comments
Discussed in my short Current piece on Yves Saint Laurent on The Atlantic's website.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 03, 2008 • Comments
Andrew Sullivan is plugging this short LA Weekly piece suggesting that Obama's candidacy might help defeat the anti-gay marriage amendment on the ballot this fall in California. I hope so, but the piece manages to avoid an obvious contradiction: Blacks are overwhelmingly opposed to gay marriage and supportive of the initiative, so much so that gay marriage supporters are essentially writing them off and concentrating on Latinos as potential swing votes. If Obama comes out forcefully against the amendment--as he should--his African-American base in California and elsewhere won't like it. But he can easier buck them than, say, Hillary could.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 03, 2008 • Comments
The Onion examines the candidates careful positioning.
(In case you missed it, here's my article on Obama's glamour.)
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 03, 2008 • Comments
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 02, 2008 • Comments
It's likely that Barack Obama will be the next president of the United States, but it's not exactly a sure thing. (Just ask the Clintons.) So I was disturbed to hear a woman with a "Women for Obama" button tell a Santa Monica store cashier that she'd already made her plane and hotel reservations for the inauguration "because I want my children to see history made." And if Obama loses, what will she tell her children then?
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 02, 2008 • Comments
This piece by LAT consumer columnist David Lazarus makes a perfectly reasonable point: letting more workers telecommute even one day a week would save money and cut traffic congestion. It is indeed crazy for Lazarus to spend $9 a day commuting instead of writing from home like a normal columnist.
On the way to his modest point, however, he repeats some all-too-common confusions about gas prices, traffic, and fuel efficiency. His column is worth addressing not because it's particularly bad (it isn't) or particularly influential (ditto), but because these confusions are so typical.
He starts by saying that "the more painful that things become at the pump, the more our political and business leaders will finally realize that they need to take steps, and soon, to wean us from our self-defeating oil jones." That's not how things actually work. In the real world, the more painful things become at the pump, the more drivers take steps to burn less gasoline, regardless of what political and business leaders do--and the more pressure political and business leaders are under to make those gas prices go down, so we won't have to change our driving behavior.
Like many people, Lazarus conflates his concerns about traffic congestion and gas prices. Both bumper-to-bumper traffic and $4.19-per-gallon make life unpleasant, and both have something to do with cars, but that doesn't mean fixing one problem will fix the other. Lazarus would like more fuel-efficient vehicles, which would address the expensive-gas problem; he just doesn't think we'll get them any time soon, because automakers "have to be dragged screaming and kicking into the future." But when the fuel-efficient future arrives, he'll discover that better gas mileage means more crowded roads. The more miles per gallon (or dollar) you get, the more you're willing to drive. The best thing for L.A. traffic is expensive gasoline, which is why I caught myself doing 75 mph coming back from downtown last Thursday afternoon.
Here's a cheat sheet:
Expensive gas = less driving = less congestion
More fuel efficiency = de facto cheaper gas = more driving = more congestion
More pain at the pump = Less pain on the roads (and vice versa)
Finally, $9 a day on gas???? You might think about moving closer to the office.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 02, 2008 • Comments
Growthology, from Tim Kane and Bob Litan. Very dynamist.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 02, 2008 • Comments
"An interesting Metafilter discussion on Obama campaign graphics." (Via Design Observer.)
I'll note, however, that propaganda has been hip for at least 40 years. All you have to do is check out a book like War Posters: Weapons of Mass Communications and you'll fine that through WWII, most of the graphic propaganda is put out by governments and their supporters and is mostly patriotic and pro-military (whichever country or military that might be). After World War II, and especially since the 1960s, in the non-communist countries it's almost all anti-government, anti-military, and anti-establishment leftist. In the communist countries, notably Cuba (where posters were and are a big deal), it's, of course, pro-establishment leftist. In both cases, it's hip.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on May 27, 2008 • Comments