Obama’s remarks at the memorial service for 29 coal minters on April 26 in Beckley, West Virginia.
Nation
The Politics of Love
What do you get when you fall in love?
You get a lot of pain and trauma
Even with Barack Obama
I’ll never fall in love again!
Unity & Struggle
Amiri Baraka issues a Call to FIRST readers.
Walking (and Stumbling) with Martin
President Obama gave the following sermon at a D.C. Church on January 17th. His Sunday text has historical interest since it hints the President wasn’t ready to hear the hard news from Massachusetts where Scott Brown would win Teddy Kennedy’s old senate seat two days later. But Obama’s speech is worth more than a snarky look back. While it underscores his over-confidence about the prospects of passing health insurance reform, it also speaks to what keeps America’s parties of hope alive. Take it as one true story behind the key line in the closing graph of his (much duller) State of the Union speech: “I don’t quit.”
Who’s To Blame? (II)
Right after the Massachusetts debacle, Bernard Avishai published a short post on “Who’s to Blame” at his website BERNARD AVISHAI DOT COM. Avishai spoke as someone “marinated” in Massachusetts politics who wondered at Coakely’s grudging (“forced and fake”) nods to Obamacare. He argued: “The real question Democrats have to ask themselves is: how come the greatest piece of social legislation since Medicare is something a progressive Democratic candidate for Ted Kennedy’s seat has to speak so defensively about.” Talking Points Memo linked to Avishai’s post and it sparked argument. Here’s Avishai’s response to his critics.
His Cool World
A rock star? No.
A hoop star? Yes.
Randy, his Columbia classmate, still calls him Barry, but I like to think of Obama as Racky B, a kind of hip-hop Rocky in the way he deals with his opponents, his Republican friends, as he likes to call them.
Damned if he didn’t throw multiple shout-outs to John McCain during his healthcare speech, as if there wasn’t a trace of bitterness or even memory of the ugly campaign that McCain desperately waged.
A Child’s Vision of the Great Depression
The author offers this piece as a “footnote” to his memoir, Daydreams and Nightmares: Reflections of a Harlem Childhood.
Nationtime
“My heart is full of love for this country.” Barack Obama in The Audacity of Hope
“I actually believe my own bullshit.” Barack Obama (quoted) in Renegade
History in the Making
Witness – Whittaker Chambers’ account of the Hiss case and its back story – is the fount of modern Movement Conservatism. (Ronald Reagan credited it with converting him from New Deal Democrat to conservative Republican.) Ideologues on today’s Right are still playing changes on the persona – “a solitary man in a gregarious land” – Chambers perfected in his great American autobiography cum anti-communist moral tract. But torture-mongers and Tea Partiers on the Right will find it hard to assimilate certain implications in Chambers’ thought. Meanwhile, leftists who instinctively avoid Chambers – ally of Nixon and the man who shaped Reagan’s brain – are missing out on a 20th Century mind whose testimony seems especially pertinent now.
Jesse Jackson and Black People (Redux)
We’re honored to reprint Amiri Baraka’s reflections on Jesse Jackson, Dukakis and the 1988 Democratic Convention in Atlanta, which he composed in 1988-1989 (and which we originally posted at First near the start of the Obama era). This is an essay for the Ages but the history Baraka witnessed in 1988 has a special resonance in our time. Baraka’s meditation begins (artfully) in medias res…
The Ground We Stand On
I had studied social movements most of my academic life, so when some kind of rhythmic popular mobilization put in an appearance in American presidential politics in 2008, I paid attention. By February, when it arrived in my neck of the woods, the Research Triangle of North Carolina, the pundits were calling it “the Obama ground game.” I signed up so I could get a close look.
Stuff White People Like
Jesus taught me to love the hell out of my enemies.
–Jeremiah Wright