so this time, i watched it like the rest of you do. on split screen tv, like they had on cnn, holy crap. Mac looks looney, blinking, sniffing and snorting, smiling and wheezing. then you look at O and he’s just calmly enjoying a valium buzz.

that’s how you win the prez, i guess. game set…

Congratulations to President Barack Obama. That is all.

..

See, I haven’t decided that’s the case yet.

That is all.

In six minutes (six minutes…six minutes…Doug E. Fresh you’re on…) we will be live-blogging the debate– well, live-MICRO-blogging would be more accurate– via our Twitter.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets”; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service, instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific. [viki]

Last time we posted about 20 updates…this time, who knows?

I assume that this tee comes with a hat that says “Irony-free zone”? P.S: You seriously think that this poster has exactly the same intent and motivation as the New Yorker cover? (Of course, the New Yorker cover was a seriously botched attempt at humor, but it doesn’t mean that it was malevolent.)

Irony dude. I was pointing out how seriously botched the New Yorker cover was, and why the intent is irrelevant in this context.

“They said it was funny when the New Yorker did it.”

I assume that this tee comes with a hat that says “Irony-free zone”?

P.S: You seriously think that this poster has exactly the same intent and motivation as the New Yorker cover? (Of course, the New Yorker cover was a seriously botched attempt at humor, but it doesn’t mean that it was malevolent.)

http://current.com/items/89393772_racist_obama_billboard_causes_outrage I will pay good money to have that caricature on a teeshirt with a really nice desi caption (can we have a friday caption contest?) He looks like an Indian farmer who just had a bumper crop!

How about “Desis for teenage immigrant welfare mothers on drugs.” or “They said it was funny when the New Yorker did it.”

I will pay good money to have that caricature on a teeshirt with a really nice desi caption (can we have a friday caption contest?)

He looks like an Indian farmer who just had a bumper crop!

Nayagan,

Here are honest answers to your question, seems like I’m having trouble capturing the tone of your question (it sounded like something else in my mind), but if you say it was honest and straight forward, then I’m certainly remiss in my assessment-

what do you do when you encounter statements like Vic’s, where he says a few bigoted things and then one true thing, in public/social situations?

Generally, I’ll point it out and depending on the body language (negative or positive) or the situation (work, a wedding, among friends at a bar, been invited to a place but don’t know anybody, etc) either press further or just point out why I disagree, don’t think it’s right, etc. and drive on. On occasions when I’m on the fringe of a discussion or just someone standing there and listening on the side lines, I’ll make a mental note of it and not insert myself into the discussion.

Do you change the direction of the conversation so it trends toward the argument that the two-party system gives us something less than 2 quality choices?

In a public/social conversation, I’ll try to avoid trending the conversation any direction, unless I’m the one that’s leading the discussion (or one of the primary participants). I said, “try”, because I’m far from perfect and have done so in the past when an issue is near/dear to me. Maybe this is one of those situations and it would be misconstrued as approval of the statement in its totality.

Let’s get few things out of the way. In the history of our republic, there are four major events – the Revolution, the Civil War, the New Deal, and then the Civil Rights movement. The ideals espoused – however sincerely – were still pathbreaking simply because they were espoused at all = imagine no torture, freedom of speech and assembly, etc…But it was not to be and it took the Civil War to abolish slavery, but the battle wasn’t ended, what about the bigger battle to ensure a more opportunity when the land had populated so much that you could not simply pack up and move away, so we had the robber barons, and the the Crash of 1929, and then came the next major event – the New Deal. But still America did not mean the same thing for all people and so after great struggle, this time peacefully, came the Civil Rights movement. So from 1932 to 1980, for almost 1/2 a century, the structures that the Dems and FDR built created the America we live in today and the Civil Rights movement too ensured that the state became equitable – but then reaction set in – and having lost the intllectual battle, the reactionaries decided to counter progress with asymmetrry and so we had a B-grade cue-card reader with no claims to intellect. Naturally the progress-stoppers felt great – notice how raptorous they wax over some of the most cliched and jejune tripe that was belted out back in the day. Of course in the meanwhile Tricky Dick came and went and his supporters realised that intellect was not enough. So in 1980 we embarked on a faux Deal – big Deal! Claiming to have an answer for everything we saw some particularly harebrained schemes in economics, society, and foreign relations. All of them lie in tatters today. As we try to pick up the pieces we have today learnt that when great profound and noble ideas fall prey to glitter, we get something that looks like a movement, but is actually a racket.

I’m not going to get in a long argument about this account of history, but let me simply say that it’s a great deal more complex than giving a single story about “our” republic that pinpoints four major events/periods and you’re conflating a mythological story with an account of politics and economics and social complexity. A better (still imperfect) periodization of a grand narrative if you want to put one together might be: Up to the mid 1700s (colonizaton); mid 1700s to 1800 (political independence and development of government institutions to first transfer of power); 1800 to 1854 (states rights / slavery / sectional disputes); 1854 to 1876 (civil war and reconstruction); 1876-1914 (triump of big capital and the emergence of discontents and U.S. economic ascendancy); 1914-1949 (depression, isolationsism and emergence of U.S. as political global hegemon – with wars inclusive); and 1949 to 1980 (triumph of Cold War liberal capitalism) (1980 – 2007/8 (triumph of reaction), end of the Cold War).

As you can see, my account is both overly detailed and still incomplete, imprecise in its dates, doesn’t account for overlaps, and I have poor knowledge of colonial history, among many other things. It loses a lot of complexity that might be of interest to people who read this site: for example, in “our” republic, our grandparents and those of others from Asia were legally banned from emigrating here from @1880 to @1965. Where does the suffragist movement fit into this? Operation Weback and the Japanese internments? The Monroe Doctrine and the history of U.S. imperialism in general? How about the early 20th century progressive movement? The story of American Indians? There are many other strands that you could choose to emphasize in telling the story.

All of which is to point out that history is hard to boil down to a few parapraphs – so it should ideally be done as well as possible and with a self-conscious understanding of the purposes for which you’re buillding your narrative.