MEME license-plate meme

Psst: pass it on.

[Crummy photograph, I know: all I had with me was an iPod Nano. I’ve zapped the registration date.]

Election thoughts

The results of yesterday’s voting make me more confident and more hopeful than ever about my country’s future. All the dollars and words devoted to depicting Barack Obama as the destroyer of the American economy and western civilization were for naught. I am happy to have voted for him for the third time.

President Obama’s reëlection makes me think that a majority of people in this country are, after all, thoughtful and compassionate. They know that climate change is real and nothing to joke about. They know that health care needs to be affordable for and accessible to all. They know that electrified fences and self-deportation are absurd and dehumanizing proposals and that there should be a path to citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants. They know that perpetual war is not the stuff of sound foreign policy. They know that PBS and Planned Parenthood serve the public good and are worthy of the government support they receive. They know that women should be able to make decisions about their own bodies. And they know that the ultra-wealthy are better positioned that anyone else to pay something more in taxes.

I am heartened too by results from other contests, with voters saying no to the likes of Todd Akin, Richard Mourdock, Joe Walsh, and Allen West (whose outré pronouncements on sundry matters bear no repeating) and yes to Tammy Baldwin, Sherrod Brown, Elizabeth Warren, and others. And to see voters rejecting a constitutional restriction on marriage and supporting referendums on equal marriage suggests that the right to marry the partner of one’s choice is well on its way to becoming a cultural norm.

I am happy today. But I am also amused — by the frequent characterizations in media commentary of ”older white men” as the bastion of the Republican Party. You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me ?

Related posts
Obama thoughts (2008)
Reality distortion fields

“Dear Sophia”

A letter from Barack Obama to a ten-year-old girl gives a good idea of the character of the man just reëlected.

[I’m sorry, but I’m powerless before the umlaut dieresis.]

Forward?

Forward!

NBC News just called Ohio for Barack Obama.

As Vigo goes (2012)

Elaine found the above detail while looking at CNN online. Indiana’s Vigo County has gone to Barack Obama, as it did in 2008. Vigo has voted for the winning candidate in every presidential election since 1956. We were knocking on doors there for Obama in 2008, with no idea of the county’s political significance.

A related post
As Vigo goes (2008)

Phrases

[New Oxford American Dictionary.]

Both phrases apply.

Election Day

“Why is voting day for American federal elections always a Tuesday? The answer is a bit obscure and has to do with buggies”: Why Are Elections on Tuesday? (NPR).

The Weavers, 1951

“A collection of all the video recordings for Snader Telescriptions filmed in 1951”: fifteen minutes and thirty-four seconds of the Weavers (YouTube).

Reality distortion fields

There are reality distortion fields, and there are reality distortion fields. The term “reality distortion field” (RDF) is associated of course with Steve Jobs, who was able to convince Apple employees that they could accomplish difficult or seemingly impossible tasks — deadlines and the limits of technology be damned. Such feats are hardly limited to charismatic executive types. Any teacher who gives students the sense that they are smarter than they believe, that they can do more than they suspect, has a good RDF at work. Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign mantra “Yes, we can” captures what’s involved: a belief that success is possible despite long odds. A good RDF reshapes one’s sense of what is possible.

Then there is the other kind of RDF, the kind that distorts matters of fact and history. Such fields were in force all through the 2008 presidential campaign, and they have been in force ever since, turning a candidate and president into a non-citizen, a secret              (you can fill in the blank, in several ways), turning healthcare reform into communism and death panels and theft from Medicare. This year’s presidential campaign has a challenger who has trained an RDF on his own record, obscuring or simply denying positions he has taken not just in recent years but in recent months, in this very campaign.

Distortions so blatant, so cynical, suggest that such a candidate and his advisors must see American voters as credulous fools, ready to believe one thing after another after another. I think though that the majority of American voters are smarter than that. Tomorrow we will find out.

Related posts
George Orwell on historical truth
George Orwell on totalitarian history
Stepping in it

Ted Curson (1935–2012)

The trumpeter Ted Curson has died at the age of seventy-seven. I know him best from his work with Charles Mingus. Here is one of Curson’s finest moments, from 1960: “Original Faubus Fables,” with Eric Dolphy (alto saxophone), Mingus (bass and vocal), and Dannie Richmond (drums and vocal).