In The American Prospect, Ezra Klein on the choice between Hillary and Obama:

Many of Clinton’s economic plans are universal as well. Indeed, her health-care plan, with its mandate, is a truer expression of the principle than Obama’s competing proposal. But in general, Clinton’s approach doesn’t display much of a unifying theme. Her health plan is universal because that makes it a better policy, not because she conceives of social policy within a universalistic framework as such. Which gets to the real difference between the two candidates, which is not in what they want to do with the economy, or even what they believe about it, but how they conceive of the president’s role in affecting it.

Where Obama speaks of trends and values, situating his policies within the broader forces shaping our culture as well as our society, Clinton speaks of individual problems and solitary obstacles, offering her proposals as discrete solutions to identifiable challenges. Her approach was well expressed in a speech she gave in Knoxville, Iowa. “The next president,” she said, “will be a steward of our economy at a time when the bills from eight years of neglect and mismanagement will be coming due.”

That is why, when you ask Clinton’s advisers about their economic plans, they’re likely to point you toward various policies she’s proposed and pieces of legislation she’s sponsored, most of which are admirable, forward-thinking, and thoughtfully designed. That is what a responsible economic steward does: competently manage the economy; identify and propose policies to solve problems when appropriate; leave things alone if they’re humming along satisfactorily.

Obama’s advisers, by contrast, are likely to point you toward his speech at the NASDAQ, which highlighted his desire to transform our economy through the application of moral leadership. There, Obama went before an audience of bankers and stockbrokers and spoke, not of our growth numbers or our credit problems but of our economic values…

In the LRB, Henry Siegman:

The breaching of the barrier between Gaza and Egypt by Gaza’s imprisoned population dramatised two fundamental realities about which Israeli and US policymakers have been in complete denial. First, that sooner or later Gazans would seek to break out of their open-air jail. That they have done so should be applauded not condemned. It would have been a sad comment on the human spirit had Gaza’s citizens surrendered to their fate.

Israel’s claim that the strangulation of Gaza was intended to provoke its population into overthrowing Hamas is absurd – and offensive. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that the draconian restrictions imposed by Israel on Gaza’s civilian residents redirected against their Israeli tormentors what anger existed among them towards Hamas for its ideological rigidity and its refusal to halt rocket assaults on Israel. As recent opinion polls have found, the suffering caused by the Gaza closures produced greater solidarity not greater divisiveness. It even moved Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad to public displays of anger (however disingenuous) against Ehud Olmert’s government.

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A Supermarket in California
Allen Ginsberg

…………………………………………………………………….
…………………………………………………………………….
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I
walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache
self-conscious looking at the full moon.

In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into
the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!

What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families
shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the
avocados, babies in the tomatoes!–and you, Garcia Lorca, what
were you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,
poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the
grocery boys.

I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork
chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?

I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans
following you, and followed in my imagination by the store
detective.

We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary
fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and
never passing the cashier.

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an
hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the
supermarket and feel absurd.)

Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees
add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be
lonely.

Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue
automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?

Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what
America did you leave when Charon quit poling his ferry and
you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat
disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

..

From Edge:

One hundred and sixty-five eminent thinkers, researchers, and communicators, at the annual request of the edge.org website, answered the following question: “What Have You Changed Your Mind About? Why?”

The obligation of a scientist to do science

Leon Lederman, Nobel Laureate in Physics (author of The God Particle)

I have always believed that the scientist’s most sacred obligation is to continue to do science. Now I know that I was dead wrong. I am driven to the ultimately wise advice of my Columbia mentor, I.I. Rabi, who, in our many corridor bull sessions, urged his students to run for public office and get elected. He insisted that to be an advisor (he was an advisor to Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, later to Eisenhower and to the AEC) was ultimately an exercise in futility and that the power belonged to those who are elected. Then, we thought the old man was bonkers. But today… A Congress which is overwhelmingly dominated by lawyers and MBAs makes no sense in this 21st century in which almost all issues have a science and technology aspect.

More here.

Booker T. Washington recalled his childhood in his autobiography, Up From Slavery. He was born in 1856 on the Burroughs tobacco farm which, despite its small size, he always referred to as a “plantation.” His mother was a cook, his father a white man from a nearby farm. “The early years of my life, which were spent in the little cabin,” he wrote, “were not very different from those of other slaves.”

He went to school in Franklin County – not as a student, but to carry books for one of James Burroughs’s daughters. It was illegal to educate slaves. “I had the feeling that to get into a schoolhouse and study would be about the same as getting into paradise,” he wrote. In April 1865 the Emancipation Proclamation was read to joyful slaves in front of the Burroughs home. Booker’s family soon left to join his stepfather in Malden, West Virginia. The young boy took a job in a salt mine that began at 4 a.m. so he could attend school later in the day. Within a few years, Booker was taken in as a houseboy by a wealthy towns-woman who further encouraged his longing to learn. At age 16, he walked much of the 500 miles back to Virginia to enroll in a new school for black students. He knew that even poor students could get an education at Hampton Institute, paying their way by working. The head teacher was suspicious of his country ways and ragged clothes. She admitted him only after he had cleaned a room to her satisfaction.

In one respect he had come full circle, back to earning his living by menial tasks. Yet his entrance to Hampton led him away from a life of forced labor for good. He became an instructor there. Later, as principal and guiding force behind Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, which he founded in 1881, he became recognized as the nation’s foremost black educator.

More here.

Janelle Nanos in National Geographic Traveler:

We can’t help but think that Eric Weiner’s research for his new book, The Geography of Bliss, would have gone a lot easier if he’d paired up with Erik Krikortz, the installation artist behind Stockholm’s Emotional Cities project. The Internet-based artwork asks people to answer a simple question: “How Are You Today?” and rate their feelings on a scale of colorful smiley faces. Factors like how well you slept, whether you had any physical activity, and how inspired you felt are all part of the equation. The results are then averaged and aggregated by region to get a sense of how a city is collectively feeling. Right now, for example, Washington, D.C., is rather green, while the rest of the world is feeling a bit more yellow.

Erik then went further and negotiated with a building company in Stockholm, where he resides, to project the corresponding colors on huge panels on the side of five buildings. (A live Webcam shows how the lights change with Stockholm’s moods.) The result is a very public display of the emotional status of the city, sparking conversations about how we interact with each other and influence our feelings.

More here.  [Thanks to Marilyn Terrell.]

For more info, go here.

Benedict Carey in the New York Times:

Stare into a mirror long enough and it’s hard not to wonder whether that’s a mask staring back, and if so, who’s really behind it.

A similar self-doubt can cloud a public identity as well, especially for anyone who has just stepped into a new role. College graduate. New mother. Medical doctor. Even, for that matter, presidential nominee.

Presidents and parents, after all, are expected to make crucial decisions on a dime. Doctors are being asked to save lives, and graduate students to know how Aristotle’s conception of virtue differed from Aquinas’s conception of — uh-oh.

Who’s kidding whom?

Social psychologists have studied what they call the impostor phenomenon since at least the 1970s, when a pair of therapists at Georgia State University used the phrase to describe the internal experience of a group of high-achieving women who had a secret sense they were not as capable as others thought. Since then researchers have documented such fears in adults of all ages, as well as adolescents.

More here.

The first work by Hannah Arendt that I read, at the age of sixteen, was Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.[1] It remains, for me, the emblematic Arendt text. It is not her most philosophical book. It is not always right; and it is decidedly not her most popular piece of writing. I did not even like the book myself when I first read it—I was an ardent young Socialist-Zionist and Arendt’s conclusions profoundly disturbed me. But in the years since then I have come to understand that Eichmann in Jerusalem represents Hannah Arendt at her best: attacking head-on a painful topic; dissenting from official wisdom; provoking argument not just among her critics but also and especially among her friends; and above all, disturbing the easy peace of received opinion. It is in memory of Arendt the “disturber of the peace” that I want to offer a few thoughts on a subject which, more than any other, preoccupied her political writings.

more from the NYRB here.

Anyone vaguely familiar with the early history of the Russian Revolution will recall the one or two lines in every textbook about Marshal Pilsudski’s legionaries stopping the Red Army before the gates of Warsaw in August 1920. The outcome is almost taken for granted. The Soviet forces, embroiled in a civil war of immeasurable savagery, were perhaps too weak to do much more; Poles were defending the independence so recently won in the Versailles settlement and fought with a stubborn nationalism. Some of this is true, but as Adam Zamoyski reminds us in this crisp account of an almost unknown war, the outcome was far from pre-ordained. If it is difficult to believe that the Soviets would have established an early version of the Cold War bloc had they won, it is also difficult to see who could have ejected them once they straddled Eastern Europe.

The story told here is a straightforward account of a short, sharp war which took place from April to October 1920 between two infant states, Polish and Soviet. The hero of the story is one of the great names of modern Polish history, Joseph Pilsudski.

more from Literary Review here.

But is hypocrisy really so bad? Given what it takes to get elected, and what we expect of politicians once in office, we may want to think again about political hypocrisy. Hypocrisy may not be an attractive human quality, but in politics, it is often a desirable one – and may sometimes be better than the alternative.

Hypocrites, in constructing an electable persona for themselves, are clearly demonstrating that they understand their personal limitations. They recognize the need to adapt what they happen to believe to what is politically prudent. So it’s possible to see hypocrisy as evidence of politicians who will do what they say once in office because they set no special premium by their private preferences.

Our instinctive dislike of hypocrisy can get in the way of seeing what is really at stake when it comes to choosing a leader. Indeed, we might even make better decisions if we could realize that far from being a liability in a leader, hypocrisy is an essential part of democratic politics.

more from the Boston Globe Ideas here.

Twelve Irreligious Questions for the Candidates Before “Tiw’s Day’s” Elections

John Allen Paulos in an excellent column at ABC News:

Religious beliefs have been a big issue in presidential politics for a while now, and many of the candidates, particularly Govs. Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney, have opted for different reasons to talk about theirs.

This is a two-way street, however. If religion and religious ideas are going to be more publicly discussed, candidates and their supporters will have to accustom themselves to the free expression of doctrines contrary to their own, in particular to irreligious perspectives.

Their religiosity will eventually invite questions about their beliefs and their provenance more pointed than the usual vague queries about the role of faith in their lives. Here are a few such questions that might be directed explicitly to Huckabee and Romney — and then generally to some of the other candidates…

• Article 19 of the Arkansas state constitution states, “No person who denies the being of a God shall hold any office in the civil departments of this State, nor be competent to testify as a witness in any court.” Although it and similar laws in other states are not enforced, do you support their formal repeal?
• Is it right to suggest, as many have, that atheists and agnostics are somehow less moral when the numbers on crime, divorce, alcoholism and other measures of social dysfunction show that non-believers in the United States are extremely under-represented in each category?
• For many, religion has been a source of ideas and narratives that are enlightening, of ideals and values that are inspiring, of rituals and traditions that are satisfying. It has also led to hatred, cruelty, superstition, divisiveness, credulity and fanaticism. What can you do to further the former and minimize the latter effects?

More here.

From Crooked Timber:

This video was posted on YouTube just yesterday and has already been watched over 150,000 times.* There’s also a site for a ringtone.

It’s impossible to know at this point how such viral campaigns might influence outcomes, but it’s certainly interesting to watch how people are taking advantage of new tools to disseminate material of this sort. It would be a stretch to suggest anyone can do this easily since this video is filled with celebrities, which likely helped it get coverage on ABC yesterday [source]. Nonetheless, having it available online certainly helps in spreading it widely. I’d be curious to know how most people linking to it found it, but many don’t seem to be pointing to sources, which makes this difficult to decipher.

[*] Note that YouTube’s numbers are confusing as depending on when I click on the link I either get around 153,000 or 84,000 views.

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“Only a fool underestimates the power of a dream.  In these seas we bob in the wake of dreams.”  Anon.

One Day
Sheng Xing

I am walking down a road that
cannot erupt with lava
towards a morning sun that
cannot fall from the sky
I run into an ugly-looking woman
I cannot fall in love with
in her hand she is carrying a dead fish that
cannot be brought back to life
she uses filthy language that
cannot be beautiful
at this moment I
cannot grow a pair of wings
and fly up into the clouds in the sky
I go home to a house that
cannot collapse
and run into my father whom I
cannot get along with
at this moment, I’m too big
I cannot turn myself into a rat
and quietly creep into my hole in some corner
tonight I lie down on my bed that
cannot turn into the open sea
at this moment I
cannot die

but I have a dream:
the sun falls to the earth
lava erupts from the ground
I fly up into the sky
kissing the sweet lips of a woman
the fish she carries in her hand is singing hymns
my father kneels down beside a ruin
and says, pointing at the sky
“what a great man he is”
next morning I wake from my dream
I cannot believe that it was real

Translation: Simon Patton

..

From Afroamhistory.com:

Frederick Douglass was born on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in February 1818. He was named Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey. As a young boy, Douglass lived with his grandparents until he was six. He was then sent to live on the Lloyd Plantation, where he stayed until he was sent to Baltimore when he was eight years old. In Baltimore, he lived with Hugh and Sophia Auld. At his new home, Sophia Auld began to teach him to read. However, when her husband found out he forbid it, and she stopped.

Despite this setback, Douglass had a revelation about slavery when he overheard Hugh Auld explain to his wife about why she should not teach him to read. Auld explained that, “if you teach that nigger how to read, there would be no keeping him” and he would “become unmanageable, and of no value to his master.” According to Douglass: “I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty — to wit, the white man’s power to enslave the black man…. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.” Douglass realized that there was power in learning to read.

A pivotal event in Frederick Douglass’ early life as a slave was when he retaliated against the men hired to “break” him.

“Mr. Covey seemed now to think he had me, and could do what he pleased; but at this moment – from whence came the spirit I don’t know – I resolved to fight; and, suiting my action to the resolution, I seized Covey hard by the throat; and as I did so, I rose. He held on to me, and I to him. My resistance was so entirely unexpected, that Covey seemed taken all aback. He trembled like a leaf. This gave me assurance, and I held him uneasy, causing the blood to run where I touched him with the ends of my fingers. Mr. Covey soon called out to Hughes for help. Hughes came, and, while Covey held me, attempted to tie my right hand. While he was in the act of doing so, I watched my chance, and gave him a heavy kick close under the ribs. This kick fairly sickened Hughes, so that he left me in the hands of Mr. Covey. This kick had the effect of not only weakening Hughes, but Covey also. When he saw Hughes bending over with pain, his courage quailed. He asked me if I meant to persist in my resistance. I told him I did, come what might; that he had used me like a brute for six months, and that I was determined to be used so no longer”.

On September 3, 1838, he escaped from slavery. Shortly after his arrival, he married Anna Murray, a free black woman he had met in Baltimore. They settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts. During their marriage, they had five children together. In 1841, Douglass began his life as a public figure and abolitionist. After hearing William Lloyd Garrison’s anti-slavery speech, Douglass was inspired to tell his story. He spoke at the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society annual convention about his experience as a slave. His speech was powerful and eloquent. He was encouraged by Garrison, who became his mentor, to continue speaking.

In 1845, he wrote about his life as a slave in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. After its publication, he traveled to England, Scotland, and Ireland where he continued speaking against slavery. Upon his return to the United States in 1847, he moved to New York and published the weekly paper called the North Star. During the Civil War, he was active in recruiting black soldiers for the Union Army. Douglass also became an advocate of women’s rights. Later in his life, he served the government in several positions. From 1877 to 1881, he was the U.S. Marshall of the District of Columbia, from 1881 to 1886 he served as the recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia, and from 1889 to 1891 he was the minister to Haiti.

After Douglass’ wife died in 1882, he married his former secretary Helen Pitts in 1884. On February 20, 1895, after speaking at the National Council of Women, he died of a heart failure at his home Cedar Hill in Anacostia, Washington, D.C.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

Tahmima Anam’s first novel is a generous act of creative empathy. Born in Bangladesh four years after the nation won its independence from Pakistan, the author grew up abroad and now lives in London. Yet from her family’s stories and her own research, she has crafted a compelling tale steeped in her native land’s diverse culture. A Golden Age chronicles a young widow’s hesitant heroism during the convulsive year 1971, when rebels, including the widow’s teenaged son and daughter, battle an army employing genocide and torture to subdue Pakistan’s breakaway eastern region.

Rehana Haque is an unlikely hero. A prologue set in 1959 shows her losing a custody battle with her wealthy brother-in-law Faiz. “Poor, and friendless,” 26-year-old Rehana lacks the confidence to assert that her children belong with their mother. When the judge asks, “What would your husband want?” she admits, “He would want them to be safe.” Faiz convinces the judge that Maya and Sohail are not safe in Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital city, roiled by strikes and demonstrations; they are sent to live with him in West Pakistan, a thousand miles away. The prologue closes with Rehana’s rueful memories of her husband, a cautious insurance executive who foresaw and forestalled every possible danger to his children and his much younger wife — except the sudden heart attack that left Rehana unable to prevent Faiz from taking them.

Twelve years later, as the main action begins, Rehana is preparing the party she throws each year to celebrate the day in 1961 when she brought her children back to Dhaka.

More here.

Nathalie Angier in the New York Times:

When scientists announced on Jan. 24 that they had reconstituted the complete set of genes for a microbe using just a few bottles of chemicals, the feat was hailed as a kind of shining Nike moment in the field of synthetic biology, the attempt to piece together living organisms from inert scratch.

Reporting in the journal Science, Dr. J. Craig Venter and his colleagues at the J. Craig Venter Institute said they had fabricated the entire DNA chain of a microbial parasite called Mycoplasma genitalium, exceeding previous records of sustained DNA synthesis by some 18-fold. Any day now, the researchers say, they will pop that manufactured mortal coil into a cellular shell, where the genomic code will “boot up,” as Dr. Venter puts it, and the entire construct will begin acting like a natural-born M. genitalium — minus the capacity, the researchers promise, to infect the delicate tissues that explain the parasite’s surname.

More here.

Stanley Fish in the New York Times:

But the people and groups Horowitz surveys have brought criticism of Clinton to what sportswriters call “the next level,” in this case to the level of personal vituperation unconnected to, and often unconcerned with, the facts. These people are obsessed with things like her hair styles, the “strangeness” of her eyes — “Analysis of Clinton’s eyes is a favorite motif among her most rabid adversaries” — and they retail and recycle items from what Horowitz calls “The Crazy Files”: she’s Osama bin Laden’s candidate; she kills cats; she’s a witch (this is not meant metaphorically).

But this list, however loony-tunes it may be, does not begin to touch the craziness of the hardcore members of this cult. Back in November, I wrote a column on Clinton’s response to a question about giving driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. My reward was to pick up an e-mail pal who has to date sent me 24 lengthy documents culled from what he calls his “Hillary File.” If you take that file on faith, Hillary Clinton is a murderer, a burglar, a destroyer of property, a blackmailer, a psychological rapist, a white-collar criminal, an adulteress, a blasphemer, a liar, the proprietor of a secret police, a predatory lender, a misogynist, a witness tamperer, a street criminal, a criminal intimidator, a harasser and a sociopath. These accusations are “supported” by innuendo, tortured logic, strained conclusions and photographs that are declared to tell their own story, but don’t.

Compared to this, the Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry was a model of objectivity.

More here.