Now it’s Monday: Open Thread 8/16/10

Fridays can be very popular Open Thread days, so here, for you, on a shining silver platter, I present: The Friday Open Thread! And, like magic, it’s a Monday Open Thread! I’ll open a new one tomorrow, I think, as this one strikes me as a work still in progress…. For explanations and rules, go here and here and here. For the Coatesian mothership, here.

by emilylhauser on August 13, 2010 • Permalink

Posted in Open Thread

Posted by emilylhauser on August 13, 2010

https://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2010/08/13/because-its-friday-open-thread-81310/

41 Comments

The Odalisque
/ August 13, 2010

Because I’ve just recently joined Tumblr, I can’t stop making blogs. Well okay, I’ve only really made 2 more. But one of them is a group blog, and I’m really excited about it.

Its called Fire With Water, and its all about peacebuilding!

firewithwater.tumblr.com
- emilylhauser
  / August 13, 2010
  
  (Plus her Twitter feed is good, too! @TheOdalisque)
- silentbeep
  / August 13, 2010
  
  After having a tumblr site empty for a few months, now I get what to do with it. I’ll follow you!
  
  http://silentbeep.tumblr.com/
dmf
/ August 13, 2010

Suddenly it is August again, so hot,
breathless heat.
I sit on the ground
in the garden of Carmel,
picking ripe cherry tomatoes
and eating them.
They are so ripe that the skin is split,
so warm and sweet
from the attentions of the sun,
the juice bursts in my mouth,
an ecstatic taste,
and I feel that I am in the mouth of summer,
sloshing in the saliva of August.
Hummingbirds halo me there,
in the great green silence,
and my own bursting heart
splits me with life.

“Cherry Tomatoes” by Anne Higgins
- emilylhauser
  / August 13, 2010
  
  “I feel that I am in the mouth of summer,
  sloshing in the saliva of August.”
  
  Wow, I kind of love that. Thanks dmf!
Sorn Jessen
/ August 13, 2010

Because it’s friday and we’re having Al Green weather here. (A Euphemism for long slow rainy day……)

Beaten Back

Henry Lawson.

BEATEN back in sad dejection,
After years of weary toil
On that burning hot selection
Where the drought has gorged his spoil.

All in vain ’gainst him, the vulture,
I have battled without rest—
In the van of agriculture,
Marching out into the West.

Now the eagle-hawks are feeding
On my perished stock that reek
Where the water-holes receding
Long had left the burning creek.

I must labour without pity—
I the pick and spade must wield
In the streetways of the city
Or upon another’s field!

Can it be my reason’s rocking,
For I feel a burning hate
For the God who, only mocking,
Sent the prayed-for rain too late?

Pour, ye mocking rains, and rattle
On the bare, brown, grassless plain,
On the shrivelled hides of cattle
That shall ne’er want grass again!

Rush, ye yellow floods, to Murray,
Over thirsty creek-banks foam;
And o’er all, ye black clouds, hurry;
Ye can bring not back my home!

And a song by the Mavericks.
- silentbeep
  / August 13, 2010
  
  Woo! I love the Mavericks.
dmf
/ August 13, 2010

i posted this over @ pg’s spot cause it has lots of good delta/coast historical/roots stuff but it’s nationwide and worth a gander:
http://www.folkstreams.net/pub/FilmsByRegion.php
dmf
/ August 13, 2010

http://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2010/08/the-woods/61451/
this seemed inevitable to me as i followed the arc of tnc’s maturation as a thinker (and what a profound public service to do this in front of, and with, so many folks) but on a more romantic note it’s tempting to think that a certain painted muse spoke to him at museum one day and set him down the garden path. for citE:
anibundel
/ August 13, 2010

*BLARG* Two days in at semi-job, and my brain is so stuffed with High Holidays information I literally feel less intelligent, like there just isn’t enough resources for the rest of my brain to function because one section of my brain is trying to digest and run too large a program. BF asking me about shopping list for groceries, and even though I am dead sure this morning at breakfast I mentally noted five things we were out of, I cannot think of one.
[insert squishy sound of brains projectile squirting out of ears.)
- dmf
  / August 13, 2010
  
  ah performance anxiety at a new job is never fun but with time and experience this too will pass, keep breathing!
  - anibundel
    / August 13, 2010
    
    I’d feel more elated about this mental stuffing if it weren’t a temporary assignment. I usually love this feeling of too much to do, but come Wednesday this job ends, and there’s something oddly depressing about stressing this hard over something so short term I won’t even see any of it through.
  - emilylhauser
    / August 13, 2010
    
    @ anibundel I hear you, sister. I do indeed hear you.
    
    Eyes on the prize: Renewed bill-paying capacity!
- K_Commenter
  / August 16, 2010
  
  This is why I finally bought a dry-erase board to mount on the fridge: it’s the only way I can guarantee I’ll record what we need *when I notice we need it*, because by the time the Sunday afternoon grocery trip comes I can’t even remember what that stuff is you pour on cereal (and yet I’ll accidentally end up with 4 bags of coffee in the cupboard).
PaulW
/ August 13, 2010

Liked the Woodstock reminder, the anniversary is in two days…

Anyone remember the Port-A-San cleaner?
carlos the dwarf
/ August 13, 2010

Hi y’all! I’m off at a friend’s vacation house at a lake house outside New York. Drinkin’ and refusing to think about my lack of job past the end of the month or any of the sh@t I have to worry about.
- emilylhauser
  / August 16, 2010
  
  I’m so glad you were off having fun! A lake house…. In my next life, I will have a lake house.
dmf
/ August 14, 2010

behold the commanding powers of ee:
- emilylhauser
  / August 14, 2010
  
  I know, right?! He finally took my call!
- Kylopod
  / August 14, 2010
  
  Now he “clarifies” his remarks:
  - emilylhauser
    / August 14, 2010
    
    I saw that after I’d written the above…. Having caught up in part, I am now caught up in full, and genuinely, deeply disappointed. To borrow a phrase, his “clarification” is not change I can believe in.
  - Kylopod
    / August 14, 2010
    
    I went into Shabbos thinking he’d finally grown a pair and taken a firm stand on a correct but unpopular view. What gets me is the clumsiness of the way he plunged into this debate: after weeks of silence, you’d think he’d at least come up with a position he could stick to without immediately backpedaling. He’ll please no one with this move. He appears weak. The right will still say he’s pandering to radical Islam and offending the memories of the 9/11 victims, a view that apparently resonates with much of the country. Meanwhile, he’s angered those who are for this. Most of the people I’ve encountered who oppose the building concede, at the end of the day, that the government has no right to stop it. So Obama’s position turns out to be no position at all.
  - dmf
    / August 15, 2010
    
    i have very mixed feelings about this, on one level very disappointing as obama as our public figurehead has turned out to be a moral vacuum, but maybe this is more honest and in some ways a more mature view of the presidency/politicians, perhaps they are just managers and we need to be the voices for conscience?
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2009/apr/01/capitalism-in-crisis
  - Kylopod
    / August 15, 2010
    
    It ties into the SSM debate, actually. HuffPost discovered that Obama supported it in 1996. I can’t say I blame him for backtracking. No serious presidential candidate has ever supported it, not even Howard Dean. Obama was already fighting perceptions that he was outside the mainstream, and openly supporting SSM could easily have sunk his candidacy before it even got off the ground.
    
    You can call him a cynic and a liar, but the fact is that it may not be possible for a president to completely avoid being those things. History seems to judge the presidents for their accomplishments, not their principles. Truman may be an exception. More typical is FDR, who was a pure political animal. In the 1940 election, he promised that he wouldn’t send American boys to fight foreign wars. Not only was he lying through his teeth, but aren’t we glad he was?
    
    Historians debate whether LBJ’s embrace of civil rights (after having opposed it early in his career) was based on politics or principle, but honestly does anyone else care?
    
    I have no regrets about supporting Obama, in the primaries as well as the general election. I have to laugh at the moonbats over at DKos who think everyone from John Edwards to Dennis Kucinich would have made a more effective commander in chief. It seems obvious beyond belief that Obama is a once-in-a-generation talent, and unlike many other political virtuosos, he does seem to have a core of decency beneath it all.
    
    But I admit that most of his decisions are political calculations. He knows the Democratic Party is fighting for survival, and any misstep can harm their chances. Going against 70% of the country carries enormous risks. You can say it’s the right thing to do, but you’re not the one burdened with the task of saving the country from being taken over by complete lunatics.
    
    A book I’m currently reading recounts a conversation between JFK and Martin Luther King. JFK said, “I may lose the next election because of [civil rights],” but, he added, “I don’t care.”
    
    I thought, on Friday, that maybe, just maybe, Obama was having an I-don’t-care moment, that he realized this was too important an issue to look at purely in political terms.
    
    Obama, of course, also has the capacity to sway voters, as he did in his Rev. Wright speech. But this ability is not unlimited.
    
    What puzzles me most of all is not his stand on this issue, but the way he quickly backtracked. He could have said on Friday that he wasn’t going to comment on the wisdom of the building’s construction but felt it was a religious right. That response would have disappointed me, but at least it would have been consistent and coherent. His signaling that he supported it then just a day later saying he didn’t made him seem atrociously weak and not in control of the conversation.
    
    My point is that as long as he’s going to be a political animal, he might as well do a good job of it. There’s no rational basis for his current backpedaling.
  - emilylhauser
    / August 15, 2010
    
    Anything I might have said has been said better and more intelligently by Kylopod, and so I say: What Kylopod said!
    
    I have moments of greater disappointment over the demands of politics. I guess this is just one of them.
dmf
/ August 15, 2010

this tragic shot of a cow in a wasteland reminded me of andyhall’s posting on the horse and the civil war:
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/08/04/magazine/20100815-dump-8.html
dmf
/ August 16, 2010

90 years of the women’s right to vote this month, try and get yer head around that:
- emilylhauser
  / August 16, 2010
  
  Oh man, excellent anniversary to recall! And with this voice as the soundtrack… I have the chills and the goosebumps, I do. Things do get better, the arc of the universe, all that. It’s hard to remember some days, but true and important.
  - dmf
    / August 16, 2010
    
    not that we have finished bringing everyone into the full protection/benefits of the constitution (ADA is still more promise than fact and marriage rigths obviously are a work in progress) but that said i often forget how young our democracy is in terms of its working potential as bodies politic.
    
    “A group called the Nebraska Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage issued a list of reasons during the state’s 1882 campaign: “Why the great majority of women do not want the ballot.” The reasons:
    
    BECAUSE they have not lost faith in their fathers, husbands, sons and brothers, who afford full protection to the community, there being no call for women to relieve them of the task.
    
    BECAUSE in political activities there is constant strife, turmoil, contention and bitterness, producing conditions from which every normal woman naturally shrinks.
    
    BECAUSE the primary object of government is to protect persons and property. This duty is imposed by nature upon man, the women being by nature absolved from assuming a task to them impossible.
    
    BECAUSE when women noisily contest and scramble for public office -woman pitted against woman – they write an indictment of womankind against which all right-minded women strenuously protest.
    
    BECAUSE women can accomplish more through counselling than they ever can attain through commanding.
    
    BECAUSE woman suffrage will not enhance peace and harmony in the home, but, on the contrary, in the heat of a campaign, it is sure to bring about dissension and discord.
    
    BECAUSE Nebraska women are already enjoying a greater measure of protection and privilege under the law than do women of any state where women vote.
    
    BECAUSE the woman worker wants rest and quietude – not political excitement.
    
    BECAUSE every reason supporting the claim of women to vote supports also the right of women to be consulted as to whether they shall or shall not be given the ballot.”
    
    – From Nebraska State Historical Society publications, January 2000
Kylopod
/ August 16, 2010

Survey question I’m curious about: how far back do you remember the term “progressive” used in the modern political sense, referring to the left wing of the Democratic Party, or the leftmost flank of mainstream American politics?
- emilylhauser
  / August 16, 2010
  
  I don’t remember it at all, frankly! I spent 14 really crucial years of political development in a different country, and there are all manner of things that I am still, 12 years after coming back, still catching up on .
- Eudaemonic
  / August 16, 2010
  
  I don’t remember it at all… to the extent that I don’t even see it right now. Isn’t “progressive” used mainly to refer to the center-left pragmatists? Or am I totally missing something?
- dave in texas
  / August 16, 2010
  
  How far back do I remember it? I’d say in the neighborhood of 15-18 years. This more or less coincides with the 1994 Gingrich-led takeover of Congress. His memo that called on GOP candidates to start using words like traitor and un-American and tying those words to liberal like an albatross was, if you think about it, kind of genius. Evil genius, true, but genius nevertheless, to be able to turn what had recently been the dominant political philosophy into the very antithesis of what it was to be American. With the term liberal smeared, it fell to the left to find an acceptable alternative, and the left, after a period of abject retreat, came up with progressive.
  
  This is, of course, just my theory. And I find it kind of odd that if the media *were* in fact liberal, they never would have allowed the term to become the pejorative that it has. People who buy ink by the barrel and paper by the ton, and who have valuable public air space given to them, would never have allowed the term liberal to become such a pejorative if they were really liberals.
emilylhauser
/ August 16, 2010

TNC gave indication this morning, via the Mad Men thread, that he may be reintroducing the Open Thread. If he does, I’ll be both happy and sad! I’ll miss having this at my finger tips.
- enstar
  / August 16, 2010
  
  then don’t get rid of it! seems like it’s evolving into its own thing.
  - emilylhauser
    / August 16, 2010
    
    Hmm. You raise an interesting possibility! I do think that everyone (myself included) will drift quickly back to the larger, faster moving OTAN at TNC’s place, but it’s true that this is somewhat different. (Indeed, I have the feeling that some enjoy its smallness and slower pace!)
    
    When/if he actually goes back to the OTAN, I’ll see how people feel about continuing here, and we’ll give it a go. And if it dies? It dies. We’ll always have Paris! Or something.
carlosthedwarf
/ August 16, 2010

Douthat’s NYT column today made me wonder: Why is he respected when the man he replaced, Kristol, was laughed at and run out of the Times on a rail? Is there any substantive difference between the amount of xenophobic cray-cray they spout?
emilylhauser
/ August 16, 2010

Y’all might want to check out the Pakistan flood thread – there’s some good information there that I wouldn’t have begun to know how to gather if Mr. Tambourine Man hadn’t come along and offered it straight up!

Pakistan and repairing the world.
dmf
/ August 16, 2010

http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2010-08-16/religious-leaders-islam-america
dmf
/ August 17, 2010

maybe we should just do away with press conferences:
emilylhauser
/ August 17, 2010

NEW OPEN THREAD NOW OPEN: https://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2010/08/17/open-thread-81710/#comment-2244