The Well-Tended Bookshelf

Essay
The Well-Tended Bookshelf

By LAURA MILLER
Published: November 28, 2008
In order to have the walls of my diminutive apartment scraped and repainted, I recently had to heap all of my possessions in the center of the room. The biggest obstacle was my library. Despite what I like to think of as a rigorous “one book in, one book out” policy, it had begun to metastasize quietly in corners, with volumes squeezed on top of the taller cabinets and in the horizontal crannies left above the spines of books that had been properly shelved. It was time to cull.

I am not a collector or a pack rat, unlike a colleague of mine who once expressed the fear that he might perish someday under a toppled pile of books and papers, like a woman whose obituary he once read. I was baffled the first time a friend explained to me that the book in my hand was his “reading copy,” while the “collection copy” resided upstairs, in some impenetrable sanctum. Having reviewed hundreds of books over the past 20-some years, I no longer subscribe to the notion that I have a vague journalistic responsibility to keep a copy of every title I have ever written about. I am not sentimental.

Nevertheless, things had gotten out of hand. The renovations forced me to pull every copy off every shelf and ask: Do I really want this? I filled four or five cartons with volumes destined for libraries, used-book stores and the recycling bin, and as I did so, certain criteria emerged.

There are two general schools of thought on which books to keep, as I learned once I began swapping stories with friends and acquaintances. The first views the bookshelf as a self-portrait, a reflection of the owner’s intellect, imagination, taste and accomplishments. “I’ve read ‘The Magic Mountain,’ ” it says, and “I love Alice Munro.” For others, especially those with literary careers, a personal library can be “emotional and totemic,” in the words of the agent Ira Silverberg. Books become stand-ins for friends and clients. Silverberg cherishes the copy of Céline given to him when he was 19 by William Burroughs, while “people I’ve stopped talking to go out immediately. There are people whose books I refuse to live with.”

The other approach views a book collection less as a testimony to the past than as a repository for the future; it’s where you put the books you intend to read. “I like to keep something on my shelf for every mood that might strike,” said Marisa Bowe, a nonprofit consultant and an editor of “Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs.” At its most pragmatic, and with the aid of technology, this attitude can be breathtakingly ruthless. Lisa Palac, a freelance writer, and Andrew Rice, a public relations executive, ultimately chose their beloved but snug house in Venice, Calif., over their library. “We’d been lugging these books around for years, and why?” Palac wrote in an e-mail message. Her husband said, “Do we really need to keep that copy of ‘The Scarlet Letter’ from college on hand? I can order up another copy online and have it tomorrow if I need it.” They kept only one carton of books apiece, donating the rest to a fund-raising bazaar for their son’s school.

Older people, curiously enough, seem to favor the less nostalgic approach. When you’re young and still constructing an identity, the physical emblems of your inner life appear more essential, and if you’re single, your bookshelves provide a way of advertising your discernment to potential mates. I’ve met readers who have jettisoned whole categories of titles — theology, say, or poststructuralist theory — that they once considered desperately important. Most of them express no regrets, although Nicholson Baker, who wrote an entire book protesting the “weeding” of books and periodicals from American libraries, still mourns the collection of science fiction paperbacks he discarded in his youth. “I’m not good at it,” Baker wrote in an e-mail message when asked about his own culling. “When I’m doing research, I buy lots of used, out-of-print books, preferably with under­lining and torn covers. I like watching them pile up on the stairs.”

For the most part, I’ve been pragmatic in my purging, and for years reference books were the most likely survivors. I needed them for work, for those occasions when I suddenly had to know at what age Faulkner published “Absalom, Absalom” (39) or the name of the Greek muse of lyric poetry (Euterpe). Now the Internet can tell me all that. Apart from the rare reference that’s worth reading in its own right, like David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film, these titles have been drifting away as the trust I’m willing to put in Wikipedia gradually equalizes with the faith I’ve invested in, say, Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia. (It doesn’t help that reference books tend to be shelf hogs.)

Nevertheless, most of the nonfiction I’ve kept consists of books I’ve already read and know I’m likely to refer to in my own writing. Richard Holmes’s biography of Coleridge has come in handy for more than one project, as has Carol J. Clover’s study of slasher films, “Men, Women, and Chainsaws.” In fiction, on the other hand, apart from a few choice favorites, the list is weighted toward classics I optimistically plan to get around to someday. Like John Irving, I hold one substantial unread Dickens novel (“Barnaby Rudge”) in reserve, for emergencies. This method has its pitfalls. The novelist Jonathan Franzen used to limit the unread books on his shelves to no more than 50 percent of the total. “The weight of those books seemed to represent a standing reproach to me of how little I was reading,” he said in a phone interview. “I want to be surrounded by books I love, although now sometimes I worry that it’s too familiar, what I see when I look around me, that it’s become a sort of narcissistic mirror.”

When it comes to novels, I’m probably too sanguine about what my future can accommodate. “Eventually the truth hits home,” Brian Drolet, a television producer in New York, told me. “As the actuarial tables advance, the number of books you’ve got time to read diminishes.” Dr. Johnson once said of second marriages that they represent the triumph of hope over experience. So, too, do my bookshelves. I have turned out to be less rational about this than I thought, and have made my library into a charm against mortality. As long as I have a few unread books beckoning to me from across the room, I tell myself I can always find a little more time.

Back to Law & Order in the US

By ROGER COHEN
Published: November 26, 2008
It’s Thanksgiving. I’m thankful for many things right now, despite the stock market, and first among them is the fact that the next U.S. commander in chief is a constitutional law expert and former law professor.

Before I get to why, allow me to add two other reasons for thankfulness. The first is that Barack Obama is a man of sufficient self-confidence to entrust the critical job of secretary of state to his former rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton. She has the strength and focus to produce results.
The second is that he’s a man of sufficient good sense to retain the remarkable Robert Gates as defense secretary.

President Bush had one overriding criterion in choosing his inner circle: loyalty. The result was nobody would pull the plug on stupidity. Obama wants the kind of competence and brainpower that challenge him. The God-gut decision-making of The Decider got us in this mess. Getting out of it will require an Oval Office where smart dissent is prized.

But back to the law, which is what defines the United States, for it is a nation of laws. Or was until Bush, in the aftermath of 9/11, unfurled what the late historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called “the most dramatic, sustained and radical challenge to the rule of law in American history.”

There is no need to rehearse here the whole sordid history of the Bush administration’s work on Vice President Dick Cheney’s “dark side:” the “enhanced” interrogation techniques in “black sites” outside the United States justified by invocation of a “new paradigm” that rendered the Geneva Conventions “quaint.”

When governments veer onto the dark side, language always goes murky. Direct speech makes dirty deeds too clear. A new paradigm sounds bland enough. What it meant was trashing habeas corpus.

The facts speak for themselves. This month, almost seven years after detainees began arriving at Guantánamo Bay on Jan. 11, 2002, a verdict was handed down in the first hearing on the government’s evidence for holding so-called unlawful enemy combatants at the U.S. naval base in Cuba.

Yes, this was the first hearing in a habeas corpus case, so long has the legal battle been to get to this point, and so stubborn has the administration been in seeking to keep Guantánamo detainees out of reach of civilian courts.

Judge Richard J. Leon of Federal District Court in Washington ruled that five Algerian men had been unlawfully held at Guantánamo and ordered their release. He said: “Seven years of waiting for our legal system to give them an answer to a question so important is, in my judgment, more than plenty.”

Of the 770 detainees grabbed here and there and flown to Guantánamo, only 23 have ever been charged with a crime. Of the more than 500 so far released, many traumatized by those “enhanced” techniques, not one has received an apology or compensation for their season in hell.
What they got on release was a single piece of paper from the American government. A U.S. official met one of the dozens of Afghans now released from Guantánamo and was so appalled by this document that he forwarded me a copy.

Dated Oct. 7, 2006, it reads as follows:
“An Administrative Review Board has reviewed the information about you that was talked about at the meeting on 02 December 2005 and the deciding official in the United States has made a decision about what will happen to you. You will be sent to the country of Afghanistan. Your departure will occur as soon as possible.”

That’s it, the one and only record on paper of protracted U.S. incarceration: three sentences for four years of a young Afghan’s life, written in language Orwell would have recognized.

We have “the deciding official,” not an officer, general or judge. We have “the information about you,” not allegations, or accusations, let alone charges. We have “a decision about what will happen to you,” not a judgment, ruling or verdict. This is the lexicon of totalitarianism. It is acutely embarrassing to the United States.

That is why I am thankful above all that the next U.S. commander in chief is a constitutional lawyer. Nothing has been more damaging to the United States than the violation of the legal principles at the heart of the American idea.

As well as closing Guantánamo, Obama should set up an independent commission to investigate what happened there, as suggested in a fine recent report, “Guantánamo and its Aftermath,” from the University of California, Berkeley. Only then will “deciding officials” become identifiable human beings who can, if necessary be judged.

Obama should also ensure that former detainees receive an apology and compensation. An
American official showing up, envelope in hand, at some dusty Afghan compound and delivering U.S. contrition and cash to a man whose life has been ravaged by U.S. abuse, will in the long term make the United States safer.

Give thanks on this day for the law. It’s what stands between the shining city on a hill and the dark side.

A Good Summary of Bush

Here is a good summary of our lameduck President by Joe Klein. I would only add that Bush is a typical Republican in his arrogance, ignorance, and ineptitude.

* * * * * * *

We have "only one President at a time," Barack Obama said in his debut press conference as President-elect. Normally, that would be a safe assumption — but we're learning not to assume anything as the charcoal-dreary economic winter approaches. By mid-November, with the financial crisis growing worse by the day, it had become obvious that one President was no longer enough (at least not the President we had). So, in the days before Thanksgiving, Obama began to move — if not to take charge outright, then at least to preview what things will be like when he does take over in January. He became a more public presence, taking questions from the press three days in a row. He named his economic team. He promised an enormous stimulus package that would somehow create 2.5 million new jobs, and began to maneuver the new Congress toward having the bill ready for him to sign — in a dramatic ceremony, no doubt — as soon as he assumes office.

That we have slightly more than one President for the moment is mostly a consequence of the extraordinary economic times. Even if George Washington were the incumbent, the markets would want to know what John Adams was planning to do after his Inauguration. And yet this final humiliation seems particularly appropriate for George W. Bush. At the end of a presidency of stupefying ineptitude, he has become the lamest of all possible ducks. (See TIME's best pictures of Barack Obama.)

It is in the nature of mainstream journalism to attempt to be kind to Presidents when they are coming and going but to be fiercely skeptical in between. I've been feeling sorry for Bush lately, a feeling partly induced by recent fictional depictions of the President as an amiable lunkhead in Oliver Stone's W. and in Curtis Sittenfeld's terrific novel American Wife. There was a photo in the New York Times that seemed to sum up his current circumstance: Bush in Peru, dressed in an alpaca poncho, standing alone just after the photo op at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, with various Asian leaders departing the stage, none of them making eye contact with him. Bush has that forlorn what-the-hell-happened? expression on his face, the one that has marked his presidency at difficult times. You never want to see the President of the United States looking like that.

So I've been searching for valedictory encomiums. His position on immigration was admirable and courageous; he was right about the Dubai Ports deal and about free trade in general. He spoke well, in the abstract, about the importance of freedom. He is an impeccable classicist when it comes to baseball. And that just about does it for me. I'd add the bracing moment of Bush with the bullhorn in the ruins of the World Trade Center, but that was neutered in my memory by his ridiculous, preening appearance in a flight suit on the deck of the aircraft carrier beneath the "Mission Accomplished" sign. The flight-suit image is one of the two defining moments of the Bush failure. The other is the photo of Bush staring out the window of Air Force One, helplessly viewing the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina. This is a presidency that has wobbled between those two poles — overweening arrogance and paralytic incompetence.

The latter has held sway these past few months as the economy has crumbled. It is too early to rate the performance of Bush's economic team, but we have more than enough evidence to say, definitively, that at a moment when there was a vast national need for reassurance, the President himself was a cipher. Yes, he's a lame duck with an Antarctic approval rating — but can you imagine Bill Clinton going so gently into the night? There are substantive gestures available to a President that do not involve the use of force or photo ops. For example, Bush could have boosted the public spirit — and the auto industry — by announcing that he was scrapping the entire federal automotive fleet, including the presidential limousine, and replacing it with hybrids made in Detroit. He could have jump-started — and he still could — the Obama plan by releasing funds for a green-jobs program to insulate public buildings. He could start funding the transit projects already approved by Congress.

In the end, though, it will not be the creative paralysis that defines Bush. It will be his intellectual laziness, at home and abroad. Bush never understood, or cared about, the delicate balance between freedom and regulation that was necessary to make markets work. He never understood, or cared about, the delicate balance between freedom and equity that was necessary to maintain the strong middle class required for both prosperity and democracy. He never considered the complexities of the cultures he was invading. He never understood that faith, unaccompanied by rigorous skepticism, is a recipe for myopia and foolishness. He is less than President now, and that is appropriate. He was never very much of one.

Screen Literacy vs. Print Literacy

From the NY Times


By KEVIN KELLY
Published: November 21, 2008

Everywhere we look, we see screens. The other day I watched clips from a movie as I pumped gas into my car. The other night I saw a movie on the backseat of a plane. We will watch anywhere. Screens playing video pop up in the most unexpected places — like A.T.M. machines and supermarket checkout lines and tiny phones; some movie fans watch entire films in between calls. These ever-present screens have created an audience for very short moving pictures, as brief as three minutes, while cheap digital creation tools have empowered a new generation of filmmakers, who are rapidly filling up those screens. We are headed toward screen ubiquity.

Video Citing: TimeTube, on the Web, gives a genealogy of the most popular videos and their descendants, and charts their popularity in time-line form.

When technology shifts, it bends the culture. Once, long ago, culture revolved around the spoken word. The oral skills of memorization, recitation and rhetoric instilled in societies a reverence for the past, the ambiguous, the ornate and the subjective. Then, about 500 years ago, orality was overthrown by technology. Gutenberg’s invention of metallic movable type elevated writing into a central position in the culture. By the means of cheap and perfect copies, text became the engine of change and the foundation of stability. From printing came journalism, science and the mathematics of libraries and law. The distribution-and-display device that we call printing instilled in society a reverence for precision (of black ink on white paper), an appreciation for linear logic (in a sentence), a passion for objectivity (of printed fact) and an allegiance to authority (via authors), whose truth was as fixed and final as a book. In the West, we became people of the book.

Now invention is again overthrowing the dominant media. A new distribution-and-display technology is nudging the book aside and catapulting images, and especially moving images, to the center of the culture. We are becoming people of the screen. The fluid and fleeting symbols on a screen pull us away from the classical notions of monumental authors and authority. On the screen, the subjective again trumps the objective. The past is a rush of data streams cut and rearranged into a new mashup, while truth is something you assemble yourself on your own screen as you jump from link to link. We are now in the middle of a second Gutenberg shift — from book fluency to screen fluency, from literacy to visuality.

The overthrow of the book would have happened long ago but for the great user asymmetry inherent in all media. It is easier to read a book than to write one; easier to listen to a song than to compose one; easier to attend a play than to produce one. But movies in particular suffer from this user asymmetry. The intensely collaborative work needed to coddle chemically treated film and paste together its strips into movies meant that it was vastly easier to watch a movie than to make one. A Hollywood blockbuster can take a million person-hours to produce and only two hours to consume. But now, cheap and universal tools of creation (megapixel phone cameras, Photoshop, iMovie) are quickly reducing the effort needed to create moving images. To the utter bafflement of the experts who confidently claimed that viewers would never rise from their reclining passivity, tens of millions of people have in recent years spent uncountable hours making movies of their own design. Having a ready and reachable audience of potential millions helps, as does the choice of multiple modes in which to create. Because of new consumer gadgets, community training, peer encouragement and fiendishly clever software, the ease of making video now approaches the ease of writing.

This is not how Hollywood makes films, of course. A blockbuster film is a gigantic creature custom-built by hand. Like a Siberian tiger, it demands our attention — but it is also very rare.

In 2007, 600 feature films were released in the United States, or about 1,200 hours of moving images. As a percentage of the hundreds of millions of hours of moving images produced annually today, 1,200 hours is tiny. It is a rounding error.

We tend to think the tiger represents the animal kingdom, but in truth, a grasshopper is a truer statistical example of an animal. The handcrafted Hollywood film won’t go away, but if we want to see the future of motion pictures, we need to study the swarming food chain below — YouTube, indie films, TV serials and insect-scale lip-sync mashups — and not just the tiny apex of tigers. The bottom is where the action is, and where screen literacy originates.

An emerging set of cheap tools is now making it easy to create digital video. There were more than 10 billion views of video on YouTube in September. The most popular videos were watched as many times as any blockbuster movie. Many are mashups of existing video material. Most vernacular video makers start with the tools of Movie Maker or iMovie, or with Web-based video editing software like Jumpcut. They take soundtracks found online, or recorded in their bedrooms, cut and reorder scenes, enter text and then layer in a new story or novel point of view. Remixing commercials is rampant. A typical creation might artfully combine the audio of a Budweiser “Wassup” commercial with visuals from “The Simpsons” (or the Teletubbies or “Lord of the Rings”). Recutting movie trailers allows unknown auteurs to turn a comedy into a horror flick, or vice versa.

Rewriting video can even become a kind of collective sport. Hundreds of thousands of passionate anime fans around the world (meeting online, of course) remix Japanese animated cartoons. They clip the cartoons into tiny pieces, some only a few frames long, then rearrange them with video editing software and give them new soundtracks and music, often with English dialogue. This probably involves far more work than was required to edit the original cartoon but far less work than editing a clip a decade ago. The new videos, called Anime Music Videos, tell completely new stories. The real achievement in this subculture is to win the Iron Editor challenge. Just as in the TV cookoff contest “Iron Chef,” the Iron Editor must remix videos in real time in front of an audience while competing with other editors to demonstrate superior visual literacy. The best editors can remix video as fast as you might type.

In fact, the habits of the mashup are borrowed from textual literacy. You cut and paste words on a page. You quote verbatim from an expert. You paraphrase a lovely expression. You add a layer of detail found elsewhere. You borrow the structure from one work to use as your own. You move frames around as if they were phrases.

Digital technology gives the professional a new language as well. An image stored on a memory disc instead of celluloid film has a plasticity that allows it to be manipulated as if the picture were words rather than a photo. Hollywood mavericks like George Lucas have embraced digital technology and pioneered a more fluent way of filmmaking. In his “Star Wars” films, Lucas devised a method of moviemaking that has more in common with the way books and paintings are made than with traditional cinematography.

In classic cinematography, a film is planned out in scenes; the scenes are filmed (usually more than once); and from a surfeit of these captured scenes, a movie is assembled. Sometimes a director must go back for “pickup” shots if the final story cannot be told with the available film. With the new screen fluency enabled by digital technology, however, a movie scene is something more flexible: it is like a writer’s paragraph, constantly being revised. Scenes are not captured (as in a photo) but built up incrementally. Layers of visual and audio refinement are added over a crude outline of the motion, the mix constantly in flux, always changeable. George Lucas’s last “Star Wars” movie was layered up in this writerly way. He took the action “Jedis clashing swords — no background” and laid it over a synthetic scene of a bustling marketplace, itself blended from many tiny visual parts. Light sabers and other effects were digitally painted in later, layer by layer. In this way, convincing rain, fire and clouds can be added in additional layers with nearly the same kind of freedom with which Lucas might add “it was a dark and stormy night” while writing the script. Not a single frame of the final movie was left untouched by manipulation.

In the recent live-action feature movie “Speed Racer,” while not a box-office hit, took this style of filmmaking even further. The spectacle of an alternative suburbia was created by borrowing from a database of existing visual items and assembling them into background, midground and foreground. Pink flowers came from one photo source, a bicycle from another archive, a generic house roof from yet another. Computers do the hard work of keeping these pieces, no matter how tiny and partial they are, in correct perspective and alignment, even as they move. The result is a film assembled from a million individual existing images. In most films, these pieces are handmade, but increasingly, as in “Speed Racer,” they can be found elsewhere.

In the great hive-mind of image creation, something similar is already happening with still photographs. Every minute, thousands of photographers are uploading their latest photos on the Web site Flickr. The more than three billion photos posted to the site so far cover any subject you can imagine; I have not yet been able to stump the site with a request. Flickr offers more than 200,000 images of the Golden Gate Bridge alone. Every conceivable angle, lighting condition and point of view of the Golden Gate Bridge has been photographed and posted. If you want to use an image of the bridge in your video or movie, there is really no reason to take a new picture of this bridge. It’s been done. All you need is a really easy way to find it.

Similar advances have taken place with 3D models. On Google SketchUp’s 3D Warehouse, you can find insanely detailed three-dimensional virtual models of most major building structures of the world. Need a street in San Francisco? Here’s a filmable virtual set. With powerful search and specification tools, high-resolution clips of any bridge in the world can be circulated into the common visual dictionary for reuse. Out of these ready-made “words,” a film can be assembled, mashed up from readily available parts. The rich databases of component images form a new grammar for moving images.

After all, this is how authors work. We dip into a finite set of established words, called a dictionary, and reassemble these found words into articles, novels and poems that no one has ever seen before. The joy is recombining them. Indeed it is a rare author who is forced to invent new words. Even the greatest writers do their magic primarily by rearranging formerly used, commonly shared ones. What we do now with words, we’ll soon do with images.

For directors who speak this new cinematographic language, even the most photo-realistic scenes are tweaked, remade and written over frame by frame. Filmmaking is thus liberated from the stranglehold of photography. Gone is the frustrating method of trying to capture reality with one or two takes of expensive film and then creating your fantasy from whatever you get. Here reality, or fantasy, is built up one pixel at a time as an author would build a novel one word at a time. Photography champions the world as it is, whereas this new screen mode, like writing and painting, is engineered to explore the world as it might be.

But merely producing movies with ease is not enough for screen fluency, just as producing books with ease on Gutenberg’s press did not fully unleash text. Literacy also required a long list of innovations and techniques that permit ordinary readers and writers to manipulate text in ways that make it useful. For instance, quotation symbols make it simple to indicate where one has borrowed text from another writer. Once you have a large document, you need a table of contents to find your way through it. That requires page numbers. Somebody invented them (in the 13th century). Longer texts require an alphabetic index, devised by the Greeks and later developed for libraries of books. Footnotes, invented in about the 12th century, allow tangential information to be displayed outside the linear argument of the main text. And bibliographic citations (invented in the mid-1500s) enable scholars and skeptics to systematically consult sources. These days, of course, we have hyperlinks, which connect one piece of text to another, and tags, which categorize a selected word or phrase for later sorting.

All these inventions (and more) permit any literate person to cut and paste ideas, annotate them with her own thoughts, link them to related ideas, search through vast libraries of work, browse subjects quickly, resequence texts, refind material, quote experts and sample bits of beloved artists. These tools, more than just reading, are the foundations of literacy.

If text literacy meant being able to parse and manipulate texts, then the new screen fluency means being able to parse and manipulate moving images with the same ease. But so far, these “reader” tools of visuality have not made their way to the masses. For example, if I wanted to visually compare the recent spate of bank failures with similar events by referring you to the bank run in the classic movie “It’s a Wonderful Life,” there is no easy way to point to that scene with precision. (Which of several sequences did I mean, and which part of them?) I can do what I just did and mention the movie title. But even online I cannot link from this sentence to those “passages” in an online movie. We don’t have the equivalent of a hyperlink for film yet. With true screen fluency, I’d be able to cite specific frames of a film, or specific items in a frame.

Perhaps I am a historian interested in oriental dress, and I want to refer to a fez worn by someone in the movie “Casablanca.” I should be able to refer to the fez itself (and not the head it is on) by linking to its image as it “moves” across many frames, just as I can easily link to a printed reference of the fez in text. Or even better, I’d like to annotate the fez in the film with other film clips of fezzes as references.

With full-blown visuality, I should be able to annotate any object, frame or scene in a motion picture with any other object, frame or motion-picture clip. I should be able to search the visual index of a film, or peruse a visual table of contents, or scan a visual abstract of its full length. But how do you do all these things? How can we browse a film the way we browse a book?

It took several hundred years for the consumer tools of text literacy to crystallize after the invention of printing, but the first visual-literacy tools are already emerging in research labs and on the margins of digital culture. Take, for example, the problem of browsing a feature-length movie. One way to scan a movie would be to super-fast-forward through the two hours in a few minutes. Another way would be to digest it into an abbreviated version in the way a theatrical-movie trailer might. Both these methods can compress the time from hours to minutes. But is there a way to reduce the contents of a movie into imagery that could be grasped quickly, as we might see in a table of contents for a book?

Academic research has produced a few interesting prototypes of video summaries but nothing that works for entire movies. Some popular Web sites with huge selections of movies (like porn sites) have devised a way for users to scan through the content of full movies quickly in a few seconds. When a user clicks the title frame of a movie, the window skips from one key frame to the next, making a rapid slide show, like a flip book of the movie. The abbreviated slide show visually summarizes a few-hour film in a few seconds. Expert software can be used to identify the key frames in a film in order to maximize the effectiveness of the summary.

The holy grail of visuality is to search the library of all movies the way Google can search the Web. Everyone is waiting for a tool that would allow them to type key terms, say “bicycle + dog,” which would retrieve scenes in any film featuring a dog and a bicycle. In an instant you could locate the moment in “The Wizard of Oz” when the witchy Miss Gulch rides off with Toto. Google can instantly pinpoint desirable documents out of billions on the Web because computers can read text, but computers are only starting to learn how to read images.

The New York Review of Books

My first issue came yesterday compliments of Freddy. A subscription to this hallowed book review was Freddy's October birthday present. I am so thankful because this is a GREAT publication.

I admit I was confused in that I thought this was the same thing as the NY Times book review that I read regularly online. But no, it's not the same thing.

This is the premier book review in the country. Now I can say that I am REALLy keeping up with the publishing world.

Here is what I like about my inaugural issue.

There are 3 pieces on Robert Frost. I have long wanted to study his poetry.

There is an article by George Soros on the current economic crisis.

There is an article by James McPherson reviewing two books on Lincoln and racial and ethnic pluralism.

There is other marvelous stuff as well. I look forward to spending considerable time with this publication as it comes in.

Thanks, Freddy, for such a tremendous gift.

Alert! President-Elect Speaks in Complete Sentences

This is just shocking! Shocking I tell you….just shocking! (This is from my friend Paul Durantini who lives in Los Angeles)

Obama's Use of Complete Sentences Stirs Controversy

In the first two weeks since the election, President-elect Barack Obama has broken with a tradition established over the past eight years through his controversial use of complete sentences, political observers say.

Millions of Americans who watched Mr. Obama's appearance on CBS' "Sixty Minutes" on Sunday witnessed the president-elect's unorthodox verbal tick, which had Mr. Obama employing grammatically correct sentences virtually every time he opened his mouth.

But Mr. Obama's decision to use complete sentences in his public pronouncements carries with it certain risks, since after the last eight years many Americans may find his odd speaking style jarring.

According to presidential historian Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota, some Americans might find it "alienating" to have a President who speaks English as if it were his first language.

"Every time Obama opens his mouth, his subjects and verbs are in agreement," says Mr. Logsdon. "If he keeps it up, he is running the risk of sounding like an elitist."

The historian said that if Mr. Obama insists on using complete sentences in his speeches, the public may find itself saying, "Okay, subject, predicate, subject predicate - we get it, stop showing off."

The President-elect's stubborn insistence on using complete sentences has already attracted a rebuke from one of his harshest critics, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska.

"Talking with complete sentences there and also too talking in a way that ordinary Americans like Joe the Plumber and Tito the Builder can't really do there, I think needing to do that isn't tapping into what Americans are needing also," she said.

The New King of Poker (from Time magazine)

Back in July, nearly 7,000 players gathered in Las Vegas for the 2008 World Series of Poker's championship event — a $10,000 buy-in elimination tournament known as the most lucrative and prestigious event in professional poker. Last week, after a 117-day recess, 22-year-old Danish pro Peter Eastgate captured the title, defeating 27-year-old Russian Ivan Demidov by turning a straight on the final hand to beat Demidov's two pairs. Eastgate, the youngest main event champion in history, earned $9.1 million for his efforts—the second largest prize the tournament has ever doled out. On his way back to Europe, he caught up with TIME for a brief phone interview.

How have you been celebrating?

In the immediate hours after the win, I celebrated with my friends and family. But we kept it pretty calm and relaxing because I was kind of exhausted after playing 18 hours of poker over two days.

How did you manage to maintain your composure and focus with so many cameras in your face and so much money on the line?

The money on the line was my motivation. It was what kept me focused.

It didn't make you nervous?

No.

This year, for the first time, there was a four-month delay before the final table was played. How did you use that period to strategize and prepare?

I didn't do that much preparation for my opponents. I got the information that I could collect about the other guys. I tried to search for information online and watched the ESPN tapes. But you're really not getting that much out of that kind of information. It's really about being prepared mentally for playing for a lot of money and a prestigious title. You have three or four months, and mentally, I just got into the right mindset so that I wasn't nervous at the final table.
Did you come in with a strategy or did you plan on taking cues from your opponents and adjusting?

I didn't have any kind of real preset strategy. I wanted to see how they played, and combat it the best way I could.

In your path through the tournament, were there one or two key hands/moments that got you on track?

I had a lot of major hands. Obviously there was the hand with Tiffany Michelle. [With 18 players remaining, Eastgate won a pot of nearly 10 million chips holding a pair of aces against Michelle's ace and jack.] There was the hand with Dennis Phillips at the final table on the K-2-2 flop. [With six players remaining, Phillips bet 7 million and Eastgate, holding pocket aces, moved all-in for 22 million. Phillips folded, giving Eastgate the chip lead.] You have also some of the folds that you don't see on the ESPN tapes, and situations where I made the right folds and my opponent didn't show me their hands. When I talked to the other guys after, they told me I had made the correct fold. So there are a lot of key points. But basically, folding at the right time and getting good setups at the right time is key, as well as big hands you win.

Who was the toughest player you went up against? Any big-name pros, or was it someone you just had trouble reading throughout the tournament?

Ivan [Demidov, the runner-up] was one of the toughest players. He played a very good final table as well; he's a really tough player. There are a lot of tough guys. Later on in the tournament, there were so many really solid players, and very few bad players.

So what's your background in poker?

I've been playing about two years professionally. More than four years total.

That's a pretty steep learning curve. How did you reach the top so fast?

For the first two years, I played poker as a hobby. I was very fascinated by the game. I put a lot of hours and hands into it. But I didn't get into poker with a serious approach, which means reading books, reading online forums, learning all the fundamentals before you start off. I kind of just learned by doing.

What do you consider your biggest strength?

I'm pretty good at looking at the psychological aspects of the game. You need to consider what your opponent is thinking. You should always try to get into your opponent's mindset, and if you can get a regular idea about how he's thinking, you have a huge edge in the match, because you're always one step ahead of him. You're thinking how he's thinking.

It sounds like you have more of an intuitive approach to making decisions than a math-based one.

Yeah, kind of.

You're a 22-year-old who's come into $9 million. What luxuries are you're going to indulge in?
I'll be traveling a lot and eating well. I feel very good about being able to treat my family and friends very good. I don't know what things I'll be buying specifically. But I look forward to treating my friends and family very well.

The New Liberal Order

This article by Peter Beinart, editor of The New Republic, explains well the historical perspective on the coming Obama administration and the chance for a new and long-awaited progressive movement. It is perfectly symbolic that the death and rebirth of American liberalism began in the same place in Chicago.


The New Liberal Order
By Peter Beinart Thursday, Nov. 13, 2008

The death and rebirth of American liberalism both began with flags in Grant Park. On Aug. 28, 1968, 10,000 people gathered there to protest the Democratic Convention taking place a few blocks away, which was about to nominate Lyndon Johnson's Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, thus implicitly ratifying the hated Vietnam War. Chicago mayor Richard Daley had warned the protesters not to disrupt his city and denied them permits to assemble, but they came anyway. All afternoon, the protesters chanted and the police hovered, until about 3:30, when someone climbed a flagpole and began lowering the American flag.

Police went to arrest the offender and were pelted with eggs, chunks of concrete and balloons filled with paint and urine. The police responded by charging into the crowd, clubbing bystanders and yelling "Kill! Kill!" in what one report later termed a "police riot." Across the country, Americans watching on television gave their verdict: Serves the damn hippies right. Democrats, who had won seven of the previous nine presidential elections, went on to lose seven of the next 10.

Forty years later, happy liberals mobbed Grant Park, invited by another mayor named Richard Daley, to celebrate Barack Obama's election. This time the flags flew proudly at full mast, and the police were there to protect the crowd, not threaten it. Once again, Americans watched on television, and this time they didn't seethe. They wept. (See pictures of Obama's Grant Park celebrations.)

The distance between those two Grant Park scenes says a lot about how American liberalism fell, and why in the Obama era it could become — once again — America's ruling creed. The coalition that carried Obama to victory is every bit as sturdy as America's last two dominant political coalitions: the ones that elected Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. And the Obama majority is sturdy for one overriding reason: liberalism, which average Americans once associated with upheaval, now promises stability instead.

The Search for Order In America, political majorities live or die at the intersection of two public yearnings: for freedom and for order. A century ago, in the Progressive Era, modern American liberalism was born, in historian Robert Wiebe's words, as a "search for order." America's giant industrial monopolies, the progressives believed, were turning capitalism into a jungle, a wild and lawless place where only the strong and savage survived. By the time Roosevelt took office during the Great Depression, the entire ecosystem appeared to be in a death spiral, with Americans crying out for government to take control. F.D.R. did — juicing the economy with unprecedented amounts of government cash, creating new protections for the unemployed and the elderly, and imposing rules for how industry was to behave. Conservatives wailed that economic freedom was under assault, but most ordinary Americans thanked God that Washington was securing their bank deposits, helping labor unions boost their wages, giving them a pension when they retired and pumping money into the economy to make sure it never fell into depression again. They didn't feel unfree; they felt secure. For three and a half decades, from the mid-1930s through the '60s, government imposed order on the market. The jungle of American capitalism became a well-tended garden, a safe and pleasant place for ordinary folks to stroll. Americans responded by voting for F.D.R.-style liberalism — which even most Republican politicians came to accept — in election after election. (Read a TIME cover story on F.D.R.)

By the beginning of the 1960s, though, liberalism was becoming a victim of its own success. The post-World War II economic boom flooded America's colleges with the children of a rising middle class, and it was those children, who had never experienced life on an economic knife-edge, who began to question the status quo, the tidy, orderly society F.D.R. had built. For blacks in the South, they noted, order meant racial apartheid. For many women, it meant confinement to the home. For everyone, it meant stifling conformity, a society suffocated by rules about how people should dress, pray, imbibe and love. In 1962, Students for a Democratic Society spoke for what would become a new, baby-boom generation "bred in at least modest comfort," which wanted less order and more freedom. And it was this movement for racial, sexual and cultural liberation that bled into the movement against Vietnam and assembled in August 1968 in Grant Park.

Traditional liberalism died there because Americans — who had once associated it with order — came to associate it with disorder instead. For a vast swath of the white working class, racial freedom came to mean riots and crime; sexual freedom came to mean divorce; and cultural freedom came to mean disrespect for family, church and flag. Richard Nixon and later Reagan won the presidency by promising a new order: not economic but cultural, not the taming of the market but the taming of the street.

The Receding RightFlash forward to the evening of Nov. 4, and you can see why liberalism has sprung back to life. Ideologically, the crowds who assembled to hear Obama on election night were linear descendants of those egg throwers four decades before. They too believe in racial equality, gay rights, feminism, civil liberties and people's right to follow their own star. But 40 years later, those ideas no longer seem disorderly. Crime is down and riots nonexistent; feminism is so mainstream that even Sarah Palin embraces the term; Chicago mayor Richard Daley, son of the man who told police to bash heads, marches in gay-rights parades. Culturally, liberalism isn't that scary anymore. Younger Americans — who voted overwhelmingly for Obama — largely embrace the legacy of the '60s, and yet they constitute one of the most obedient, least rebellious generations in memory. The culture war is ending because cultural freedom and cultural order — the two forces that faced off in Chicago in 1968 — have turned out to be reconcilable after all.

The disorder that panics Americans now is not cultural but economic. If liberalism collapsed in the 1960s because its bid for cultural freedom became associated with cultural disorder, conservatism has collapsed today because its bid for economic freedom has become associated with economic disorder. When Reagan took power in 1981, he vowed to restore the economic liberty that a half-century of F.D.R.-style government intrusion had stifled. American capitalism had become so thoroughly domesticated, he argued, that it lost its capacity for dynamic growth. For a time, a majority of Americans agreed. Taxes and regulations were cut and cut again, and for the most part, the economic pie grew. In the 1980s and '90s, the garden of American capitalism became a pretty energetic place. But it became a scarier place too. In the newly deregulated American economy, fewer people had job security or fixed-benefit pensions or reliable health care. Some got rich, but a lot went bankrupt, mostly because of health-care costs. As Yale University political scientist Jacob Hacker has noted, Americans today experience far-more-violent swings in household income than did their parents a generation ago. (See pictures of the 1958 recession.)

Starting in the 1990s, average Americans began deciding that the conservative economic agenda was a bit like the liberal cultural agenda of the 1960s: less liberating than frightening. When the Gingrich Republicans tried to slash Medicare, the public turned on them en masse. A decade later, when George W. Bush tried to partially privatize Social Security, Americans rebelled once again. In 2005 a Pew Research Center survey identified a new group of voters that it called "pro-government conservatives." They were culturally conservative and hawkish on foreign policy, and they overwhelmingly supported Bush in 2004. But by large majorities, they endorsed government regulation and government spending. They didn't want to unleash the free market; they wanted to rein it in.

Those voters were a time bomb in the Republican coalition, which detonated on Nov. 4. John McCain's promises to cut taxes, cut spending and get government out of the way left them cold. Among the almost half of voters who said they were "very worried" that the economic crisis would hurt their family, Obama beat McCain by 26 points. (See pictures of Obama's campaign.)
The public mood on economics today is a lot like the public mood on culture 40 years ago: Americans want government to impose law and order — to keep their 401(k)s from going down, to keep their health-care premiums from going up, to keep their jobs from going overseas — and they don't much care whose heads Washington has to bash to do it.

Seizing the MomentThat is both Obama's great challenge and his great opportunity. If he can do what F.D.R. did — make American capitalism stabler and less savage — he will establish a Democratic majority that dominates U.S. politics for a generation. And despite the daunting problems he inherits, he's got an excellent chance. For one thing, taking aggressive action to stimulate the economy, regulate the financial industry and shore up the American welfare state won't divide his political coalition; it will divide the other side. On domestic economics, Democrats up and down the class ladder mostly agree. Even among Democratic Party economists, the divide that existed during the Clinton years between deficit hawks like Robert Rubin and free spenders like Robert Reich has largely evaporated, as everyone has embraced a bigger government role. Today it's Republicans who — though more unified on cultural issues — are split badly between upscale business types who want government out of the way and pro-government conservatives who want Washington's help. If Obama moves forcefully to restore economic order, the Wall Street Journal will squawk about creeping socialism, as it did in F.D.R.'s day, but many downscale Republicans will cheer. It's these working-class Reagan Democrats who could become tomorrow's Obama Republicans — a key component of a new liberal majority — if he alleviates their economic fears. See pictures of former Presidents Clinton and Bush.
Obama doesn't have to turn the economy around overnight. After all, Roosevelt hadn't ended the Depression by 1936. Obama just needs modest economic improvement by the time he starts running for re-election and an image as someone relentlessly focused on fixing America's economic woes. In allocating his time in his first months as President, he should remember what voters told exit pollsters they cared about most — 63% said the economy. (No other issue even exceeded 10%.)

In politics, crisis often brings opportunity. If Obama restores some measure of economic order, kick-starting U.S. capitalism and softening its hard edges, and if he develops the kind of personal rapport with ordinary Americans that F.D.R. and Reagan had — and he has the communication skills to do it — liberals will probably hold sway in Washington until Sasha and Malia have kids. As that happens, the arguments that have framed economic debate in recent times — for large upper-income tax cuts or the partial privatization of Social Security and Medicare — will fade into irrelevance. In an era of liberal hegemony, they will seem as archaic as defending the welfare system became when conservatives were on top.

A New ConsensusThere are fault lines in the Obama coalition, to be sure. In a two-party system, it's impossible to construct a majority without bringing together people who disagree on big things. But Obama's majority is at least as cohesive as Reagan's or F.D.R.'s. The cultural issues that have long divided Democrats — gay marriage, gun control, abortion — are receding in importance as a post-'60s generation grows to adulthood. Foreign policy doesn't divide Democrats as bitterly as it used to either because, in the wake of Iraq, once-hawkish working-class whites have grown more skeptical of military force. In 2004, 22% of voters told exit pollsters that "moral values" were their top priority, and 19% said terrorism. This year terrorism got 9%, and no social issues even made the list.

The biggest potential land mine in the Obama coalition isn't the culture war or foreign policy; it's nationalism. On a range of issues, from global warming to immigration to trade to torture, college-educated liberals want to integrate more deeply America's economy, society and values with the rest of the world's. They want to make it easier for people and goods to legally cross America's borders, and they want global rules that govern how much America can pollute the atmosphere and how it conducts the war on terrorism. They believe that ceding some sovereignty is essential to making America prosperous, decent and safe. When it comes to free trade, immigration and multilateralism, though, downscale Democrats are more skeptical. In the future, the old struggle between freedom and order may play itself out on a global scale, as liberal internationalists try to establish new rules for a more interconnected planet and working-class nationalists protest that foreign bureaucrats threaten America's freedom.

But that's in the future. If Obama begins restoring order to the economy, Democrats will reap the rewards for a long time. Forty years ago, liberalism looked like the problem in a nation spinning out of control. Today a new version of it may be the solution. It's a very different day in Grant Park.

For Obama and Family, a Personal Transition

BY Peter Baker
New York Times, November 13, 2008

CHICAGO — A couple of weeks ago, Barack Obama headed to the Hyde Park Hair Salon for a trim. He greeted the staff and other customers and plopped down in the same chair in front of the same barber who has cut his hair for the last 14 years.

But when he wanted a trim this week, the Secret Service took one look at the shop’s large plate-glass windows and the gawking tourists eager for a glimpse of the president-elect and the plan quickly changed. If Mr. Obama could no longer come to the barber, the barber would come to him and cut his hair at a friend’s apartment.

Life for the newly chosen president and his family has changed forever. Even the constraints and security of the campaign trail do not compare to the bubble that has enveloped him in the 10 days since his election. Renegade, as the Secret Service calls him, now lives within the strict limits that come with the most powerful office on the planet.

He has chosen to spend this interval before his Jan. 20 inauguration at his home in Hyde Park, which has in some ways been transformed into a secure fortress for his protection. After two years of daily speeches and rallies, he has retreated into an almost hermitlike seclusion, largely hidden from public view and spotted only when he drops his two daughters off for school or goes for a workout at the gymnasium in a friend’s apartment building.

“This is a tremendous personal transition, as well, far beyond what anyone could imagine,” said Alexi Giannoulias, the Illinois state treasurer and a close friend. “Little things, like going to the gym, going to the movies, going to dinner with his wife, none of that will ever be the same again. Things that we take for granted.”

Mr. Obama is putting off the change as much as he can by remaining in Chicago during the transition. “I am not going to be spending too much time in Washington over the next several weeks,” he told someone in a telephone conversation overheard by reporters on his chartered plane heading back to Chicago after a White House visit on Monday.

Indeed, he was on the ground in Washington less than four hours for his tour and talk with President Bush. Mr. Obama has yet to take a vacation since the election, as he works on selecting a White House staff, building a cabinet and formulating policies. But friends and aides said he was also using this time to concentrate on his family before moving to the most famous address in the nation.

The personal considerations coincide with political calculation as well. By remaining in Chicago, it may be easier for him to avoid becoming drawn into decisions by the departing administration and may accentuate the sense of change when he returns to Washington as the new president. He will not be around, for example, for the global economic summit meeting starting Friday, nor for the lame-duck Congressional session next week.

But the trappings of his life are increasingly presidential. Although he does not yet have access to Air Force One, he now rides in an armored government limousine, complete with the war wagon and other motorcade vehicles zipping through red lights with traffic blocked. Although the Secret Service long ago set up concrete barriers around his house here, they expanded their perimeter by several blocks after the election and brought in explosive-sniffing dogs.

“It’s changed,” said Mesha Caudle, 45, who lives a block from the Obamas. “It’s a little inconvenient, just a little, when you have to go around three blocks to go one block. I don’t mind, though, because I got the president I voted for. If the price is a little inconvenience, that’s O.K.”

The Obama house, bought for $1.65 million in 2005, is a stately mansion in the middle of the racially and economically diverse Hyde Park-Kenwood area near the University of Chicago, shielded by trees, not to mention the phalanx of Secret Service agents and Chicago police officers. The neighborhood is a mix of grand homes, aging but well-tended brick houses and dilapidated buildings. Across the street, renovated condominiums start at $190,000. Just blocks away, some houses are boarded up.

Most modern presidents have had a ranch, farm or estate easily isolated from the community around it. Mr. Obama is the first since Richard M. Nixon to be elected while living in a urban neighborhood, and Mr. Nixon soon sold his New York City apartment and retreated during his presidency to exclusive getaways in Florida and California. Mr. Obama, by contrast, is expected to keep his Chicago home.

The streets around Mr. Obama’s home have been closed to outside traffic. Residents show picture identification at checkpoints as officers scan lists of pre-cleared people. The K.A.M. Isaiah Israel synagogue across the street gave the Secret Service a list of 2,000 members and regular visitors, who are checked by metal detectors before services. “It’s actually not as big a deal as it may appear,” said Linda Ross, the temple’s executive director.

A property manager trying to rent $750-a-month apartments three doors down from the Obamas said applicants, janitors and contractors all must be cleared. “The day after he made his speech in Grant Park, things changed dramatically,” said the property manager, whose boss told him not to give his name to reporters. “Before they had Chicago police around his house and it was barricaded. The day he became president-elect, they moved the barricades three blocks out.”

For Mr. Obama, it means no more casually stopping by the Medici for pastries or heading over to Valois for lunch or window shopping with the girls at 57th Street Books, at least not without elaborate preparation. He did manage to take his wife, Michelle, on Saturday night to Spiaggia, a four-star Italian restaurant in downtown Chicago, where the future president loves the wood-roasted scallops.

The Obamas have been going to Spiaggia with its lakefront view for years for what they call “date night,” including on their anniversary last month and Michelle’s birthday earlier this year. “It’s always just the two of them,” said Tony Mantuano, the chef and co-owner. “Now it’s just the two of them and 30 Secret Service agents.”

His day starts with breakfast with his daughters, aides said, and he has taken them to school a few times. For his daily workout, he uses the gymnasium at Regents Park apartment building where his friend, Mike Signator, lives. He later heads to transition offices set up in the Kluczynski Federal Building and receives daily intelligence briefings. He could be interviewing cabinet candidates, but no one will say.

“He seems to be very, very focused on the transition,” said his friend, John W. Rogers Jr. chairman of Ariel Investments, who lent office space to Mr. Obama until the federal space was available. “It doesn’t seem to have changed him at all. He’s the same relaxed, in-control, engaging Barack that he’s always been. I’ve been struck by that, that it hasn’t shifted him.”

Perhaps no one knows that kind of thing more than a man’s barber. Mr. Obama’s barber, Zariff, 44, who goes by one name, went over to Mr. Signator’s apartment on Tuesday to give Mr. Obama his usual $21 cut and said his longtime client still seemed the same. As he walked in, Zariff remembered, he called him “Mr. President,” and Mr. Obama laughed.

“He’s looking a lot more presidential now; he walks a little different,” said Zariff, who himself has become a local celebrity and is thinking about opening a shop in Washington. Mr. Obama is no longer the guy strolling around the neighborhood.

"I think he misses that a lot,” Zariff said. “But that’s the price of fame.”

Sean Wilentz - Andrew Jackson

This slim volume by renowned historian Sean Wilentz will likely become THE quick one-volume reference on the life of Andrew Jackson. This issue is part of Arthur Schlesinger's series on American Presidents.

Wilentz presents a carefully nuanced portrait of Jackson, which one has to do given the enormity of the life and influence of our 7th President. It is possible to applaud Jackson's accomplishments---the first common President, the first President to champion the cause of the people (albeit propertyless white men, which was the people in his time), fighting for the people against what he called "the money power." But then we must recognize his racism, typical of his time, and his horrific Indian Removal policy, which resulted in the deaths of thousands of Native Americans.

Jackson bested Calhoun in the nullification controversey and thereby saved the Union for the time being. Lincoln found inspiration in Jackson's patriotism.

Jackson enhanced the power of the Presidency. It was under Jackson that the executive branch became the dominant branch of government.

Historians can take sides in the issue of Jackson vs J Q Adams. Both were great Americans, and I think we can appreciate both without taking sides.

I continue my Andrew Jackson reading and hope to have more to say later.

The Intellectual Bankruptcy of the Republican Party

Fareed Zakaria discusses the out-of-touch Republican Party



Zakaria: GOP bereft of ideas or trapped by wrong ones
Story Highlights
Zakaria: GOP's social program out of touch with young, diverse, tolerant electorate
Voters sensed a new world out there; McCain campaign didn't address change
Zakaria: Challenge is secure interests; create stable, peaceful, prosperous world


Editor's note: Fareed Zakaria is a foreign affairs analyst who hosts "Fareed Zakaria: GPS" on CNN at 1 p.m. ET Sundays.

Fareed Zakaria says "We need to have communication channels open."

NEW YORK (CNN) -- On the day President-elect Obama visited the White House, a new national poll suggested that the current occupant at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. is the most unpopular president since approval ratings were first measured more than six decades ago. Seventy-six percent of those questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Monday disapprove of how President Bush is handling his job. That's an all-time high in polling by CNN or Gallup dating back to World War II. CNN spoke to world affairs expert and author Fareed Zakaria to get his take on what the Republican Party should do to get back on track.CNN: If we accept that President-Elect Barack Obama and the Democrats seem to have won largely on the message of change, then why do you think Sen. John McCain and the Republicans lost?

Zakaria: I actually think that there were broad reasons for the resounding Republican loss and that they need to rethink their ideas before they can start winning again.

CNN: It was their ideas and not their strategy?

Zakaria: The Republican Party has become a party bereft of ideas or trapped by the wrong ones. The Reagan-Thatcher revolution of low taxes, deregulation and tight money isn't relevant to the problems of under-regulated financial products, huge deficits and a deepening recession. Add to that the Republican Party's social program is out of tune with an increasingly young, diverse and tolerant electorate.

Something similar has happened in foreign policy. Voters have seemed to sense that there is a new world out there and that the solutions presented by McCain in his campaign didn't address the change.
Don't Miss
'Fareed Zakaria: GPS'
Zakaria's new book: 'The Post-American World'
CNN: But do you really think that American voters care about foreign policy? Especially when it seems it was the economy that mattered more.

Zakaria: The economy was definitely an issue, but note that President Bush's approval ratings had plummeted to historic lows by 2005 even when the economy seemed to be on a steady course. And I do believe the vigorous unilateralism openly advocated by the administration is recognized by most Americans to have weakened the country's influence abroad. Its excessive reliance on military force has yielded few results relative to the costs. Zakaria urges Obama to 'go big' to fix economy »
At the heart of President Bush's ideology was regime change -- armed Wilsonianism. Whether in Iraq, North Korea or Iran, the basic goal was to refuse any kind of negotiation or diplomacy and instead try to overthrow the government and replace it with a democratic and friendly one. Most Americans now recognize that, however pleasant this sounds in theory, the real world is a complicated place and cannot be transformed by magic or military power.
CNN: So we need to negotiate with the enemy?

Zakaria: We need to have communication channels open. As former Secretary of State Madeline Albright said on our show, "Talking is not necessarily making nice. It is delivering tough messages and listening. I would bet that Milosevic didn't think that he was having a nice conversation with me -- or Kim Jong Il, for that matter."

Recently, even President Bush himself has seen the necessity of this. Over the past three years, he has negotiated with North Korea and Libya and even taken a tentative step with Iran; launched a high-profile peace process between the Palestinians and Israelis; and made encouraging proposals about global warming. These are all steps Bush actively opposed during his first term. He has moved in this direction out of necessity. Failure concentrates the mind.

CNN: So what would you recommend to the Republican Party?

Zakaria: They need to realize the world is changing and the old rules don't apply. They need to be innovative as Ronald Reagan was in 1980. Shouting "USA is No. 1" is cheap rhetoric, divorced from the real world. The real challenge for Washington is not to boast about America's might but to use its capacities -- military, political, intellectual -- to work with others to create a more stable, peaceful and prosperous world in which American interests and ideals will be secure.

The Mind of the South

Here is a response to the NY Times article presented below this post.


The Mind of the South

Momentarily doffing my business-beat hat, I want to highlight a strange article in the New York Times this morning. “For South, a Waning Hold on National Politics,” reads the headline, and the gist of the piece is that Southern voters, by backing McCain this election, have proven that their backward ways are increasingly irrelevant to the American scene. There are lots of good quotes from the usual suspects—Merle Black, Tom Schaller—and lots of interesting anecdotes. But the accompanying graph, a county-level map showing left-right voting levels in 2008 relative to 2004 (hues of blue if the counties tilted more Democratic this time around, hues of red if they tilted further to the GOP), seems to belie most, if not all, of the article’s premise. Across the “Deep South”—South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and northern Louisiana, what the rest of the country talks about when it talks about the South—the map is almost entirely blue. Pretty much all of Texas is blue, too. That means that Obama, even if he didn’t win these states, still did better than Kerry. Instead, the red splotches center in eastern Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and southern Louisiana; northern Alabama is pretty red as well. (Interestingly, these are places where Democrats tend to do well, historically, on the local and state level.)
What this all points to is not a waning South, but a fissured and rapidly changing one. Perhaps the most frustrating thing for southerners, and those who study the South, is to watch observers pinch and pull at the region’s boundaries to fit their argument. Sometimes it’s everything from Delaware El Paso; sometimes it’s just rural Georgia. The fact that Obama won three southern states, did better than Kerry in counties across the region, and invigorated a substantial number of minority voters—black southerners are southerners, too, remember—complicates the picture of the South as some sort of static geographic-demographic bloc of racists. What is really surprising is not how stalwart the South is in its ways. It’s that broad swaths of the region look just like the rest of the country.

--Clay Risen
Posted: Tuesday

It's Race, Race, Race in the South

I will have a follow-up on the article below; suffice it to say at the moment that as I have been saying, race continues to be the dominant factor in voting in the South.



By ADAM NOSSITER
Published: November 10, 2008

VERNON, Ala. — Fear of the politician with the unusual name and look did not end with last Tuesday’s vote in this rural red swatch where buck heads and rifles hang on the wall. This corner of the Deep South still resonates with negative feelings about the race of President-elect

What may have ended on Election Day, though, is the centrality of the South to national politics. By voting so emphatically for Senator John McCain over Mr. Obama — supporting him in some areas in even greater numbers than they did President Bush — voters from Texas to South Carolina and Kentucky may have marginalized their region for some time to come, political experts say.

The region’s absence from Mr. Obama’s winning formula means it “is becoming distinctly less important,” said Wayne Parent, a political scientist at Louisiana State University. “The South has moved from being the center of the political universe to being an outside player in presidential politics.”

One reason for that is that the South is no longer a solid voting bloc. Along the Atlantic Coast, parts of the “suburban South,” notably Virginia and North Carolina, made history last week in breaking from their Confederate past and supporting Mr. Obama. Those states have experienced an influx of better educated and more prosperous voters in recent years, pointing them in a different political direction than states farther west, like Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi, and Appalachian sections of Kentucky and Tennessee.

Southern counties that voted more heavily Republican this year than in 2004 tended to be poorer, less educated and whiter, a statistical analysis by The New York Times shows. Mr. Obama won in only 44 counties in the Appalachian belt, a stretch of 410 counties that runs from New York to Mississippi. Many of those counties, rural and isolated, have been less exposed to the diversity, educational achievement and economic progress experienced by more prosperous areas.

The increased turnout in the South’s so-called Black Belt, or old plantation-country counties, was visible in the results, but it generally could not make up for the solid white support for Mr. McCain. Alabama, for example, experienced a heavy black turnout and voted slightly more Democratic than in 2004, but the state over all gave 60 percent of its vote to Mr. McCain. (Arkansas, however, doubled the margin of victory it gave to the Republican over 2004.)
Less than a third of Southern whites voted for Mr. Obama, compared with 43 percent of whites nationally. By leaving the mainstream so decisively, the Deep South and Appalachia will no longer be able to dictate that winning Democrats have Southern accents or adhere to conservative policies on issues like welfare and tax policy, experts say.

That could spell the end of the so-called Southern strategy, the doctrine that took shape under President Richard M. Nixon in which national elections were won by co-opting Southern whites on racial issues. And the Southernization of American politics — which reached its apogee in the 1990s when many Congressional leaders and President Bill Clinton were from the South — appears to have ended.

“I think that’s absolutely over,” said Thomas Schaller, a political scientist who argued prophetically that the Democrats could win national elections without the South.
The Republicans, meanwhile, have “become a Southernized party,” said Mr. Schaller, who teaches at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “They have completely marginalized themselves to a mostly regional party,” he said, pointing out that nearly half of the current Republican House delegation is now Southern.

Merle Black, an expert on the region’s politics at Emory University in Atlanta, said the Republican Party went too far in appealing to the South, alienating voters elsewhere.
“They’ve maxed out on the South,” he said, which has “limited their appeal in the rest of the country.”

Even the Democrats made use of the Southern strategy, as the party’s two presidents in the last 40 years, Jimmy Carter and Mr. Clinton, were Southerners whose presence on the ticket served to assuage regional anxieties. Mr. Obama has now proved it is no longer necessary to include a Southerner on the national ticket — to quiet racial fears, for example — in order to win, in the view of analysts.

Several Southern states, including Arkansas, Louisiana and Tennessee, have voted for the winner in presidential elections for decades. No more. And Mr. Obama’s race appears to have been the critical deciding factor in pushing ever greater numbers of white Southerners away from the Democrats.

Here in Alabama, where Mr. McCain won 60.4 percent of the vote in his best Southern showing, he had the support of nearly 9 in 10 whites, according to exit polls, a figure comparable to other Southern states. Alabama analysts pointed to the persistence of traditional white Southern attitudes on race as the deciding factor in Mr. McCain’s strong margin. Mr. Obama won in Jefferson County, which includes the city of Birmingham, and in the Black Belt, but he made few inroads elsewhere.

“Race continues to play a major role in the state,” said Glenn Feldman, a historian at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. “Alabama, unfortunately, continues to remain shackled to the bonds of yesterday.”

David Bositis, senior political analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, pointed out that the 18 percent share of whites that voted for Senator John Kerry in 2004 was almost cut in half for Mr. Obama.

“There’s no other explanation than race,” he said.

In Arkansas, which had among the nation’s largest concentration of counties increasing their support for the Republican candidate over the 2004 vote, “there’s a clear indication that racial conservatism was a component of that shift away from the Democrat,” said Jay Barth, a political scientist in the state.

Race was a strong subtext in post-election conversations across the socioeconomic spectrum here in Vernon, the small, struggling seat of Lamar County on the Mississippi border.

One white woman said she feared that blacks would now become more “aggressive,” while another volunteered that she was bothered by the idea of a black man “over me” in the White House.

Mr. McCain won 76 percent of the county’s vote, about five percentage points more than Mr. Bush did, because “a lot more people came out, hoping to keep Obama out,” Joey Franks, a construction worker, said in the parking lot of the Shop and Save.

Mr. Franks, who voted for Mr. McCain, said he believed that “over 50 percent voted against Obama for racial reasons,” adding that in his own case race mattered “a little bit. That’s in my mind.”

Many people made it clear that they were deeply apprehensive about Mr. Obama, though some said they were hoping for the best.

“I think any time you have someone elected president of the United States with a Muslim name, whether they are white or black, there are some very unsettling things,” George W. Newman, a director at a local bank and the former owner of a trucking business, said over lunch at Yellow Creek Fish and Steak.

Don Dollar, the administrative assistant at City Hall, said bitterly that anyone not upset with Mr. Obama’s victory should seek religious forgiveness.

“This is a community that’s supposed to be filled with a bunch of Christian folks,” he said. “If they’re not disappointed, they need to be at the altar.”

Customers of Bill Pennington, a barber whose downtown shop is decorated with hunting and fishing trophies, were “scared because they heard he had a Muslim background,” Mr. Pennington said over the country music on the radio. “Over and over again I heard that.”
Mr. Obama remains an unknown quantity in this corner of the South, and there are deep worries about the changes he will bring.

“I am concerned,” Gail McDaniel, who owns a cosmetics business, said in the parking lot of the Shop and Save. “The abortion thing bothers me. Same-sex marriage.”

“I think there are going to be outbreaks from blacks,” she added. “From where I’m from, this is going to give them the right to be more aggressive.”

How I Learned to Be a Man

My first lessons in how to be a man came from my Daddy. Be a man and you’ll always be OK he said.

He was a very patient man, tended toward passive-aggressiveness, but when the time came to act, he acted. He might have been slow to move, but when he moved, he was like a force of nature. And before he acted, he had a cold stare that could cut through steel. People left the room when they saw that stare. People would start running, start jumping off buildings if necessary. The only man I ever saw insult my Mother (called her a Jezebel) ended up on his backside with about 20 stitches decorating his face later that day.

I’ve grown up to be just like my Daddy. Better watch for that cold stare.

My next teacher was George C. Wallace. He taught us Alabamians that we didn’t have to take a backseat to anybody.

“Yankees don’t put their pants on a nail and run and jump in ‘em. They put their pants on one leg at a time just like we do,” he assured Alabama boys. I was so reassured by that, growing up being called a redneck and poor white trash.

The Guvnuh taught me about liberal arrogance---the pointed-headed pseudo-intellectuals who wanted to bus us all over creation and yet sent their own kids to private schools. The effete defeatists who wanted to cut and run in Viet Nam just like those who want to cut and run from Iraq today. Those Washington bureaucrats who trampled all over states rights, who didn’t understand what Palin calls “real Americans.”

There was my Uncle Elmo, who lived in a little community called Bankston in Fayette County. He taught me to always protect myself and my loved ones.

Uncle Elmo believed in self-sufficiency. He and Aunt Ruby had a huge garden. They could have lived a year on what they had canned. They could have fed the entire county supper.

Then there was Uncle Elmo’s munitions room. He had enough weaponry and ordinance to kill everybody in the county three times over.

“Sooner or later we might have to fight ‘em again, and I’m gonna be ready,” he said.

“You think so, Uncle Elmo?’ I asked him.

“Shoot, yeah,” he said, employing his favorite phrase.

I’ve already been to my local Pelham gun-seller to stock up (there was a long line as you can imagine). When Obamer comes around to confiscate my guns, I’ll go down fighting. When they take my rifle from me, like Chuck Heston said, my hands will be cold.

Having been taught how to be a man growing up, I think I’m ready for whatever comes. I’m not worried.

Books I'll Probably Read

Jon Meacham has a big biography of Andrew Jackson coming out next week that has already received rave prepublication reviews.

H.W. Brands has a new biography of FDR.

Fred Kaplan has a new literary biography of Lincoln. As the anniversary of Lincoln's 200th birthday approaches, Lincoln books will proliferate.

Beyond the Angry White Guy

Though I am a Democrat, I peruse the Weekly Standard, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, and the National Review to keep up with Republican thinking. In the midst of the Republican soul-searching that is going on now after last Tuesday's GOP debacle, Fred Barnes says one thing that is undoubtedly true.


"Republican Weakness. Where is it? In the Northeast, across the upper Midwest, and in cities and upscale suburbs. To gain a majority in Congress, Republicans will have to win House and Senate seats in those places. To win the presidency, they'll have to appeal to voters in those locations.
Republicans in Washington must keep these voters--they're more moderate than conservative--in mind and avoid alienating them. Republicans don't need to jettison conservative principles. Ryan, the party's most innovative thinker, says Republicans need only apply these principles to the new political era, and moderates will be comfortable with the result.
One more thing is essential, according to Ryan. "We've got to be happy warriors," he says. "We've got to stop being the angry white guy party." Otherwise, Republicans will play right into Obama's hands."
Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

Brains are Back!

Here is an absolutely marvelous article celebrating the change in the intellectual atmosphere that is now upon us.




THE WORLD FROM WASHINGTON
Michael Hirsh
Brains Are Back!
After eight years of proud incuriosity and anti-intellectualism, we now have a leader who values nuance and careful thought.
Published Nov 7, 2009


For two days now Americans have celebrated the idea that we may have atoned finally for our nation's original sin, slavery, along with its long legacy of racism. We have rejoiced in the world's accolades over the election of a multicultural African-American to the presidency after nearly eight years of cringing in shame as the Bush administration methodically curdled our Constitutional values and sullied our global reputation as a beacon of hope. Every once in a while, it seems, we Americans do manage to live up to our ideals rather than betray them. Hooray!

I am just as happy as everyone else over all this global good feeling. But there's something else that I'm even happier about--positively giddy, in fact. And the effects of this change are likely to last a lot longer than the brief honeymoon Barack Obama will enjoy as a symbol of realized ideals. What Obama's election means, above all, is that brains are back. Sense and pragmatism and the idea of considering-all-the-options are back. Studying one's enemy and thinking through strategic problems are back. Cultural understanding is back. Yahooism and jingoism and junk science about global warming and shabby legal reasoning about torture are out. The national culture of flag-pin shallowness that guided our foreign policy is gone with the wind. And for this reason as much as any, perhaps I can renew my pride in being an American.

I'm under no illusion that Barack Obama will turn out to be Barack Panacea. In terms of holding major office, he's the least experienced president in memory. He'll probably screw up a lot of things, especially at first. The problems he faces – from the economic crisis to Iran's nuclear program – are just too hard. And I occasionally worry that in his eloquent eagerness to empathize and reach across cultural barriers, Obama may overreach in the opposite direction from Bush, stumbling into the appeasement of adversaries like Iran (whose buffoonish president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, practically invited him to do so this week by sending him the first letter of congratulations from Tehran since 1979). Obama must also guard against the sort of intellectual arrogance that characterized the "best and the brightest" of the Vietnam era.

But, frankly, these are all risks worth taking after nearly eight years of a president who could barely form a coherent sentence, much less a strategic thought. We can finally go back to respecting logic and reason and studiousness under a president who doesn't seem to care much about what is "left," "right" or ideologically pure. Or what he thinks God is saying to him. A guy who keeps religion in its proper place—in the pew. It's no accident that Obama is the first Northern Democrat to be elected president since John F. Kennedy. The "Sun Belt" politics represented by George W. Bush – the politics of ideological rigidity, religious zealotry and anti-intellectualism--"has for the moment played itself out," says presidential historian Robert Dallek.

From the very start of his campaign, Obama has given notice that, whatever you might think about his policies, they will be well thought out and soberly considered, and that as president he would not be a slave of passion or impulse. While his GOP opponent, a 72-year-old cancer victim, was cynically deciding for political reasons that a woman who apparently did not know that Africa was a continent rather than a country should be a heartbeat away from the presidency, Obama was setting up working groups to study every major international issue and region of the world. Through three debates with John McCain, he refused to be baited into personal attacks. And the more we have learned about his transition process, the clearer it becomes that he intends to be that kind of president as well. Against the very political concerns of some of his loyalists that he, the candidate of "change," is bringing too many ex-Clintonites on board, he is dispassionately welcoming in the best brains (like Larry Summers, Laura Tyson and Gene Sperling) and most experienced hands (considering an extension of Bob Gates' tenure at the Pentagon, for instance). He is actively considering other Republicans for high posts.

How very presidential. And how very unusual.

David S. Reynolds - Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson

This book is a marvelous, so readable, survey of the country during time of Andrew Jackson, from roughly 1815, when Jackson burst on the American scene with his incredible over the British in New Orleans, to 1848, when the last Whig president, Zachary Taylor, was elected.

During this election season, I've been thinking about and reading again about Andrew Jackson, the founder of the Democratic Party. Over the years, starting in 1971, I have read many of the leading books on Jackson. To understand this country fully, I submit that you have to understand Andrew Jackson and his times.

This book reflects the mature historical writing of a seasoned historian, who carefully balances the strengths and weaknesses, the accomplishments and the failures, of our seventh President. A rebalancing is underway in this part of our history where Jackson is seen in greater clarity and appropriate credit is given to John Quincy Adams.

To his everlasting credit, Andrew Jackson was our first non-elitist, common man, president of all of the people. He was a true democrat. The people loved him, not just as a military hero, although for that reason too, but because they knew he was on their side.

The Democratic Party has always been the party of the working people of this country, and it all started with Andrew Jackson.

Our Monster Days are Over (we hope)

Paul Krugman is getting lots of notice for saying that the monsters that have sullied our country the last 8 years are going away.


The monster years
Last night wasn’t just a victory for tolerance; it wasn’t just a mandate for progressive change; it was also, I hope, the end of the monster years.
What I mean by that is that for the past 14 years America’s political life has been largely dominated by, well, monsters. Monsters like Tom DeLay, who suggested that the shootings at Columbine happened because schools teach students the theory of evolution. Monsters like Karl Rove, who declared that liberals wanted to offer “therapy and understanding” to terrorists. Monsters like Dick Cheney, who saw 9/11 as an opportunity to start torturing people.
And in our national discourse, we pretended that these monsters were reasonable, respectable people. To point out that the monsters were, in fact, monsters, was “shrill.”
Four years ago it seemed as if the monsters would dominate American politics for a long time to come. But for now, at least, they’ve been banished to the wilderness.

The Latest Palin Joke

The latest Palin joke is all over the airwaves. I first heard it today on FOX (of all palces--the Republican network that I occasionally listen to on my satellite radio just for laughs). During the campaign she thought that Africa was a country, and that South Africa was a part of the country of Africa. Also, she spent much more than $150,000 on clothes. The Wasilia Hillbillies go to Neiman-Marcus. That we might have elected this stupid woman VP and potentially President speaks volumes about conservatives. Unbelievable.