Obammerce!

On inauguration day, just after Obama took his oath, I went up to 125th Street in Harlem. Many smiley faces--and products! Here are some of faves:

A Front Seat for History

Election '08 is finally here. And Obama is, right now, in the lead. He's winning the cities; McCain is taking the counties But me thinks Obama will take the crown with ease...he's taking too many states that have been Red for at least a decade. I have been at two different parties -- one on the Upper West Side; another on the Upper East. All are eager for Obama to get on with the job of running this country (although he has a rather difficult task ahead of him sorting out this mess of an economy).

Obama on Iraq

An Op-Ed in today's New York Times that is well worth the read:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/14/opinion/14obama.html?hp

America's Swart Gevaar

An excellent opinion piece here in yesterday's New York Times by Roger Cohen who spent some of his childhood in Muizenburg. (His parents immigrated to London).

"Fear, shadowy as the sharks beyond the nets at Muizenberg, was never quite absent from our sunlit African sojourns. My own was formed of disorientation: I was not quite of the system because my parents had emigrated from Johannesburg to London. So, on return visits, I wandered into blacks-only public toilet or sat on a blacks-only bench.

Blacks only — and I was white. Apartheid entered my consciousness as a kind of self-humiliation. The black women who bathed me as an infant touched my skin, but their world was untouchable.

Only later did a cruel system come into focus. I see white men, gin and tonics on their breath, red meat on their plates, beneath the jacarandas of Johannesburg, sneering at the impossibility of desiring a black woman."

Using his experience of apartheid South Africa and the fact that it is no more, he draws a comparison to Barack Obama's recent speech on race.

"It takes bravery, and perhaps an unusual black-white vantage point, to navigate these places where hurt is profound, incomprehension the rule, just as it takes courage to say, as Obama did, that black “anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.”

Read the full piece here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/20/opinion/20cohen.html?em&ex=1206158400&en=f37f26e473175c8d&ei=5087%0A

Hussein: What's in a Name?

When I was in South Africa recently, there was great hysteria amongst the Jewish community (ok, my family), brought on by an e-mail that was being sent around on the Internet claiming that Barack Hussein Obama was a Muslim. I tried to explain to my mother that even if Obama was a Muslim (which he isn't), it didn't make him a militant suicide bomber. She regarded me suspiciously, wanting to believe. In Vanity Fair's Hollywood Issue a profile on Obama addresses these accusations thus: Todd S. Purdum writes that Obama told me [him] that he could only laugh at the false press accounts that portray Soetoro [Obama's stepfather] as some kind of radical Muslim who had sent him to an Islamic school. "I mean, you know, his big thing was Johnny Walker Black, Andy Williams records," Obama said. "I still remember 'Moon River.' He'd be playing it, sipping, and playing tennis at the country club. That was his whole thing."
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And today on Salon.com, there is a longer discussion. Take a look: http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/02/28/hussein/