Why the heck does Susan Faludi think the sports metaphor is “a particularly lamentable white male construct” (New York Times, May 9)?
For that matter, why assign it to white males? I know black males, white women, black women, and athletes of all ethnicities who use sports metaphors effectively, some as early as third grade, without impairing their worthier values.
All else being equal, I would consistently prefer a sports metaphor to a conflict reality. There are so many conflict realities, and declarative nouns to describe them. War. Economy. Gas prices. Globalization. Global warming. Violence. Murder. Myanmar. Rush Limbaugh’s “chaos.” Racism. Gender wars. Divorce. Politics. Karl Rove politics. George W. Bush.
I cry for relief. Toss me a sports metaphor, please. Quick, somebody, hit one out of the park. That’s what sports and their metaphors are for. Relief. The nominative realities are never going to go away. Humans came to accept this several thousand years ago. I am no anthropologist, but the acceptance of nominative conflict realities may have directly preceded the invention of games and game metaphors. In fact I would be willing to contend that human awareness of games metaphors occurred not too long after the discovery of infidelity and long before the discovery of fire.
Sports provides all the conflict with none of the realities, and no one really loses in the end. Doesn’t anybody realize that sports is nothing more than a multi-billion-dollar business based on not knowing who is going to win? In the media business, it’s called the “threat to the status quo,” which is one of the two definitions of news: “News is anything that changes, or threatens to change, the status quo.” It’s a dynamic, infinitely renewable definition. The Giants, third and long, two minutes left. Classic threat to the status quo. Memorable, even. They converted, scored, and New England didn’t make it to 19-0. Maybe next year.
This political campaign is another classic of the same threat. Lord have mercy, Ms. Faludi, if you want metaphors about who is going to win, listen to “Hardball” for an hour. Oops. “Hardball” must mean that Chris Matthews and his cohorts must make sense only to white males who know what it means to play hardball.
Do I sound a tad hot? I guess I am. I’m tired of being assigned white male constructs. For three minutes, I wish I was Don Newcombe on the mound, and Susan Faludi was at bat. Do you know how to spell chin music?
Lamentably, Faludi just grasped the idea of the sports metaphor and assigned it to white males to try to make a point about Hillary Clinton. How convenient. And then she closed her argument, not with a reality, but a metaphor. Glass floor. See how useful they are?
The world’s second most populous nation is up-in-arms over remarks recently made by President Bush, as he attempted to explain rising food and energy prices to an audience in Maryland.
The president said the following:
“There are 350 million people in India who are classified as middle class. That’s bigger than America. Their middle class is larger than our entire population,” said Bush. “And when you start getting wealth, you start demanding better nutrition and better food. And so demand is high, and that causes the price to go up.”
Minister of State for Commerce, Jairam Ramesh: “George Bush has never been known for his knowledge of economics. And he has just proved once again how comprehensively wrong he is.”
West Bengal’s Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee: “It is preposterous for anyone to say that global food crisis, including the crisis in America, is because Indians are eating more. It is needless to say what the Indians get to eat or what they (Americans) eat. This only shows how he has lost his senses” … he added that Bush’s remark was nothing more than a “cruel joke.”
But striking a conciliatory note, Surojit Chatterjee writes for the Business Times: “Being well-informed or choosing words carefully are not his specialty. … Let’s be forgiving to the U.S. President. … Let us stop pointing fingers at one another and receive Bush’s remark with a pinch of salt and a hearty laugh.” Read the rest of this entry »
Is it possible that in the midst of the most grueling political ordeal of his life, Barack Obama took time out last week to negotiate with Nigerian Militants?
“The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta command is seriously considering a temporary ceasefire appeal by Senator Barack Obama. Obama is someone we respect and hold in high esteem.”
“As if the protagonists weren’t human beings who has separated themselves from their families to try and build a better future, the news that cash remittances from Latin American immigrants to their impoverished families back home are declining has been cause for celebration in xenophobic circles in the United States. … that doesn’t imply, as anti-immigrant groups say, good news for those seeking to restrict the flow of migration, since if the U.S. economy continues to deteriorate, the effects will be felt throughout the region. And when the economies of Latin America enter into a major crisis, the only escape valve will once again be immigration.” Read the rest of this entry »
While at WORLDMEETS.US, we have seen a good deal of support for John McCain in the Portuguese-speaking countries ofBrazil and Portugal, chiefly due to McCain’s promise to include Brazil in the G8 and his relatively liberal trade policies, this op-ed from Portugal’s Jornal de Negicios is decidedly concerned about what might happen under a McCain presidency.
After examining some of the specifics of McCain’s foreign policy plans, including his plans to create a “League of Democracies,” “expand NATO to include all democratic states,” exclude Russia from the G-8 and include Brazil and India, João Carlos Barradas writes for Jornal de Negocios:
“McCain’s plans are frightening in their incoherence, total lack of realism and underestimation of economic and financial constraints. … Even before Beijing or Moscow put the heat on the eventual Republican president, the apprehension of allies in Berlin, Tokyo and Riyadh would be such that either McCain will have to change course or he will condemn the United States to a proactive interventionism capable of bringing even greater misfortune.
“Why is it such a struggle for Obama to get elected? The question of Blacks in the United States is the best kept secret in the American family. Forty years after President Johnson’s great campaign for civil rights, much about race relations has changed, but not the essence: the semi-condescending, semi-frightened, mostly disguised fear of African Americans by the White majority.”
In summing up what’s at stake in the Democratic primary race, Maurice writes:
“The outbreak of race in the debate lends itself to a rational argument about the fragility of the Black candidate. In the mind, these unspeakable racial divisions secretly lurk, and mark the campaign with a strong emotional impact. The debate constitutes a profound test for both Democratic candidates.”
By Antoine Maurice
Translated By Sandrine Ageorges
May 3, 2008
Tribune de Geneve - Switzerland - Original Article (French)
Why is it such a struggle for Obama to get elected? The question of Blacks in the United States is the best kept secret in the American family. Forty years after President Johnson’s great campaign for civil rights, much about race relations has changed, but not the essence: the semi-condescending, semi-frightened, mostly disguised fear of African Americans by the White majority.
The Black community has been shaped largely by a series of dramatic episodes, and it will soon commemorate the 50th anniversary of some of these events: The death of Martin Luther King, last great advocate for Black integration [40 years ago]; the assassination of two Kennedys [John and Robert - 40 years ago], the dawn of the campaign for civil rights, the birth of a Black middle class, the growth of inter-racial marriage, the advent of minority studies (Black history) in academia and minority participation in the arts.
In short, African Americans, who have built their unity based mostly on the way others view them, have experienced unprecedented economic and civic progress.
Barack Obama serves as an indicator of this spectacular progress, while at the same time he is confronting - despite himself - its incompleteness. His strategy thus far has been not to play the race card, but to present himself as the promoter of change in America, more committed to redressing income inequalities than the burden of racial inequity.
READ ON AT WORLDMEETS.US, along with continuing translated foreign press coverage of the U.S. elections.
Respondents to my “Macrame Journalism” post make some engaging points, while other points need clarification.
The post was not a defense of journalism (I’ll get into that another time), but a definition of it. Readers are correct to say that journalism today suffers from self-inflicted damage. But what divides journalists from macramé journalists is education and training. The traditional journalism industry, both on and offline, would not hire applicants who could not show a baccalaureate level of journalism education. A macramé journalist, meanwhile, can join the field with an ISP connection and a blog account. Much of their work is very good, but at its best, it is commentary, not journalism. At its worst, it is the same as an avalanche of unsigned letters to the editor. Assigning such blather the stature of “citizen journalism” is inappropriate and dangerous.
he word “abridge” in the First Amendment makes clear that the authors understood that the power of the press predated the Constitution. The origins of such a press were with the Zenger decision in 1734 that established truth as justification to publish. The weight was on “truth.” It was not enough for Peter Zenger and his attorney, Andrew Hamilton, simply to say his newspaper, The New York Weekly Journal, had printed the truth about government officials. Truth required documentation and verification. For almost 300 years, that documentation and verification has been the cornerstone of America’s press. Investigative reporters won’t publish information without triple verification, and then only after a phone call offering the opportunity to verify or deny to the story’s subject.
Enforcing the First Amendment has required the enforcing of such standards, both in freedom of the press and in freedom of speech. The press was granted such power that in the courts a body of law was created and started to grow, protecting citizens from press abuses of its power. The standard of truth is the first burden placed on the press by that law. Free speech is held to a similar standard, which has also shown up in courts since 1789. Classic example: Is an individual who yells “Fire!” in a crowded theater, when there is no fire, protected from prosecution by the First Amendment? Not many Americans have turned their backs on the standards of free press and speech. When they do, thank God, it makes news.
Any out-of-work reporter (plenty of those around) could operate independently online, not writing commentaries like this one, but doing real journalism. As I pointed out in the last post, such work would be instantly recognizable as journalism, just as macramé journalism is instantly recognizable.
I won’t tell my 100 college journalism students what one respondent said about “kids these days and their blogs and rock ‘n roll music and long hair.” They will be the online reporters and editors of tomorrow. Traditional journalism, in converged (print and broadcast) form is moving steadily toward the Internet, where doing business is infinitely cheaper than the traditional broadcast model that has been in place for the last 500 years. I call the new model “incast.” No longer will news organizations (and other media) spend millions sending information out to the audience at large. Online, all that content is just files in a computer, accessible at any time to consumers coming in, a ridiculously cheap and efficient (one-to-one marketing!) model.
What are the news organizations going to do with all that money they save? They won’t have to repeat cycles anymore like CNN, as one respondent pointed out. And they will have millions to hire journalists to fill a practically infinite news hole. That’s where my little longhairs come in.
If one wanted to know the difference between being an American and being a European, this article from France’s Le Figaro newspaper would be a very good place to start.
From Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky to client number nine Eliot Spitzer and ‘Kristan,’ Europeans have looked at the effect that sex has on American politics with a collective shake of the head. Read the rest of this entry »
In highlighting the ongoing legal prosecutions at Siemens - the German mega-giant now mired in what some have called the greatest bribery scandal of all time, Klocks writes:
“What German courts were unable to achieve and even the Pope would have failed to accomplish, has now been done by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. … The capitalists themselves insist that the train of greed remain on the tracks - its tracks.”
Kocks then goes on to describe how the Pietists created the first capital markets - which leads him to what created the business powerhouse known as the United States of America: Read the rest of this entry »
When I came into the newspaper business in 1967 at the tender age of 20, most reporters and editors drank like fish and smoked like chimneys (on the job), lived and died for the news scoop, type was set on massive linotype machines using molten lead, and when the presses of morning and evening newspapers rolled it was like printing money.
Today newsrooms are like vegetarian cafeterias, the scoop is most often the purview of cable news channels, or Internet sites, the entire typesetting and printing process is electronic, and when the presses roll for the remaining morning papers (there are no evening papers as such anymore), one can only wonder how many years it will be before they are silenced.
The reasons for the long downward spiral of the industry are complex and multi-layered, but basically boil down to something that I was saying well before I wrote my last story and quit a few weeks before the 9/11 attacks:
Newspapers will not survive if they don’t change and change damned quickly by embracing the Internet and hugging it to their collective bosom.
I take no satisfaction in being right. (And yes, it was weird to feel like a fireman without a ladder when the first aircraft slammed into the World Trade Center on that beautiful September morning.)
When the history of the New York Times‘ long slide from grace and profitability is written, there should be a chapter for op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd, who has gone from being a must-read to an obnoxious crank.
Don’t get me wrong. There are far too many op-ed political columnists who are as dull as dishwater (Broder and Collins come to mind), but agree with their opinions or not, there is usually some semblance of a factual underpinning for what they write.
Not so with Dowd. At least not any more, and to use an old newspaper term, she’s been phoning it in for some time now. Translation: MoDo may go through the motions of researching a subject but merely throws a bunch of words together — the edgier the better in her instance — and presto! she gots herself a column.
My break with the Queen of Snark coincided with the collapse of the TimesSelect subscription firewall last September, when hers and other op-ed columns could again be read for free.
I had declined to pony up for TimesSelect and quickly found that I didn’t miss the op-ed crew. (Frank Rich was an exception because, sentimental soul that I am, I have continued to buy the dead tree edition of the Sunday Times). Nevertheless, I was shocked when I resumed reading MoDo again and found that someone who was cogent and moderately amusing on her best days wasn’t having best days any more and had become a bottom-feeding trivializer.
Now as President Bush prepares to leave office and the ‘Three Amigos’ have said their last goodbyes, Mexican columnists have begun to weigh in on the success of their final NAFTA Summit.
While NAFTA has become increasingly unpopular in the United States, the same can be said in Mexico - but for far different reasons.
There, the dissatisfaction stems from the feebleness of NAFTA’s mechanisms for enforcing its decisions on the three federal governments, and the perceived lack of respect given Mexico in relation to its two other North American Read the rest of this entry »
“The George Washington has 85 combat aircraft, including the Super Hornet, the most powerful carrier-based aircraft. On a single aircraft carrier of this class (the Nimitz) there are more late-generation fighter aircraft flying than the total number available to the entire Brazilian Air Force. … American pilots and technicians probably fly more hours per week in conditions similar to the real thing (45 percent of flights, for example, are nocturnal) than their Brazilian and Argentine colleagues do in a year.” Read the rest of this entry »
What’s poses the greatest danger to NATO’s effort in Afghanistan? According to Dutch Scholar Gunnar Heinsohn, the answer is clear: Afghanistan’s birth rate.
“In 2008, there are 4.5 million male Afghans within the traditional warrior age of 15 to 29 years. Out of that group come the insurgents that the approximately 35,000 NATO soldiers are now dug in to confront … and behind Read the rest of this entry »
Even under ordinary conditions, if you are the newly-elected president of a small Central American nation like Guatemala, coming to Washington to meet the U.S. president is a singularly important and daunting event.
Unfortunately for Guatemala, President Alvaro Colom’s visit comes during an election year in which the idea of legalizing the undocumented is the political kiss of death. According to this editorial from Guatemala’s Prensa Libre, the trip also proved a lesson in the global pecking order:
“Meetings between Guatemalan officials and their Washington colleagues stand out, due to a failure to comprehend how the complicated American political system works Read the rest of this entry »
As we all know, this is the country with the largest reserves of drinking water in the world. And where is the water? In the Amazon! Read the rest of this entry »
One must hand it to the Beijing authorities. It takes tremendous gall for a regime that outlaws press freedom or open criticism of any kind, to liken the failure of Western reporters to parrot the Communist Party line to a lapse of journalistic ethics.
April 29th, 2008 by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
Past political campaigns have had their share of people associated with candidates who are placed on the defensive — but seldom has one in any year had one as proactively insistent on keeping himself alive and injected into an excruciatingly close race as the political albatross now dangling around Democratic Senator Barack Obama named Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Aside from the eager nodding of heads and the unspoken “Keep it up!” you can almost feel coming from the campaign of rival Democratic Presidential wannabe Senator Hillary Clinton, conservative Republicans are ecstatic. Jonah Goldberg, writing in The Los Angeles Times:
God bless the Rev. Jeremiah Wright!
After Barack Obama gave his big race speech in mid-March, many critics noted that the Illinois senator had thrown his own grandmother under the bus to defend his controversial pastor. Well, Wright proved over the last few days that he would not be outdone. He not only threw Obama under the bus, he chucked much of the liberal and mainstream media under there with him. If this keeps up, to paraphrase Roy Scheider in “Jaws,” he’s gonna need a bigger bus.
For six weeks, Obama’s biggest supporters have diligently argued that to so much as mention Wright is in effect racist. When Hillary Rodham Clinton said that Wright wouldn’t have been her pastor, Andrew Sullivan gasped on his Atlantic blog that this was “a new low” in the election. When Lanny J. Davis, Clinton’s consummate spinner, defended her on CNN by describing what Wright actually said, CNN’s Anderson Cooper lambasted Davis for daring to even repeat Wright’s comments. Newsweek’s Joe Klein chimed in, “You’re spreading the poison right now.”
What Wright has done the past few days by (over)exposure is to leave himself in the eyes of many indefensible in terms of the center — and converted himself into an unrelenting albatross also chained to a 1,000 lb. anchor dangling around Obama’s neck:
Obama and his defenders have repeatedly insisted that the bits from Wright’s sermons that got wide circulation last month had been taken “out of context.” His infamous sound bites were grounded in concrete theological or factual foundations, they claim. He was quoting other people. He’s done good things. Nothing to see here, folks.
And so God bless Wright because he’s left all of these folks holding a giant, steaming bag of … well, let’s just call it a bag of “context.”
His positions and the context of his remarks, some could argue, are still explainable, but the problem is that those making that argument right now veer into a nuanced area of nuance — the kind of argument that usually does not work in elections where candidates oversimplify, generalize and try to link up their opponents with broad-brush imagery of stances, events or individuals that will be seen unfavorably by key chunks of an attention-span-challenged electorate.
All this comes at a time when Obama’s campaign is reportedly battening down the hatches for what is expected to be a brutal campaign lasting well into the summer, the New York Times reports:
Mr. Obama’s aides said that they remained confident he would win the nomination. “We feel very good about the position that we are in,” said David Axelrod, his chief strategist. “But we have gotten to the position we are in by taking every week and every contest seriously.”
Still, they said they were no longer as hopeful as they once were that the contest could be resolved before June 3, the day of the last primaries. As a result, they were girding for six weeks of attacks by Mrs. Clinton and potential election defeats that could raise further questions among superdelegates — the elected Democrats and party leaders who will ultimately determine the nominee — about Mr. Obama’s strength as a general election candidate.
And Wright’s double-whammy of appearances came at a time of introspection and private disappointment:
In discussions with donors and supporters last week, Mr. Obama’s advisers played down the loss in Pennsylvania, noting that both sides had expected Mrs. Clinton to win there.
Still, the message belied private frustration and disappointment that Mr. Obama shared with a few associates and advisers, particularly over the hardening narrative that he could not appeal to working-class voters, and a personal frustration for comments he made about some small-town voters being “bitter” at their economic conditions. (Mrs. Clinton seized on those remarks, which have shadowed his campaign.)
“Everyone’s got a real calmness about where we are,” said David Plouffe, who is Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, “but a real sense of urgency that we have eight contests coming up in pretty rapid succession.”
But now it’s clear from the amount of space Wright has gotten on blogs, on serious cable talk shows, on screaming head cable and radio talk shows and in the opinion columns:
Wright is proactively making it tough for Obama to right his campaign.
Will he have to make a statement to distance himself even more from him? And what if Wright’s love affair with national media coverage continues? In essence, Wright himself has been putting the muscle, meat and flesh on the skeletal stereotypical imagery critics have tried to sculpt about Obama. And he won’t stay out of the spotlight to let the issue defuse itself.
Candidates’ associates have seldom totally sank a national political campaign.
But perhaps we are about to see an example of what happens when an association does.
Much has been written in the foreign press about the real purpose of Pope Benedict XVI’s unprecedented election-year visit to the United States. Some charge that he came to bolster the only pro-life candidate, John McCain. Others have surmised that the Pope came to make common cause with President Bush to oppose the perceived threat of an expanding Islam.
“As for Catholics in the United States, almost a third of the population has been brought up in that faith, but today only 24 percent of Americans call themselves Catholic, less than a half of those who identify themselves as Protestant/Evangelical - almost 52 percent. The study clearly shows that the strongest adherents of the Catholic Church are amongst recent immigrants. Forty-six percent of U.S. nationals born outside the country are Catholic, while 24 percent of them Protestant.”
“The situation changes when we consider the religious affiliation of those born in the United States: fifty-five percent are Protestant and 21 percent are Catholic. In other words, a significant percentage of those who were Catholic in their infancy, have over the years decided to change their affiliation, switching primarily to Evangelical and Pentecostal churches.”
In other words, the longer immigrants remain in the U.S., the greater the likelihood that they’ll switch to another denomination or religion.
“To the Pope’s misfortune, the dynamics of change are influenced by factors beyond his control.”
By Carlos Martínez García
Translated By Halszka Czarnocka
April 23, 2008
Mexico - La Jornada - Original Article (Spanish)
The results of the trip are more media than real. Benedict the XVI’s visit to the United States ratified a pastoral line that doesn’t confront problems at their root but treats them superficially and postpones their resolution, to the detriment of the millions of Catholics whose disillusionment with the leadership of the Catholic Church continues to deepen.
A good number of commentators and analysts expressed surprise and even praised the papal decision to meet with some victims of clerical pedophilia in the United States. They forget that due to the peculiarity of United States society, both in terms of its religious composition and the vigilance with which it monitors leaders of any kind, Pope Benedict XVI was practically obliged to show some sign that these outrageous abuses will not happen again.
We know of the magnitude of the sexual abuses perpetrated by Catholic priests in that country thanks to the mobilization of those who were assaulted and the solidarity of people who assisted them in disseminating news about the size of the problem and suing the pedophiles in court. It was an organization of citizens and its insistence on documenting and making public the sexual attacks of clergy in that country, which made it possible to make the issue a public one of such national significance.
The various centers of ecclesiastic authority, both in the U.S. and Rome, did everything possible to conceal the scandals. When they failed in the attempt, they imposed damage control measures and tried unsuccessfully to minimize the problem.
It was an entire network of complicity within the U.S. Catholic Church that permitted thousands of cases of sexual abuse, not the isolated behavior of this or that cleric. In this regard there is convincing data:
“A study ordered by the North American Episcopal Conference in 2004 … concluded that the number of children victimized by about 5 000 priests over the past three decades was over 11,000. Since many cases have been resolved according to the culture and civil law of the United States, the relevant statistics include $2 billion that has been paid in out in this regard, which has contributed to bankruptcy of more than a few diocese” (from The Pope and Clerical Pedophilia in Mexico [El Papa y la pederastia clerical en México] by Miguel Ángel Granados Chapa, Proceso).
The Pope pronounced words and promised actions favorable to Latin American immigrants, the majority of whom entered the United States without a visa. The productive apparatus in the United States has benefited on a great scale from these so-called illegals by paying them low wages and providing them with almost no social benefits. For the most part, these people come to that nation as Catholics and are the main factor in the growth of Catholicism there. This reality has another less well-known side, which is creating concern at the Holy See in Rome.
“One must question how Clinton would stand up in a campaign against McCain. Her argument is that she would draw more of her opponents’ core-voters. But Obama does something that Clinton no longer wangles: he mobilizes new voters. The Clinton camp wants to take a slice of McCain’s pie, while Obama wants to bake his own.”
“And this is precisely what Clinton seems to want to prevent with her war of attrition. She has never offered a new perspective - only tried and tested ones. That was supposed to be enough. But then came Obama, who turned her into a zombie-candidate. If you’re not attractive enough, one must paint your opponent as even uglier. Unfortunately, Obama has begun to display certain Clintonesque properties - the bitterness of the primary elections has left its mark, transforming he, too, into a political zombie.” Read the rest of this entry »
![[Excelsior, Mexico]](http://worldmeets.us/images/wantedimmigrants_excelsior.gif)
![[Guardian Unlimited]](http://worldmeets.us/images/obamakkk_guardian.gif)
When the history of the New York Times‘ long slide from grace and profitability is written, there should be a chapter for op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd, who has gone from being a must-read to an obnoxious crank.
![[Het Parool, The Netherlands]](http://www.parool.nl/columnisten/joep_bertrams/beeld/041608-doodstraf.jpg)
