So I have never spent my college years collecting normal student experiences. In fact, I’m more likely to spend my time venturing into the bizarre. I could try to say that I produced this music video as a celebratory fusion of my work in performance arts and my Anglicanism…or you could just say that I did it because it was darn fun. Did you ever think you’d see Martin Luther dissin’ Johann Tetzel in a rap video? The clip below is the brainchild of my friend Alexander Dominitz, a young film director and cinebuff extraordinaire. For the full lyrics and much more, check it out at www.95thesesrap.com. H/t to Adrian for designing and launching the full website.
Author Archive for Kate Maltby
The West at Yale has the most moving response I’ve seen yet to Tuesday’s Presidential Debate. It’s a lament for the dearth of serious philosophical commentary in this election cycle, in a world in which a Presidential candidate can declare healthcare “a right” and, instead of a public debate about the nature of Rights Language, be greeted with a resounding intellectual silence. It’s a loss that’s been particularly felt since Andrew Sullivan turned into a tabloid scandal hound. The money quote?
I just need some conservative intellectual commentary right now to save me from this election cycle’s demagoguery, and Sullivan is being as unquestioningly partisan as Hannity is for McCain.
Incidentally, the most official endorsement of loose rights terminology that I’ve ever seen was at the Museum of the Red Cross in Geneva. According to the stone inscriptions that greet visitors on entry, prisoners of war have natural rights to Water, Food and … Tobacco. Of course, if access to tobacco is a natural right, may the noble savage light up inside a New York restaurant?
Daniel Finkelstein is being sensible about the latest Palin furore. The brunt of the story is that Palin quoted some praise of small towns, out of context, written by Westbrook Pegler, who elsewhere called for the murder of Robert Kennedy. As Finkelstein points out,
Palin did not misrepresent Pegler because she didn’t talk about him.
Palin might be inadvised to reference a racist who issued calls for political assination. And simple political intelligence should be a requirement for high government office. But she didn’t endorse his complete oeuvre, or claim him as her inspiration. She just lifted a few pretty lines about standard small town values. Really guys, get over it. There are far more serious things worth attacking her on.
I don’t know much about Pegler, but Buckley seemed to like him…
According to Sullivan, here. As Ramesh Ponnuru puts it,
Can anyone say with a straight face that Palin would have gotten picked if she were a man?”
And the more obvious it becomes that someone has been given a job simply because she’s a woman, the more men are going to resent women in the workplace. And that’s not good for any of us.
I’m worried that the strongest arguments the Dems could use against her would be those that most insidiously attack the cause of women in the workplace. Andrew Sullivan quotes a reader,
No sooner did my best friend hear about the Sarah Palin pick than I received an e-mail from her. It said simply: “Sarah Palin is a Bad Mother!”
I was at work but could not resist giving her a call to follow up. She told me that she was watching CNN and heard that Ms. Palin had 5 children and that one was only 4 months old and born with Down Syndrome. “How in the name of GOD, can she even think about leaving her child or taking her child on the campaign trail for 70 days?” She was indignant.
Let me tell you why My best friend Liz matters. She is 37 years old and Catholic.
Sarah Palin has already proved herself an energetic and forceful governor while producing children at a steady rate for the last nineteen years. Those who point out that she’s only been a governor for two of those years forget that she has been major player in the state and thorn in the side of the establishment for far longer. With a supportive husband, she’s proved quite adept at combining family with the most meteoric rise to her office in Alaskan history - she’s their youngest ever governor. Not everyone who calls themselves a feminist may like all her policies - I clearly don’t - but no one with that moniker should condone criticism of a working mother.
I should acknowledge that I find it difficult myself to imagine leaving a five-month old child for the campaign trail. But my concern is not that such criticisms of Palin are entirely unjustified, but that they increase the acceptability of anti-woman advertising in American politics. The languages of advertising and of politics are defined entirely by precedent - which makes it an extremely conservative field. If twenty million Americans watch an advertisement next week which questions whether a mother can work with a baby, they’ll be less shocked if they watch one in four years time which questions whether a mother can work with a ten-year old. Which would be sad.
The Alaskan governor is pro-life and a Washington outsider, both of which will appeal to suburban America. McCain is really trying to pick up the angry women who supported Hilary at the same as load his ticket with representatives of truly rural, credit-crunched conservative Americans.
I’ll say it boosts his chances of winning, but at a steep price for the women’s movement. I was recently criticized by feminist friends by blogging here that a woman VP candidate, after the gender issues that have dominated coverage of Hilary’s defeat, would look like such tokenism that it could be the torchpaper to an anti-feminist backlash. Given that Palin is already being summarized as “young … and relatively unknown“, it’s not a far step to “only chosen because she’s female”. The yelling matches that erupt over her qualifications are unlikely to be helpful to the cause of women making it on merit.
Fortunately, however, there’s already a good scandal in her closet to distract us. The attack dogs are here and here.
Iain Dale is the undisputed king of British bloggers. He’s also a committed conservative and has a long career behind him of print publishing, political journalism and activism. So when he failed to be selected for the “A-list” of centrally-approved electoral candidates to be fast tracked into a winnable seat, many were shocked. Did Central Office not realise just how potent internet celebrity can be when fighting a campaign? Or were they warning that a searchable history of independent minded critique is a major bar to promotion under the party standard?
The perfect irony is that the “secret” list of local candidates with this central sanction was leaked to the outside world only thanks to…another leading conservative blog, ConservativeHome - which incidentally, is behind this wonderful campaign against anti-Americanism. ConservativeHome is more successful as a massive source of information on the movement, with a range of different feeds, while Iain Dale has the cult of personality of a star solo commentator and more name recognition outside political circles. That fact that both can thrive, along with Guido Fawkes, a superficially anonymous parliamentary rumormonger, shows that there’s still plenty of space in the market.
That’s the story behind today’s column by Dale in the right-leaning British newspaper, The Daily Telegraph. With his usual delicate tact, Dale politely suggests that the Conservative Party has been so suspicious of the independence of bloggers that it has focused on distancing itself from the community rather than integrating within it.
They may be Conservative but they won’t trot out the party line like a robot. So CCHQ views them with suspicion, so much so that they have now deleted any links to Conservative blogs (apart from ConservativeHome and those written by Tory MPs and councillors) on their website. How very short-sighted…[given that] Conservatives.com gets fewer hits than many of the top blogs…and blog readership is increasing by between 30 per cent and 50 per cent each year.
Of course, any organization which views independence as the problem fails to understand the internet. The aesthetic of the internet is defined by its slight distance from ‘real life’, and the accompanying sense of liminality. Any media that can be produced by one guy with an computer draws its identity from its grassroots feel - and you won’t integrate into the online community unless your fellow bloggers feel you are one of them. And a blog depends on the online community with a strange paradox - bloggers compete for market share all the time, but you won’t get anywhere unless people respect you enough to link to you, repay citations with a spot on their blogroll and welcome you as part of a cultural network, rather than a set of pedestals for individuals. The system is based on mutual self-congratulation and hat tipping. Which is why a blog has to have the sociability of an individual, rather than an organization - particularly in this super-cynical age in which retaining a PR officer is enough to make any media bunny distrust an institution. The Dems and the Republicans have official blogs but they’re not picked up much by the rest of the blogosphere - yesterday’s live video feed of the Democratic Convention had only attracted nine comments at the time of writing. Their successes come from their support of independent, personable bloggers, bringing bloggers together at special ‘bloggers briefings’ from major think tanks and policy departments, facilitating live-blogging and minute-by-minute reporting with Twitter feeds of campaign events, and lending approval to new media support centers like Techrepublican.com and the Republican Technology Council.
Dale’s is a timely call for the Conservative Party to embrace the blogosphere.
Once the US election is out of the way, the Tories need to recruit the Republican Party’s best internet brains and use them to drag their web operations into the 21st century.
So maybe that could translate into jobs for Nicky and me?
Yesterday I was worried that leaking McCain’s VP during Obama’s acceptance speech:
seems such an obvious dirty trick that even the average voter is going to see through it, quite possibly with resultant distaste for the Republican machine. Certainly, it gives the Dems plenty of opportunity to hammer home their current key line, that McCain represents the continuation of the “nasty” Bush-Rove era. Crashing other people’s press parties is the type of thing Washington politicians do, and McCain has been fighting hard to demonstrate that he’s just as much of an innocent outsider as Saint Obama.
So instead, this is much, much more classy. And it’s still a way to gatecrash the coverage, as Marc Ambinder points out in his twitter from the convention.
So it’s just over two hours to go until The One makes his case for the Presidency, and large extracts are beginning to spurt out all over the web.
The first thing one has to admit, is that it’s very very good. No matter how many speechwriters Obama employs, a speech this important in a career will always in its fundamentals be the personal expression of the orator - and it makes Obama look like a very smart guy indeed. (Incidentally, one of the many ghosts, a guy I know living in London, even emails the text of speeches in every week from the UK), The most uplifting for me is the line that seems to justify all the sentimentality of the Obama campaign:
“America, we are better than these last eight years. We are a better country than this.”
It’s a reminder that dissent in a time of war is not unpatriotic and an assurance that a political life built on aesthetics rather than policy is traditional in a country that has always been built on abstract ideas. It manages to remind one that America’s image abroad does matter, without being explicit enough to open the speaker up to the old accusations of being too focused on adulation abroad. At the same time, it’s a piece of political ingenuity because it puts at the heart of Obama’s own message an echo of his most damaging claim against McCain, the baseless but powerful fear that the older man could be a repeat of a President who now enjoys the worst approval ratings since Nixon.
Keep watching for commentary and updates.
Updates: Is this a counter strike against the rumors that McCain camp might just leak their VP pick in the middle of Obama’s primetime assault on US television? The more clued up journalists are on Obama’s remarks in advance, the less willing they might be to drop a well-prepared analysis of a speech they’ve actually worked on for a confusing attempt to report a sudden surprise. Of course, a VP leak tonight would be a massive risk of humiliation for Team GOP - what if Obama is just so gripping that the networks keep streaming him without interruption, or find it easier (never forget that journalists are an inherently lazy species) to stick with their prepared analysis during the post-speech post-mortem? After all, today’s speech will always be on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s death - cue the assembled TV experts talking of their own emotional memories and swearing to remember this day until death - whereas discussion of a VP pick loses no aesthetic resonance by waiting til tomorrow. And the VP leak seems such an obvious dirty trick that even the average voter is going to see through it, quite possibly with resultant distaste for the Republican machine. Certainly, it gives the Dems plenty of opportunity to hammer home their current key line, that McCain represents the continuation of the “nasty” Bush-Rove era. Crashing other people’s press parties is the type of thing Washington politicians do, and McCain has been fighting hard to demonstrate that he’s just as much of an innocent outsider as Saint Obama.
Update 2: note that in all the extracts leaked, there is not a single mention the MLK-related significance of the date. So either Obama really has decided to finally cultivate some humility by tuning down the historical associations, or he’s saving that for the big surprise. Also, there’s no reference to the progress that the American nation has made in producing an African-American politician of such stature - a true sign of a post-racial campaign, or an indicator that the Obama campaign wants to downplay any ‘otherness’ in a campaign where issues of race continue to swirl like dark water under a boat, threatening to pull down anyone who ventures to poke at them? Unless the secret grand finale turns out to be a re-enactment of the march on Washington. We’ll see in one hour…
Most Recent Comments
RSS