It’s easy to get lost in the 24/7 news cycle and in the political blogs of many ideological stripes that are loaded with persistent hyperbole. It is a challenge to sort through the tsunami of opinions and find good insights and well-reasoned positions.
How to assess Obama and his presidency at this point in the midst of this online chaos? As a long-time supporter of the President, how much do I give him the benefit of the doubt and when does it seem like he’s on the wrong track? When do his critics start making sense and start requiring closer consideration?
Jon Stewart and Andrew Sullivan, in their own ways, offer me the least insane options to help think about these nagging questions. I found Stewart’s recent critique of the President’s policies worth mulling over after the discomforting laughter from his comedic take.
Sullivan’s blog posting todaytakes the longer view and raises the conversation above the despair of Obama’s liberal critics and the insistent nihilism of his far-right opposition.
I share Sullivan’s take on the President:
… Obama’s incrementalism, his refusal to pose as a presidential magician, and his resistance to taking the bait of the fetid right (he’s president – not a cable news host) seems to me to show not weakness, but a lethal and patient strength. And a resilient ambition.
Victoria Manalo Draves, an Asian-American diver who overcame ethnic prejudice early in her career to become the first woman to win springboard and platform gold medals in the same Olympics, in 1948, died on April 11 in Palm Springs, Calif. She was 85.
Vicki Manalo was the daughter of a Filipino father and an English mother, in a society in which mixed marriages were generally frowned on. When she was 17, she sought to join the Fairmont Hotel Swimming and Diving Club in San Francisco. As she told The San Francisco Chronicle in 2005, the club’s coach, Phil Patterson, told her that because of her Filipino name she could not join the club.
In a 1991 interview which included her husband Lyle Draves, she described her early family life, her training, and the 1948 London Olympics:
I really didn’t have a clue about the Olympic Games. I can remember all the teams as we arrived at the stadium. You just feel like this one little tiny member of a huge gathering of all these wonderful athletes from all over the world. It is one of the few times that a woman was able to have a real patriotic feeling. It is such a different experience. It is just magnificent. Something you just hold in your heart and you just never forget, no matter how long ago it was.
The single story creates stereotypes. And the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story the only story.
…
The consequence of the single story is this: it robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult, it emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.
It’s ironic that this fast run-through of works displayed in the Museum of Modern Art elicits nostalgia for me. But most of these “modern” art marked milestones during my art history studies in college a million or so years ago. I remember my visceral responses to their visual effects and my struggles to scratch the required words for my class papers. Many years later, I still wonder what words adequately accompany Mark Rothko’s paintings?
Jon Stewart and Andrew Sullivan, in their own ways, offer me the least insane options to help think about these nagging questions. I found Stewart’s recent critique of the President’s policies worth mulling over after the discomforting laughter from his comedic take.
Massachusetts Medical Society
