One of the strongest obstacles to positive change is narcissism: our proclivity to give ourselves the benefit of the doubt, based on the feeling that nice people like ourselves couldn’t possibly be doing bad things. In the public arena, this is especially easy to see if you follow the way our leaders use the word …
The “ownership society” paradigm the Bush administration invokes in its campaign to dismantle Social Security scares me in a very old and deep place, chilling my soul. When I feel the shiver, an image shimmers in my mind, fleeting as a reflection on water: an old woman, wrapped in rags, sitting at the mouth of …
There were problems in our most recent presidential election that prevented some people from voting: poll slowdowns, registration glitches, dirty tricks, and much more. (I don’t mean to be dismissive: there are nearly 29,000 incidents reported in the Election Incident Reporting System database.) But what if, when our next election day rolls around, you and …
Superstitious me; I’m knocking wood as I write this, but: I feel the distinct rumble of a cultural shift gaining momentum. Really. Consider, for example, the notable news that all 8 of the Democratic Senators voting in the Judiciary Committee on Wednesday opposed Alberto Gonzales’ confirmation as U.S. Attorney General. The 13 members of Congress …
George Bush’s second inaugural address set me to ruminating on the question of political rhetoric. Indeed, there was so much to chew on, I’ve been processing for nearly a week and I’m still not quite ready to swallow it. Like religious speech, political speech is infinitely elastic. Like religious speech, it traffics both in exalted …
Condoleezza Rice is a work of art, her own exquisite creation. As we all by now know, as a child she excelled in music and sports, skipping two grades and achieving a baccalaureate by 19. Yesterday, NPR commentators were awestruck in admiration at her self-containment. At a break they remarked that while she’d come into …
When I started writing “2005” on things last week, I had a surreal feeling: this isn’t the future I was expecting. The turn of the 21st century was such a big deal for my generation, a longed-for milestone. When I was a child in the fifties, we thought that by the year 2000 people would …
According to many reports, the outpouring of donations for tsunami relief in Asia is setting records, especially for online donations. Yesterday, NPR’s “Talk of The Nation” featured a call-in with international aid executives. As I drove around town on my errands, a man telephoned to ask whether American taxpayers were going to have to make …
At dinner with friends this past weekend, the conversation turned to the urgent, imperative topic that seems inevitable these days: what shall we do now? In this context, “we” means all who feel misrepresented by the present U.S. administration, all who fear for ourselves, our nation and the world should its ambitions expand unchecked; all …
Monday’s \New York Times\ carried an interesting article about how the Bush campaign’s media consultants used consumer market segmentation data to woo the voters they most wanted to reach. (The Kerry campaign tried the same thing; this is a culture-wide phenomenon, not a partisan one.) The article quotes advertising big-wig Donny Deutsch: “The selling of …