I have — as we say here on the left coast — trust issues. Not the mundane kind: I’m happy to give most people the benefit of the doubt, and more often than not, they prove trustworthy. I’m content to trust the roads to hold me and the sun to rise tomorrow morning. No, I’ve …
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 …
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 …
Colin Powell has stepped down as Secretary of State, and it appears Condoleeza Rice is going to be his replacement. It also looks like the end of an era of essentialist thinking about race. In a post-election essay that’s been circulating via the Internet, Charles Frederick characterized race as “a concept of no meaning while …
I suppose a worshipful tone is to be expected in the coverage of any presidential passing, but the Ronald Reagan hagiography has been a bit much. (The San Francisco Chronicle‘s coverage of Reagan as the avatar of family dysfunction was a point of light, however.) But what has really gotten me has been the headlines. …