If you could recommend one literary work to George Bush, what would it be and why?
If you could recommend one literary work to John Kerry, what would it be and why?
People speculate on this question. Bookninja throws in some other titles.
Why the heck do kids get it right when electing a president?
Danah Boyd cites a compelling angst-filled letter by Jo Guldi :
We sat around with glasses of Cabernet in a warehouse by the ocean, watching DC and New York reporting on New Mexico and Oregon, feeling horribly like it was too late. Now neither the church, nor ideology, nor science, nor economics, nor foreign policy, nor pressure, nor hope, nor organization could save us. No angry Marxist professors, no brilliant editorials in the Times could reach what needed to be reached. The beast of history is in. Lovers in each others’ arms, wake up and look. Poets and anarchists, put down your pens. Stop all the clocks, put down the indy rock music, stop reading psychology. Move to Vancouver or Paris. Get a degree in political science or advertising or business. Because whatever we were doing isn’t working, and the deadline is past. If there were a practical way to build something out of what has happened, we’d turn to that, but the moderate conservatives have already been exiled from Washington, and none of our friends will have influence for a long time yet. What has happened is too big for us, too big for our loose ideas of a hundred-year-plan for peace and happiness. There is no more road by which to get there: the storm of the last four years has swept it away, and the wind in the street last night blew out our last bridge to safety.
Progressive magazine journalist Matthew Rothschild writes about the flap of teachers being ousted for their T-shirt from the Bush rally.
Rahul Mahajan tries to explain the Bush Victory:
This election was about the victory, not so much of imperial arrogance and neocolonialism or of crony-capitalist “free market” fundamentalism, but of stupidity. Tom Coburn was elected to the Senate in Oklahoma; while campaigning, at one point he said, “lesbianism is so rampant in some of the schools in southeast Oklahoma that they’ll only let one girl go to the bathroom. Now think about it. Think about that issue. How is it that that’s happened to us?”
Jim Bunning was re-elected to the Senate in Kentucky. He is senile. He said his opponent looked like one of Saddam’s sons, admitted he hadn’t read a newspaper in six weeks, and reneged on a promise to debate his opponent in a public forum, instead teleconferencing in from remote location where he could read from a teleprompter.
Voters who said honesty was their key consideration for a candidate voted for Bush over Kerry 2 to 1.
I don’t deny that Bush is probably honest (willing to let his proxies do the dirty work of mispreresenting his opponent). But it’s a stretch to see a pro-honesty voter being impressed by the administration’s lack of transparency. If anything, Bush’s policy on Global Warming, Guatanamo, Iraq, the deficit makes us wonder why the administration is always hiding things.
David Weinberger talks about democrats reclaiming the language of moderation
Civility. I’m all in favor of civility. Real civility. I am not in favor of it when it means “Shut up and assume the position.” When rights are being trampled (excuse me, I mean when we are trading off rights for increased security) and lives are being lost, keeping a civil tongue is treason against morality. (See first entry above.)
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