I’m glad we had the opportunity to visit Alaska in August of 2007. Having been there, I feel better equipped to understand some of the thinking emanating from “The Last Frontier” that now shapes our news cycle.
Salon founder David Talbot, concerned with the right wing attacks on Obama that question his love for country, writes:
The Republican ticket is working hard this week to make Barack Obama’s tenuous connection to graying, ’60s revolutionary Bill Ayers a major campaign issue. But the Palins’ connection to anti-American extremism is much more central to their political biographies.
It’s a revealing article and I enjoyed reading it, but I have some issues with it. For one, I’m not ready to say the Alaska Independence Party–which Todd Palin once belonged to, and Sarah Palin recently gave a shout out to–is an “anti-American extremist” organization.
The fact that AKIP sent a Governor to Juneau in 1990 is one argument against this derisive labeling. Unless, of course, a majority of Alaskans are anti-American extremists.
Honestly, I know little about this political party or the people who support it. From what I can see in their platform, it’s essentially libertarian, with some “extreme” views on property rights thrown in. The point is I don’t need to agree with AKIP’s platform to agree that third party politics is of value to the citizens of this nation. Also, the idea of Alaska as a separate nation is not hard to conceive. It’s hard in that Imperial America would never let those natural resources go without a fight. But if you skip over that part, and see it from an Alaskan’s perspective, it makes some sense.
I’d actually take it much further and suggest that America could be divided into a group of nation states defined by its natural bioregions. If states’ rights hadn’t been so severely trampled by Reagan and company, this might not be as necessary as it is today. But they were trampled, and the homogeneous federalism that we endure today is no answer for a nation with many distinct cultures tied to place. For sure, all Americans have things in common, but not like they do with the people who share a climate, a dialect, water and food sources. I’m sure many in Alaska wonder what elected officials and bureaucrats in Washington, DC know about their lives. I wonder this all the time, but I don’t consider my views to be anti-American.
We need wild ideas and extreme points of view to help us stretch. It’s the way to a better future. America is often touted as “the cradle of democracy,” by political figures of all stripes. Great, then let’s push the envelope and find new ways to increase our personal liberties while also securing sustainable paths to energy, food and water. Can you think of a better time to reinvent ourselves and the way we do things in this country?
Can a hockey mom from small town Alaska lay claim to the word “maverick” and be believed by large segments of the voting population? I don’t think there’s any question that she can, and that fact has a fiery old lady from Texas upset.
Samuel Augustus Maverick
According to The New York Times , Terrellita Maverick, 82, a San Antonio native who proudly carries the name of a family that has been known for its progressive politics since the 1600s, shrinks a little each time she or her children hear Sen. McCain or Gov. Palin use the term to describe themselves.
Let’s look at where the meaning of this word developed:
In the 1800s, Samuel Augustus Maverick went to Texas and became known for not branding his cattle. He was more interested in keeping track of the land he owned than the livestock on it, Ms. Maverick said; unbranded cattle, then, were called “Maverick’s.†The name came to mean anyone who didn’t bear another’s brand.
As Maureen Dowd points out, also in today’s New York Times, “True mavericks don’t brand themselves.”
old postcard advertising Call of the Wild Museum in Gaylord, MI
I love this image, which we happened to pick up yesterday at an antique store in NE Portland. Exactly why I love it is hard to say. It has something to do with nostalgia I feel for a time in this country that I did not live through. Namely, the early part of the 20th century. I love the books from that era, the jazz, the cottages and bungalows, the hats and wool jackets, the flappers. Most of all I love the palpable sense of frontier. It’s such an evocative time, I think sometimes I can taste it.
Film critic, Roger Ebert, discusses the vice presidential debate as theater in today’s Chicago Sun Times. His is one of the more relevant approaches, given that TV has totally altered how politicians get elected in this nation.
I get the feeling that the powers that be in the Republican Party saw what happened to Nixon in 1960, and collectively agreed to never let that happen again. And for the most part they’ve been wildly successful at selling their mythical version of a much slimier reality. But I digress.
Here’s some of what Ebert saw in Governor Palin last night:
When she was on familiar ground, she perked up, winked at the audience two of three times, and settled with relief into the folksiness that reminds me strangely of the characters in “Fargo.”
Palin is best in that persona. You want to smile with her and wink back. But who did she resemble more? Marge Gunderson, whose peppy pleasantries masked a remorseless policewoman’s logic? Or Jerry Lundegaard, who knew he didn’t have the car on his lot, but smiled when he said, “M’am, I been cooperatin’ with ya here.” Palin was persuasive. But I felt a brightness that was not always convincing.
I think Palin is clearly Marge, not Jerry. A comment on Ebert’s post by “Citizen Spain” says it best:
What annoys me most is that Palin’s disarming Marge Gunderson quaintness has transformed a significant portion of our population into drooling, blathering Mike Yanagitas. Such a super lady!
Breathe Easy is a collective effort that features multi-layered tracks laid down by friends of the band at their famed Odditorium studio in Portland. According to the press release, the Dandy’s have always striven to build and promote a community for musicians, and in 2007, they took a very purposeful step in making this a definitive part of their ethos.
The nation could certainly use more Senators with Bernie Sanders’ perspective and his willingness to act for the common good.
Writing in The Nation, Sanders proposes to levy a 10 percent surtax on the income of individuals above $500,000 a year, and $1 million a year for couples in order to provide liquid capital for the nation’s beleaguered lending institutions. Sounds good to me.
Here’s what he has to say about the Bush/Paulson plan.
This proposal as presented is an unacceptable attempt to force middle-income families (and our children) to pick up the cost of fixing the horrendous economic mess that is the product of the Bush administration’s deregulatory fever and Wall Street’s insatiable greed. If the potential danger to our economy was not so dire, this blatant effort to essentially transfer $700 billion up the income ladder to those at the top would be laughable.
That’s not all that’s laughable coming from these bandits. Sadly, it’s just this week’s version of laughable.
Portland poet and essayist, Floyd Skloot, is the unique position of having two books introduced at once. His fourth memoir, The Wink of the Zenith, is out from University of Nebraska Press. And his new book of poems, The Snow’s Music, is out from Louisiana State University Press.
Last night, while reading at Powell’s, Skloot said The Wink of the Zenith is getting good reviews but he fears his new book of poems could be overlooked in the process.
Not by this site.
Here’s a selection from The Snow’s Music, a poem Skloot shared last night during his reading:
The Ensemble
The actor playing Claudius has worn
the same shirt to rehearsal every night,
a faded royal blue polo with torn
sleeves and grayed message: Ophelia Was Right.
The student of divinity who plays
Laertes has stopped seeking his inner
hothead. He’s come to believe the boy stays
calm and affects rage while his voice, thinner
the louder it becomes, gives him away.
That new beard, flecked with white, will have to go.
Meanwhile, the Gertrude whispering her way
through another chest cold still does not know
her speech from Act Three, saying No more sweets,
Hamlet! instead of No more, sweet Hamlet!
Her husband playing her son is two beats
too fast on every line. No surprise. Yet
his quick mouth suggests doubt, a racing mind,
something she has not considered before.
At the bar tonight the Director is kind
in his final notes, knowing little more
to do now, certain it will come together
tomorrow. He orders one more round,
toasts cast, stage crew, opening night weather,
Shakespeare, Denmark. He savors the sound
their laughter makes as it rises and falls.
He’s loved them all since the first casting call.
After Skloot read, I asked him if he’d written a play. He said not yet, but it would be an interesting challenge. He mentioned that he used to act and that the theatre has a big impact on his writing.
Portland is a city full of friendly, interesting people, so it’s natural that web sites would spring up from this fertile land to support that fact. One is Portland On Fire, a site that profiles a different Portlander each day. The site is currently inactive, but there may be work happening behind the scenes to bring us more profiles.
Another site I took note of is Strange Love Live, a podcast series featuring local tech persons of interest produced by Cami Kaos and Dr. Normal. I’m looking forward to the show’s next feature on local photographer, Mark Coleman. Mark and I met at Beer and Blog two Fridays ago.
Also at Beer and Blog, I bumped into Dawn Foster. Dawn is profiled on Portland on Fire, as well. Since meeting her, I noticed that another Portlander (one I have not yet met), Marshall Kirkpatrick, named her an up-and-coming social media consultant on ReadWriteWeb. Dawn gave me an invite to Shizzow, a Dopplr-like site that helps friends connect in real space and time.
I also met Amber Case and Bram Pitoyo at Beer and Blog. They’re working on organizing the first annual CyborgCamp, among other things.
This post is not conclusive, it’s just a run through of some of my preliminary findings in the tech and social media communities here. I’ve also had coffee with a couple of ad guys, and gotten to know someone working at Wieden + Kennedy. The someone at Wieden mentioned her frustration that the tech and ad communities are not better connected. It was an interesting observation, and by no means a situation exclusive to Portland.
Keen cultural observer and wordsmith David Foster Wallace–who passed away at 46 this month–gave the commencement address at Kenyon College in Ohio, on May 21, 2005.
He advised that it’s important to break out of one’s “default settings,” which is his phrase for the state of mind that limits one’s ability to operate at a higher level of consciousness on a day-to-day basis.
…learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.
That’s damn good advice. There’s way to much going on to “pay attention to.” We need to focus on what matters most to us and go deep there. We need to pick our waves carefully, and ride the ones we’re good on. The ocean, like the day-to-day world, is much to big to comprehend, but there is one thing we know—we have to go into both with utmost awareness and respect.
…the cult of the individual has caused the commonwealth to wither. – Roger Cohen
Roger Cohen of The New York Times wrote a splendid op-ed on the culture of Wall Street and how the nation needs to move beyond this epoch of unchecked greed into something better, something wholesome and sustainable.
The leverage party’s over for the masters of the universe. Shed a tear. When you trade pieces of paper for other pieces of paper instead of trading them for real things, one day someone wakes up and realizes the paper’s worth nothing. And Lehman Brothers, after 158 years, has gone poof in the night.
We’re witnessing the passing of more than a venerable firm. We’re seeing the death of a culture.
Cohen taught a journalism class at Princeton recently, where he saw first hand how attractive the high paying jobs in the financial sector are to the young minds coming out of Ivy League schools.
According to the Harvard Crimson, 39 percent of work-force-bound Harvard seniors this year are heading for consulting firms and financial sector companies (or were in June). That’s down from 47 percent — almost half the job-bound class — in 2007.
These numbers mirror a skewed culture. The best and the brightest should think again. Barack Obama put the issue this way at Wesleyan University in May: beware of the “poverty of ambition†in a culture of “the big house and the nice suits.â€
Maybe all the ex-paper pushers could be put to work, building things of value to the community. It seems far fetched at the time of this writing, but it might be less so in the not too distant future.
