Last night, while jolking (jog-walking, a form of exercise particular to those of us trying to get in shape) at the gym, I had the deep displeasure of catching about 50 minutes of cable news. I had the option of either watching Fox News, CNN, or the gym parking lot.
I should have gone with watching the parking lot.
The topic of conversation on Lou Dobbs, Bill O’Reilly and Campbell Brown’s shows was, of course, Senator Obama’s speech. O’Reilly and his guests (the not-as-noxious-as-Limbaugh-or-Hannity-but-noxious-nevertheless Laura Ingraham) presented intellectually dishonest presentations of Obama’s speech, saying that he failed to reject Reverend Wright’s unhinged and unsavory remarks, while Dobbs and Brown asked their esteemed guests questions, and subsequently failed to correct or challenge them when they offered false or questionable claims. Is this what passes for intellectual debate these days?
Today while sitting in my car during my lunch break (don’t worry - I wasn’t idling), I heard a discussion on NPR regarding Obama’s speech that I wish were the standard for the norm for intellectual debate in the mass media.
One of the panelists, a Michael Meyers (no, not that one. Nor the even more frightening one), wrote an Op-Ed piece for the LA Times yesterday claiming that Obama “blew it.” And Obama blew it, he says, not for any of the reasons you might think.
No, Obama blew it not because he failed to acknowledge the concerns of one group or another, nor because he insufficiently distanced himself from remarks of one kind. Rather, Obama blew it because he failed to offer a way out of the way we currently think about race.
Meyers contends that Obama had an opportunity to remind us that we are all a part of the human race, and that race as it has hitherto been discussed and thought of is not merely wrong, but harmful:
We can’t be united as a nation if we continue to think racially and give credence to racial experiences and differences based on ethnicity, past victim status and stereotypical categories. All of these prejudices surrounding tribe-against-tribe are old-hat and dysfunctional — especially the rants of ministers, of whatever skin color or religion, who appeal to our base prejudices and to superstitions about our supposed racial differences. The man or woman who talks plainly about our commonality as a race of human beings, about our future as one nation indivisible, rather than about our discredited and disunited past, is, I predict, likely to finish ahead of the pack and do us a great public service.
This, rather than O’Reilly’s bilious conversation and Dobbs’ irrelevant discussion on The Speech, is thought-provoking.
March 20, 2008 at 3:12 pm
I think that is putting the cart before the horse. Of course we all want to reach the point where we are working only for the Human race as a community. But that point is not here yet, and Barack Obama has been attacked recently because of the color of his skin. He had to address it. He could not look past it. Same with the whole country. We have to address it. We cannot look past it.
We also call it “The Speech”. And it caused us to start this:
http://www.cheeseandcrackersforobama.com
Dig in.
March 26, 2008 at 11:21 am
Fullbodytransplant is right. We cannot put aside racial distinctions and look at ourselves as “the human race” until the various legitimate frustrations of the minorities (and even a few of the majority, as Obama pointed out) are addressed.