Mao must have been rolling in his grave. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) Chinese students scoured the country destroying every vestige of Chinese history and culture they could find. The opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics was a celebration of Chinese tradition that would have been unimaginable to the iconoclastic revolutionaries who dominated 20th century Chinese politics. It was the most significant political statement of this unfortunately over-politicized Olympics.

Reviewing Entertainment Weekly interviews with the candidates, Marc Ambinder expresses surprise that

In some ways, Obama has the tastes of a 72 year old man; McCain has the tastes of a 47 year old whippersnapper. Who knew?

At risk of sounding cynical, why should we be surprised when Obama associates himself with Dick Van Dyke and McCain associates himself with Usher?  Isn't this what candidates often do in interviews - try to address potential vulnerabilities and convince more people that they're more like them than they realized (that is, when they're not focused on doubling-down on their perceived strengths)?  That the guy smeared as a secretly foreign terrorist fist jabber touts an old white guy and the really old white guy who can't use a computer touts a rapper seems to make a lot of sense.  Same reason around election time we often hear more from Democrats about their love of guns and Jesus and from Republicans about their love of Black people and the environment.

I am in awe.

Unfortunately - I had to watch the Canadian channel to see it without some idiot blathering away about god knows what, and then I had to watch it on blab-head-blabby NBC to see it in hi-def.

(Hey, NBC - STFU!!  We don't want to HEAR you!  We are quite capable of watching without your editorial!)

But I digress.

See more pics at the NYT and xinhua.

Got a short and sweet email from my good friend Makbula Nassar (مقبولة نصار), a Palestine reporter who does radio and print out of Haifa.  She was recently interviewed by Haaretz.com and proudly sent the link to the buddies. I thought some of you might find it a great read, thus gladly I share.

More below...

We have a vague notion that the "inevitability" of democracy's spread throughout the world may be a false claim, but we don't know for sure, and don't know how to evaluate the idea.  So even Democrats hesitate to call the idea nonsense.

Frances Fitzgerald wrote "Fire in the Lake," published in 1972.  This book described the debacle that results when Americans try to insert American values and institutions into a society (Vietnam) that cannot accept them.

From outward appearances no member of Congress, no present or recent member of the administration (let's include Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz and the State Department) and none of the Sunday morning interview hosts has ever read this book or any similar book.

August 6, 1945 was the horrible dawn of the atomic age at Hiroshima.

It's also the less well-known debut of an equally iconic, equally American killing technology:  the electric chair, which claimed its first victim on August 6, 1890 in New York's Auburn Prison.

This weird hybrid of penal reformism, naive techno-optimism and cutthroat corporate competition between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse made a nauseating botch of its maiden usage upon the person of otherwise obscure wife-murderer William Kemmler.

Cross-posted from Executed Today

Great article, video series, and photo essay that follows Union General William Sherman's war-route through Tennessee, Georgia, and the Carolinas in the present year to examine the slowly changing culture of the south and its impact on the election.

The article questions the role of the past in the present, and how accepting - or not - the evolving South has become, as well as how far it has to go. In addition to old black-white racism wounds, the new scapegoat of illegal immigration is impacting the cultural debate as well. The article begins:

George W. Bush and Barack Hussein Obama have unsettled the South: the first with a reckless war and a weakened economy, the second with the color of his skin, the foreignness of his name, the lofty liberalism of his language. Suddenly the palliative prosperity that salved old, deep wounds no longer seems adequate to the task.

The article was written after a roadtrip by the son of Deliverance writer James Dickey. Links and more below the fold.

You know I have been dropping poetry from my book BEING BLACK: being human over the past few days because I felt my poems addressed some of the crap I see coming out of the woodwork since Obama has been nominated.

I was going to take a break today but now I have to drop this one because those guys with the flag in Obama's face really pissed me off!

Jump below for my poem of the day...

Outing, as I would assume most people here know, is forcing someone out of the closet, i.e. showing them to be gay. It is most often done when the person ia in some position of power and the person has either done something that has not advanced gay rights OR more usually hurt the gay community at the same time the person is gay themselves.

I am obviously writing this as 1 gay man's view and voice and no way do I represent nor wish to nor would ever hope to represent anything then just little old me.

<more after the break>

The Dhammapada teaches

Conquer the angry man by love.
Conquer the ill-natured man by goodness.
Conquer the miser with generosity.
Conquer the liar with truth.

While most of us understand the logic of this approach in theory, it far too rarely spills over into practice.

It’s kind of a funny question to ask, but if America has a culture—does it deserve one?

The reason I’m asking this tonight is that I’m looking over the reviews for the new Batman movie, and they’re simultaneously so breathless and breathy that you’d think a new epoch in cinema had just begun. Look at this stuff:

This is an ongoing series from the national tour for THE UPRISING. You can order The Uprising at Amazon.com or through your local independent bookstore.

NEW YORK'S LA GUARDIA AIRPORT - To paraphrase Jerry Garcia, my book tour has been a long, strange trip - but as my newspaper column this week notes, it has been strange in how much of the same I've seen.

I want to share something that hit me today in the midst of my July 4th.  It's not particularly profound or revelatory but I think it is, however flawed, important - an important lesson about how we are witnessing something truly different in this country this election year.

Have you ever tried to recite the names of the Presidents in order?  Somehow I've managed to shoehorn that into my brain.  After reading a little Presidential puzzler that came in my morning LA Times, I decided to run through the list again.

While Americans hate bad movies, there is one thing they hate much more.

In fact, we hate this thing so much, that unlike bad movies, we refuse to even talk about it.  

Oh Where do I begin with this one? So... there is this boy in texas who is 5 years old and has never cut his hair. His father is native american and this is a cultural and religious tradition for them. When his parents went to enroll him in the local public school they were told by the principal that the dress code requires little boys to have hair cut above their ears. Reasons range from "it's always been like that" to "it will distract other children" (well maybe if long hair on boys was allowed to be more common it wouldn't BE a distraction!) to "boys are more likely to get dirty than girls" (though not said in so many words).

Since the blowup over the incident with the two women who were wrongfully removed from sitting behind Senator Obama because they were wearing hijabs, there have been several diaries here discussing the issue, and I have tried to read all of the comments.  

I was distressed by some of the remarks made in the diaries, and I won't call out anyone's names but my distress is based on the fact that I often wear a headwrap as a black woman here in the US for religious, cultural and ancestral reasons.

Some people who commented even asserted that the volunteers who took these steps were correct, since it would "protect" our candidate from the current slew of right-wing smears.  

I was perturbed by what I feel is both a xenophobic and ethnocentric perspective on head-covering, and to explain how those of us who do wear them can identify with the feelings of the two women who were discriminated against.  More importantly, I want to raise the issue in a broader context, and to discuss how this speaks to larger issues of diversity here in the United States.

I happen to work (right now, anyway) for one of America's largest bookstore chains. Which one is relatively unimportant, but I will tell you that its name rhymes with "Starne's and Coble". It's not at all a bad place to work.  The pay's nothing to write home about, but the discount on books helps - a lot. It requires significant discipline not to recycle my paychecks in their entirety right back through the corporation.

Working at a big bookstore affords one an interesting view of the culture.  Anyone paying even a modicum of attention can tell that we've gotten ourselves into a world of hurt, and that we can't always seem to find a way out.

I love to see ten gangling gorillas slapping the ball around under bright lights to the roar of fans. I do not much care about the Romans, even though they knew what it was all about: you win, or you dead. Too intense for me. I know more about Kobe, less about the 250 pound marbled Kobe-ushi who lives next door. I know what Phil ate for lunch. Phil, the coach, not Phil, my son. I do not know much about my son, even though I see him almost every day from the corner of my eye while I am watching my game or something. Let me stop for a minute and thank the media for achieving this state of atomicity. Frugal, minimalist, independent. Each individual wired to the signal, now in High Definition.