Tom Carson has a piece at Vox about Rockwell becoming politicized in the 1960s, something I didn’t know about.
The first painting Rockwell did for Look magazine, after moving over from Saturday Evening Post, was a vivid statement about race in those tumultuous times. Alas, all the well-meaning actions at the time stalled and ended up meaning more as a symbolic nod than any radical change.
We’re still waiting for that.
So much of how we (and everyone else) turns out is due to happenstance. This story explains how working for equal opportunity makes merit meaningful. Good stuff.
Read it at Vox here.
Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay
A fascinating explanation of how modern elections turn not on swing voters choosing candidates, but the base voting against the other guys.
Which is why voters who dislike Trump have to remember to vote for the Democratic candidate, no matter who that is, in November. The Republicans, the Russians, the White Supremacists will try to get Dems and Independents to stay home, or vote for a third party candidate.
Don’t get fooled again!
“Only 53 percent of Sanders voters say they will certainly support whomever is the Democratic nominee. This is no idle threat. In 2016, in Pennsylvania, 117,000 Sanders primary voters went for Trump in the general, and Trump won the state by 44,292 ballots. In Michigan, 48,000 Sanders voters went for Trump, and Trump won the state by 10,704. In Wisconsin, 51,300 Sanders voters went for Trump, and Trump won the state by 22,748. In short, Sanders voters helped elect Trump.”
So, who among Democrats siphons votes away from Trump? Bernie seems to be the answer. Brooks says.
You can read his column, which makes a different and not really defensible point, here.
I think the better message is that most people don’t like Trump. Most people are opposed. No matter who the Democratic nominee is, and we may or may not like her or him, we all have to vote for the nominee. That’s the job. None are as bad as the choice of not voting, which is equal to a vote for Trump.
That’s what we all have to remember, even as Republican and Russian and White Supremacist operators pound us with divisive information. There’s better, there’s best, there’s not quite as good. All fine, especially if the alternative is Trump.
Stories about creativity are often tedious. Not uninteresting, at least not always, but often worthless.
So, it’s pleasing to find an old memory turned blog post about a painting that is charming and funny and meaningful. If you think so.
It’s about this piece.
A lunch counter, actually. It’s called Saartje, named after the given name of a South African woman who became better known as the Hottentot Venus, and it serves Nigerian fare, dishes like Woloff rice and fried plantains. But the chef, Tunde Wey, has bigger things in mind than just food.
The linked story, in the Washington Post, explains why Wey charges people of color $12 for lunch (and they can choose to take a percentage of the stand’s profits when the project is over, or not), and gives white people the option of paying $12 or $30, the larger figure representing the local income disparity between the races.
Wey is taking no profits from the stand, and has a Tulane student conducting post-lunch interviews, collecting data about why diners chose the option they did. He’s a cook, but this is also a sociological experiment.
Putting a face on the ways racial inequality persists seems pretty important, especially in a way that touches people emotionally. The story does a good job of amplifying those feelings, and where they come from.
Barack Obama was born in the US. We all knew it in 2004, in 2008, in 2012. Now, holy cow, even Donald Trump agrees that’s true. Boy genius!
But why did Trump spend seven years insinuating that Obama wasn’t born in the US?
Was it because there were legitimate questions? Or was it because Trump could gain political advantage by exploiting the prejudices of people who weren’t comfortable having a Black man with an unusual name as president?
Where do you stand?
This story is a good resource: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/09/priebus_pence_christie_conway_all_lie_about_birtherism.html
Three authoritative pieces about Donald Trump have emerged in recent days. These are based on solid straight-forward reporting by Newsweek, The Atlantic and Washington Post, and are followed by Keith Olbermann’s oxygen depleting recitation of factual reasons Donald Trump shouldn’t be president.
These stories are all over the place today, but I’m pinning them here just in case anyone lands here who needs to be reminded what their vote for Trump is actually a vote for. Continue reading The Known Facts About Donald Trump
I live just down the block from Prospect Park, which is a remarkable place. How remarkable? This video of mostly drone footage goes part of the way toward explaining it.
Not sure what aHa is doing in there, but the traffic circle at the southwest corner of the park, Bartle Pritchard Circle, has never looked more beautiful.
https://vimeo.com/161333029
Arthur C. Brooks is president of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. In this past Sunday’s New York Times he takes on the problem of polarization in the United States. This leads him from an old joke about two comedians in a boat, to the Dalai Lama, and a call for warmheartedness.
It’s well worth a read. I couldn’t agree with him more.
