Letters to the Editor
GizmoJones
Published Letters: 3
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A few words from Ralph Waldo Emerson
[Read the article: Are Barack Obama and John McCain hypocrites?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"Sincerity is the luxury allowed, like diadems and authority, only to the highest rank, that being permitted to speak truth, as having none above it to court or conform until. Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins."
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Who would Molly Ivins vote for?
[Read the article: The Obama difference]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]One of the distinguishing characteristics of Obama is that he is the first member of his generation to step up to the plate. He has the perspective that the self-absorbed and self-important Boomers lack.
I'm a Baby Boomer, I admit it, a member of the generation that both ended the Viet Nam War and invented junk bonds. It took me a long time to figure out how we could have done both -- what happened to our idealism, I wondered. I finally figured out that we didn't stop the war because we were all about love and peace and sex without commitment -- we were all about I am a member of the best-educated generation ever, so I know what's best. I'm sick of us. I'm ashamed of what a lousy job we did bringing up our kids, that we've dismantled most of the social safety nets, that we need to know what our ROI is going to be before we donate any money to any good causes, that we don't take responsibility for any of the messes we've gotten ourselves and our children and our planet into. We're not evil -- most of us -- but, with all our advantages, we could have done a better job, a less selfish job.
To me, the biggest tragedy of the last election was that a full third of Americans didn't even bother to vote. It was mostly younger people, and, while a part of me was irritated by this, another part of me couldn't blame them, considering the choices they were being given?
Now there's this guy. A black man with a white mother, a white man with a black father, politic but not political, brilliant and self-effacing. Mostly what is though, is he's an Xer. Like the brightest of his generation, he's savvy to the hype and baloney and posturing and self-importance that my generation has brought to our government, our economy, our educational system, our healthcare system...
Unlike McCain, Obama understands that our country has to change. Unlike Clinton, he has a clue about how the country wants to change.
One of the ways we need to change, whether we want to or not, is that we need to get over ourselves. (An expression invented by Xers.) We need to be honest with ourselves about what we're good at and what we're lousy at, so we can put our good to work for the greater good and get to work on improving the stuff that needs improving instead of spending so much energy being self-important and defensive.
Thinking about all this made me wonder: what would Molly say?
I remember Molly Ivins coming to my town almost 20 years ago and describing Hillary Clinton, without malice, as a "do-gooder Methodist lady." (Clinton is of my generation, the one that thinks it knows what's best.) Molly was the bullshit police for the generation that perfected bullshit. She knew immediately when something stank, and she called us on it. She was also the first person to recognize the real thing when she saw it. So I googled "who would Molly Ivins vote for" and found my answer here: http://blog.niemanwatchdog.org/?p=190
I'm voting for Obama because he's not a Boomer.
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Define "star," please
[Read the article: A star is born (at age 51)]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I have watched "Truly, Madly, Deeply" so many times that I wore out the video tape and paid a premium to replace it. I tell people it's what "Ghost" would have been, if "Ghost" were a good movie. The opening scene, in which Nina is crying in her pyschiatrist's office, is one of the most intimate, honest, heart-wrenching scenes on film. Juliet Stevenson brings that honesty to everything she does. I'm glad "A Previous Engagement" has finally made it to the U.S.