Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: Scrimshaw Edition (Click on this heading to read more)
.
[...]Greg Grandin finds a literary analogy for modern America in a work by Herman Melville. And no, not the one with the whale.The view of racial relations that Grandin projects is bleak, and unfortunately the conclusions he draws seem all too close to the mark.
.
We live in an America where a significant portion of the population doesn't see the election of a black president as a triumphant victory set against centuries of injustice. Doesn't see it as progress toward an America that really lives up to the high-flown language of its founders rather than their often far more base behavior. Doesn't even see it as a proud expression of our vaunted "American dream." Instead, millions of Americans consider the election of Barrack Obama an uprising, an overturning of a natural order that must be restored.
No other American president has had to face, before even taking office, an opposition convinced of not just his political but his existential illegitimacy. In order to succeed as a politician, Mr. Obama had to cultivate what many have described as an almost preternatural dominion over his inner self. He had to become a "blank screen," as Mr. Obama himself has put it, on which others could project their ideals.... Yet this intense self-control seems to be what drives the president's more feverish detractors into a frenzy; they fill that screen with hatreds drawn deep from America's historical subconscious.
[...]
No comments:
Post a Comment