He has been gone now for more years than he lived but, on the birthday we celebrate today, Martin Luther King Jr. would have been only 80 years old.
Michelle and Barack Obama are doing community service in his honor and urging all Americans to do the same. In more ways than one, the inauguration of an African-American president tomorrow is part of his legacy.
Martin Luther King preached nonviolence to the oppressed. “Our weapon is love,” he told them, and he used it with stunning force.
At the dawn of TV, he brought into American homes images of peaceful Southern protesters beaten, driven with high-pressure hoses and arrested without fighting back. Their body rhetoric exposed racial hatred as never before.
Then, in 1966 Dr. King wrote for me about the apartment he had rented in Chicago’s slums to connect with gang members: “I was shocked at the venom they poured out against the world.”
He asked them to join Freedom Marches in Mississippi and they did in carloads, where “they were to be attacked by tear gas. They were to protect women and children with no other weapons but their own bodies...
“They learned in Mississippi and returned to teach in Chicago the beautiful lesson of acting against evil by renouncing force...
“And in Chicago the test was sterner. These marchers endured not only the filthiest kind of verbal abuse but also barrages of rocks and sticks and eggs and cherry bombs...
“It was through the Chicago marches that our promise to them—that nonviolence achieves results--was redeemed and their hopes for a better life rekindled, For they saw that a humane police force, in contrast to police in Mississippi, could defend the exercise of Constitutional rights as well as enforce the law in the ghetto.”
Some of those young men Martin Luther King helped to grow up and away from their worst selves to exercise their civil rights must have been among the millions of Americans of all races to vote for Barack Obama in November.
We celebrate his birthday today, but tomorrow will be the fulfillment of Martin Luther King's dream.
Showing posts with label Michelle and Barack Obama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Michelle and Barack Obama. Show all posts
Monday, January 19, 2009
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Michelle Obama Is No Jacqueline Kennedy
The comparisons were inevitable: two charismatic presidents in their forties and their dazzling wives moving into the White House with young children.
"When Michelle Obama took to describing her new role as mom in chief," Ruth Marcus wrote in the Washington Post last week, "my first reaction was to wince at her words...What does it say about the condition of modern women that Obama... sounded so strangely retro--more Jackie Kennedy than Hillary Clinton?"
Marcus recalled that Cherie Blair "who managed to keep her barrister job while her husband was in office, grandly decreed that Tony, prime minister or not, would be taking paternity leave after the birth of their fourth child." But in advice to Michelle Obama, Mrs. Blair has now changed her tune:
"You have to learn to take a back seat, not just in public but in private. When your spouse is late to put the kids to bed, or for dinner, or your plans for the weekend are turned upside down again, you simply have to accept that he had something more important to do."
When Jacqueline Kennedy was about to become First Lady, she sounded like a Stepford wife, telling a reporter I sent to interview her, "The most important thing for successful marriage is for a husband to do what he likes best and does well...If the wife is happy, full credit should be given to the husband because the marriage is her entire life."
But when the reporter put away his notebook, Mrs. Kennedy looked him in the eye and said, "But I'm smarter than Jack, and don't you forget it."
The difference between now and then is that Michelle Obama, unlike her predecessor, has had a successful career and put it on hold voluntarily to help her husband get elected and now to govern the country.
As the Kennedys entered the White House, there was obvious tension between them. I spent an hour with JFK waiting for her to appear for a cover shoot and, when I had to leave, he asked, "What do you do when your wife is always late?"
"You can't win, Senator," I answered. "If you let it pass, you're accused of not caring that something might have happened to her. If you complain, you're a brute."
"I'd rather," he said, his jaw tightening, "be a brute."
When Mrs. Kennedy arrived, the resulting pictures showed them looking less like a couple ready to move into the White House than a pair of prisoners posing for a joint mug shot. The shoot was rescheduled.
The Obamas' easy interplay during their Barbara Walters interview last week made it clear there was nothing "retro" about their roles in a relationship that others will be theorizing about during their years in the spotlight.
"When Michelle Obama took to describing her new role as mom in chief," Ruth Marcus wrote in the Washington Post last week, "my first reaction was to wince at her words...What does it say about the condition of modern women that Obama... sounded so strangely retro--more Jackie Kennedy than Hillary Clinton?"
Marcus recalled that Cherie Blair "who managed to keep her barrister job while her husband was in office, grandly decreed that Tony, prime minister or not, would be taking paternity leave after the birth of their fourth child." But in advice to Michelle Obama, Mrs. Blair has now changed her tune:
"You have to learn to take a back seat, not just in public but in private. When your spouse is late to put the kids to bed, or for dinner, or your plans for the weekend are turned upside down again, you simply have to accept that he had something more important to do."
When Jacqueline Kennedy was about to become First Lady, she sounded like a Stepford wife, telling a reporter I sent to interview her, "The most important thing for successful marriage is for a husband to do what he likes best and does well...If the wife is happy, full credit should be given to the husband because the marriage is her entire life."
But when the reporter put away his notebook, Mrs. Kennedy looked him in the eye and said, "But I'm smarter than Jack, and don't you forget it."
The difference between now and then is that Michelle Obama, unlike her predecessor, has had a successful career and put it on hold voluntarily to help her husband get elected and now to govern the country.
As the Kennedys entered the White House, there was obvious tension between them. I spent an hour with JFK waiting for her to appear for a cover shoot and, when I had to leave, he asked, "What do you do when your wife is always late?"
"You can't win, Senator," I answered. "If you let it pass, you're accused of not caring that something might have happened to her. If you complain, you're a brute."
"I'd rather," he said, his jaw tightening, "be a brute."
When Mrs. Kennedy arrived, the resulting pictures showed them looking less like a couple ready to move into the White House than a pair of prisoners posing for a joint mug shot. The shoot was rescheduled.
The Obamas' easy interplay during their Barbara Walters interview last week made it clear there was nothing "retro" about their roles in a relationship that others will be theorizing about during their years in the spotlight.
Sunday, November 16, 2008
The Obamas: Keeping It Real
If self-possession is a requirement for a successful presidency, Michelle and Barack Obama showed it in abundance on 60 Minutes tonight.
In half a century of watching White House occupants publicly and privately, I have never seen a couple as comfortable with themselves and each other as these two people who had to overcome extraordinary barriers to get there.
Obama, who avoided talking about race after his Philadelphia speech, acknowledged on Election Night "emotion that I could see in people's faces and in my mother-in-law's face...Michelle's mom, who grew up on the west and south sides of Chicago, who worked so hard to help Michelle get to where she is, her brother to be successful. She was sitting next to me, actually, as we were watching returns...
"And suddenly she just kind of reached out and she started holding my hand, you know, kind of squeezing it. And you had this sense of, 'Well, what's she thinking?' For a black woman who grew up in the 50s, you know, in a segregated Chicago, to watch her daughter become first lady of the United States. I think there was that sense across the country. And not unique to African-Americans."
When their journey started, Obama told Tim Russert with a nervous smile that his wife and friends thought he was still there behind all the hype and hoopla. Almost two years later, he still seems to be himself after all the exposure and pressure to become the fictional character that presidential aspirants usually morph into.
From the evidence of their interplay tonight, his staying grounded has much to do with the woman at his side, who teased him about the car he drove with a hole in the floorboard when they first met and his Washington apartment ("a dump") that she refused to sleep in during his Senate days.
Talking about what he will face as president in dealing with a sick economy, the President-to-be projected a no-nonsense approach that would be seamless with the kind of personal life he has led and will, if Michelle Obama has anything to say about it, continue to lead in the White House.
In half a century of watching White House occupants publicly and privately, I have never seen a couple as comfortable with themselves and each other as these two people who had to overcome extraordinary barriers to get there.
Obama, who avoided talking about race after his Philadelphia speech, acknowledged on Election Night "emotion that I could see in people's faces and in my mother-in-law's face...Michelle's mom, who grew up on the west and south sides of Chicago, who worked so hard to help Michelle get to where she is, her brother to be successful. She was sitting next to me, actually, as we were watching returns...
"And suddenly she just kind of reached out and she started holding my hand, you know, kind of squeezing it. And you had this sense of, 'Well, what's she thinking?' For a black woman who grew up in the 50s, you know, in a segregated Chicago, to watch her daughter become first lady of the United States. I think there was that sense across the country. And not unique to African-Americans."
When their journey started, Obama told Tim Russert with a nervous smile that his wife and friends thought he was still there behind all the hype and hoopla. Almost two years later, he still seems to be himself after all the exposure and pressure to become the fictional character that presidential aspirants usually morph into.
From the evidence of their interplay tonight, his staying grounded has much to do with the woman at his side, who teased him about the car he drove with a hole in the floorboard when they first met and his Washington apartment ("a dump") that she refused to sleep in during his Senate days.
Talking about what he will face as president in dealing with a sick economy, the President-to-be projected a no-nonsense approach that would be seamless with the kind of personal life he has led and will, if Michelle Obama has anything to say about it, continue to lead in the White House.
Monday, July 14, 2008
Obama Cover As a Museum Piece
It's one thing to find the New Yorker Obama cover in questionable taste, but the yahoo-ish invective being aimed at the magazine is over the top. However flawed in the eyes of some, the cover is nevertheless in the best tradition of magazine journalism.
Doubters can check out the Museum of Modern Art exhibit showing 32 of the 92 George Lois covers designed for Esquire between 1962 and 1972.
Unlike the current New Yorker, with the Obamas imagined by an illustrator, Lois often had subjects pose for his satirical images--heavyweight champions Muhammed Ali as the Christian martyr St. Sebastian with arrows stuck in him and Sonny Liston, the "meanest man in the world," as Santa Claus, to name two featuring African-Americans.
After the JFK assassination, inspired by the article "Kennedy Without Tears," Lois superimposed a hand with a handkerchief dabbing at the eye of the slain president. "I caught hell from a lot of people," Lois recalls, for being 'insensitive.'"
In 1968, as a takeoff on the five o'clock shadow from the 1960 presidential debate, Lois had a number of hands applying makeup to Richard Nixon, one of them wielding a lipstick, which a campaign honcho complained was a slur on the candidate's masculinity.
Lipstick had previously figured in a cover of a college football player applying it to his face to illustrate a piece on "the gay way to beat the draft."
Equal-opportunity offenders, Lois and editor Harold Hayes showed Vice President Hubert Humphrey as a ventriloquist's dummy on LBJ's lap, Stalin's daughter who defected to the US with her father's mustache drawn above her upper lip and TV MC Ed Sullivan with a Beatles' wig on his head.
The Obama cover is not likely to end up with all those in the MOMA, but it would be heartening to be able to look back at the reaction to it some day as a museum piece reflecting the prejudices and stupidity of our unevolved era.
Doubters can check out the Museum of Modern Art exhibit showing 32 of the 92 George Lois covers designed for Esquire between 1962 and 1972.
Unlike the current New Yorker, with the Obamas imagined by an illustrator, Lois often had subjects pose for his satirical images--heavyweight champions Muhammed Ali as the Christian martyr St. Sebastian with arrows stuck in him and Sonny Liston, the "meanest man in the world," as Santa Claus, to name two featuring African-Americans.
After the JFK assassination, inspired by the article "Kennedy Without Tears," Lois superimposed a hand with a handkerchief dabbing at the eye of the slain president. "I caught hell from a lot of people," Lois recalls, for being 'insensitive.'"
In 1968, as a takeoff on the five o'clock shadow from the 1960 presidential debate, Lois had a number of hands applying makeup to Richard Nixon, one of them wielding a lipstick, which a campaign honcho complained was a slur on the candidate's masculinity.
Lipstick had previously figured in a cover of a college football player applying it to his face to illustrate a piece on "the gay way to beat the draft."
Equal-opportunity offenders, Lois and editor Harold Hayes showed Vice President Hubert Humphrey as a ventriloquist's dummy on LBJ's lap, Stalin's daughter who defected to the US with her father's mustache drawn above her upper lip and TV MC Ed Sullivan with a Beatles' wig on his head.
The Obama cover is not likely to end up with all those in the MOMA, but it would be heartening to be able to look back at the reaction to it some day as a museum piece reflecting the prejudices and stupidity of our unevolved era.
Sad Day for Satire
Somewhere in editorial heaven, William Shawn is making a little note on the new New Yorker cover, scribbling in his tiny script, "What this?"
The cover of the July 21st issue is an artist's vision of the Oval Office with Michelle Obama with an AK 47 and Afro fist-bumping her husband in turban and Muslim dress to illustrate an article, "The Politics of Fear." The cover, the New Yorker explains, "satirizes the use of scare tactics and misinformation in the Presidential election to derail Barack Obama’s campaign.”
In the chaotic 1960s and beyond, the legendary Shawn made his magazine an oasis of sanity with the best reporting of the time on the political, social and cultural upheavals over race, the environment, art, poverty and the depredations of the Nixon White House.
He was trying, Shawn explained, "to hang on to sanity and reasonableness, no matter how turbulent or fevered or lunatic the world became...and, through it all we've considered humor indispensable, and we've searched for it, clung to it, and nourished it as if our life depended on it--and I think it did."
Today, the Obama campaign isn't laughing, finding the new cover "tasteless and offensive." Sadly, I'm sure Shawn would agree.
The cover of the July 21st issue is an artist's vision of the Oval Office with Michelle Obama with an AK 47 and Afro fist-bumping her husband in turban and Muslim dress to illustrate an article, "The Politics of Fear." The cover, the New Yorker explains, "satirizes the use of scare tactics and misinformation in the Presidential election to derail Barack Obama’s campaign.”
In the chaotic 1960s and beyond, the legendary Shawn made his magazine an oasis of sanity with the best reporting of the time on the political, social and cultural upheavals over race, the environment, art, poverty and the depredations of the Nixon White House.
He was trying, Shawn explained, "to hang on to sanity and reasonableness, no matter how turbulent or fevered or lunatic the world became...and, through it all we've considered humor indispensable, and we've searched for it, clung to it, and nourished it as if our life depended on it--and I think it did."
Today, the Obama campaign isn't laughing, finding the new cover "tasteless and offensive." Sadly, I'm sure Shawn would agree.
Saturday, February 02, 2008
Mixed Doubles for the White House
Forget the Super Bowl. Here's a match for Pay-Per-View--the Clintons vs. the Obamas.
Now that the candidates have shown in their last debate how well they bounce the conversational ball between them, why not schedule a round of doubles?
As Hillary keeps explaining away embarrassments by Bill, she always notes that Barack too has a supportive spouse. Today's Washington Post observes, "It is fascinating enough that Bill Clinton and Michelle Obama are playing on the same field as their partners duel for the Democratic nomination. More intriguing still is her effectiveness, hardly a given for a recent campaign recruit matched against a two-term president.
"Clinton, 61, earned his reputation as one of the most gifted national politicians in modern times while Obama was still a young lawyer trying to find herself. Obama, 44, kept her political forays to a minimum while building a career on community outreach in Chicago, yet more than a few enchanted voters have said after watching her that she should be the one in public office."
As this crucial campaign heads toward a two-for-one confrontation, a cable network could do worse than scheduling an hour for the Clintons and Obamas to sit together and talk politics.
If equal time is an obstacle, they can always invite the McCains and the Romneys to do the same.
Now that the candidates have shown in their last debate how well they bounce the conversational ball between them, why not schedule a round of doubles?
As Hillary keeps explaining away embarrassments by Bill, she always notes that Barack too has a supportive spouse. Today's Washington Post observes, "It is fascinating enough that Bill Clinton and Michelle Obama are playing on the same field as their partners duel for the Democratic nomination. More intriguing still is her effectiveness, hardly a given for a recent campaign recruit matched against a two-term president.
"Clinton, 61, earned his reputation as one of the most gifted national politicians in modern times while Obama was still a young lawyer trying to find herself. Obama, 44, kept her political forays to a minimum while building a career on community outreach in Chicago, yet more than a few enchanted voters have said after watching her that she should be the one in public office."
As this crucial campaign heads toward a two-for-one confrontation, a cable network could do worse than scheduling an hour for the Clintons and Obamas to sit together and talk politics.
If equal time is an obstacle, they can always invite the McCains and the Romneys to do the same.
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