About nothing much at all

It occurred to me that Senator Barrack Obama and former Governor Mitt Romney have much in common.

1) They are both handsome, well mannered and elegant, with an unmistakeable touch of the upper class. This is not a bad thing, but it can be a serious problem with those parts of the American electorate that are suspicious of "elitism" in its various guises.

2) They both have a political background that is significantly to the left of their prospective electorate. After his performance as Governor of Massachussets, Romney had a serious problem convincing any registered Republican that he was any kind of conservative.

3) They both have a religious background which the majority of Americans find suspicious, and which they have to play down. Romney was rather more successful in this than Obama; probably because, whatever most Americans may think of Mormonism, they do not find its mainstream version subversive or immediately dangerous. (In fact, I head it said that if you want to send your kids to a top university but keep them from promiscuity, drugs, and moral relativism, Brigham Young is a good choice.) But I think in both cases the burden has been rather more serious than the media realize.

What does this mean? Nothing much. I just found it interesting. Point 3 is perhaps worth noticing: evidently, the days when someone had to convert to Unitarianism or Episcopalianism to be a full-time member of the American upper class are long gone.

This, on the other hand, is a rather more serious thought

Whatever happens to the Democrat campaign, it is fundamentally a good thing that the issue of "black theology" and black separatism should have become a major issue. This thing has been growing in the black community, pretty much unconsidered and unnoticed by the majority. The fact that such a way to speak and think seems understandable if not natural to a large amount of African-Americans, so that a significant and native minority (what ethnic group has more of a claim to being local and ancient than those whose enslaved ancestors had been brought in before the Civil War?) is largely out of sympathy with the majority, speaks morally and politically a different language? This issue had to be faced, and if possible dealt with, whatever one thinks of Rev.Wright. (And, to be fair, I think very little of him.)And this concerns us all. US blacks are not an insignifcant community, and their importance does not stop at the border of their country. Their cultural influence is vast and enduring: black innovations from jazz to hip hop and rap have crossed all the oceans and made themselves at home from France to China. Above all, the ways of looking at the world that these innovations imply have reached out, from the improvisational edge of jazz to the anger that seems implicit in rap. There is a kind of cultural prestige, a "coolness", about being black in the American way, which percolates to many levels of society. English and Italian kids can be found imitating black fashions, black music, and above all black attitudes. And if these attitudes are underlain in whtever part by the separatist, self-righteous, and ultimately racist mental world of Wright and his likes, then that is something that will, in whatever way, affect the rest of us. So the issue has to be faced.

Progressivism vs. Socialism

The big surprise in the English and Welsh local election( Read more... )