It won’t have gone unnoticed that I have been neglecting ten minutes hate in favour of other writing projects and sitting about drinking iced tea while trying not to melt in the summer heat (always tricky for redheads). Normal service is likely to be resumed as autumn approaches, in the meantime, here are some of the best things I have discovered elsewhere.
Starting with two very different perspectives on the Obama presidency, the first from Ta-Nehisi Coates, writing in The Atlantic, considers the irony of America’s first black president virtually ignoring the issue of race. Looking at Obama’s first term in the context of racial politics since America’s founding, he notes:
[W]hat are we to make of an integration premised, first, on the entire black community’s emulating the Huxtables? An equality that requires blacks to be twice as good is not equality—it’s a double standard. That double standard haunts and constrains the Obama presidency, warning him away from candor about America’s sordid birthmark.
The hope and change are also in short supply in this Voices on the Square conversation between actor John Cusack and Constitutional Scholar Jonathan Turley, as Cusack charts the death-by-drone-strike of his belief in Obama’s claim to be different to what preceded him:
There will be a historical record. ‘Change we can believe in’ is not using the other guys’ mob to clean up your own tracks while continuing to feed at the trough. Human nature is human nature, and when people find out they’re being hustled, they will seek revenge, sooner or later, and it will be ugly and savage.
In light of recent tragic events, the GQ article, ‘Guns ‘R Us’ is an essential read. Detailing the weaponry available over the counter in suburban America and the motivations of the people who buy and use it, the writer considers whether sales clerks are the best people to spot those likely to freak out and kill large numbers of their fellow citizens:
So these are the people who stand at the front lines, guarding America against its lunatic mass murderers? Clerks at Walmart. Clerks at sporting-goods stores. Minimum-wage cashiers busily scanning soccer balls, fishing tackle, and boxes of Tide.
With various idiotic pronouncements by various idiotic politicians on both sides of the Atlantic about rape, this week has been a dispiriting one to be a woman. I will return to the subject in greater detail soon, but in an attempt to redress the balance, here are two inspirational women who – in their own very different ways – have refused to take any crap from the patriarchy. Shown battling her own demons, the weighty expectations wrought by ‘legend’ status and a Syrian Army deliberately targeting journalists, Vanity Fair’s coverage of Marie Colvin’s Private War is a respectful and illuminating portrait of a peerless war reporter. Her advice to a younger reporter in Afghanistan:
You always have to think about the risk and the reward. Is the danger worth it?
is a difficult one to answer, but we are left the poorer without Marie Colvin to bring our easily distracted attention to the innocent victims of war.
Last, I really enjoyed writer Rebecca Solnit’s account of having Men Explain Things to Me:
Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don’t. Not yet, but according to the actuarial tables, I may have another forty-something years to live, more or less, so it could happen. Though I’m not holding my breath.
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