Autumn Leaves and an Old Car

This post is mostly an experiment with embedding photos. I took these today on my way to the supermarket, to show a Korean friend how my town looks in autumn.







On the way home, I saw this car, a Chevrolet from the 1960s, parked near downtown.

Poetry Friday - Dinner Scene

DINNER SCENE

We sat giggling in a purple cafe,
hands crawling like friendly pink spiders up
and down each other's thighs,
seeking warm dark crannies to snuggle into.
Nothing like body games played under a dinner table
to coax me out of my gray moods.
When my hand has touched down in Ultima Thule
and you press your thighs together on it like a molding press,
I like to think that my hand will melt in your body kiln and then cool there,
so that I'll be joined to you forever.

-- 25 January 1971

By the time I'd written this one I must have met the guy who'd be my Muse until I moved to Bloomington the following fall. Not that long, really. By "Muse" I mean something like the relationship May Sarton had with the women who inspired her poetry, as I understand it: the feeling was largely unrequited, its subject not really accessible, the relationship never consummated physically -- yet out of that frustration and pain came poetry. Or verse, at any rate. It seems to me now that I wrote my best erotic poems in those days, when I had no erotic experience at all, only fantasies and wishes.

A couple of years ago I saw the Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethaku's film Tropical Malady, which contains a scene that could have come from this poem: the two main characters are watching a film in a theater, and one puts his hand on the other's leg. The other responds by gripping the first one's hand between his thighs and wrapping an arm around his shoulders as they both grin with pleasure and delight. Though the two are never shown having sex in the film, the scene makes the erotic current between them as clear as can be.

Pay No Attention to the Man Behind Bars

I also hate cartoons like this one (via Jenny Crusie's blog, with links to more like it):

Yes, Barack Obama's election was a minor victory over American racism; I don't deny that. I never quite believed I'd live to see an African American President elected, and I figured that if I did, they'd be a reactionary like Condoleezza Rice or Colin Powell. As I said before, I don't mean to rain on the parade of black and brown people who were understandably excited about Obama's achievement. What depressed me about the euphoria last week, among other things, was the self-congratulation of white Americans who overstated the significance of the event.

If you're going to point to a single black person's success as proof that America is a Land of Opportunity, why not point to Oprah, or Michael Jordan, or any number of other successful people of color? But Uncle Sam and the cartoonist who drew him are also muttering, "Pay no attention to the man behind bars -- hundreds of thousands of him. Pay no attention to the black children who are getting abysmally substandard educations in our apartheid school system. Pay no attention to the everyday racism that still permeates American society, not always expressed in lynching or a hail of police bullets, but it still degrades the quality of life of most African Americans. Focus all your attention on that One Man who managed to climb to the top; don't worry about all his brothers and sisters who are still on the bottom."

I'm not being picky picky picky here. Most white Americans still believe that blacks and whites have an equal chance of getting ahead in our society. I believe they thought so even when American white racism was more shamelessly explicit. I expect that Obama's election will encourage this perception.

Somewhere I read that in his later years, Thurgood Marshall (another first, the first African-American Justice of the Supreme Court) said that he could no longer in good conscience go around speaking to schools telling young black kids that if they worked hard, they could be the one black Supreme Court Justice when they grew up. And that brings to mind a sign that a friend of mine had on the door of her dorm room:

Sexual equality doesn't mean that a female Einstein gets an assistant professorship, it means that a female schlemiel gets promoted as easily as a male schlemiel.

By the same standard, the election of one African American to the White House does not mean racial equality.

One cartoonist who gets this is Garry Trudeau, an episode of whose Doonesbury I linked to last week. In that strip, a white American soldier in Iraq reacting to Obama's election exults, "We did it! ... He's half-white, you know!" A black soldier sitting next him smiles, "You must be so proud." A commenter at the site argued that it was reasonable for a white American to be proud of the achievement of Obama's white half. It would be, if the election of a white President were an event of any moment, but one thing we've not had in the United States is a shortage of white male presidents.

P.S. I just noticed that the cartoonist left out the barrier wall along the U.S. border with Mexico, let alone our many legal barriers to immigration, or even tourism. "See? This is the Land of Opportunity! So eat your hearts out, you poor huddled masses, and stay out!"

In Praise of Hate

Some years ago, my university’s diversity managers did an ad campaign on campus built on the slogan, “Hate Doesn’t Discriminate.” Ads in the student newspaper, flyers on the bulletin boards, that sort of thing. This is the sort of thing that feeds my distaste for the whole business of diversity management:* the professionalization, the sloppiness, the wholly unjustified self-righteousness.

Hate does discriminate, of course, if it makes any sense at all to speak of “hate” as though it were a person, an agent, instead of an abstraction. In fact, “hate” here refers to what used to be called discrimination, the allocation of resources, privileges and penalties based on “race”, sex, religion, sexual preference, and other hot-button markers. While there is what my high-school sociology teacher called a “halo effect” – prejudices tend to cluster – someone who “hates” people of color does discriminate between them and people of pallor; someone who “hates” Catholics welcomes Protestants. That’s what you call discrimination. Yet such an obvious howler was conceived by college-educated diversity managers and continued to appear around campus for a couple of years. And nobody laughed derisively, except me and a few other malcontents.

Hate is not necessarily bad, and I don’t think anyone really believes otherwise. But then I need to sort out what I’m talking about here. Like “love,” “hate” is a complex word. I love butterscotch ripple ice cream, I hate coffee; I love Heathers and Double Happiness, I hate The Joy Luck Club. I hate the person, whoever it is, who always parks their car so as to block the bike path from where I lock my bike at work. I hate bigotry – but that’s another abstraction, like “hate”, so maybe it would be more accurate to say that I hate bigots. (Or as Tom Lehrer once put it, “I know there are people in the world who do not love their fellow human beings – and I hate people like that!”)

As a personal emotion, hate is no more invalid than love, but no less problematic. What is called love is often just infatuation. People do awful things in the name of love, in personal relationships. “I’m just doing this because I love you.” “This hurts me more than it hurts you.” “If I can’t have you, nobody can.” Love brings misery at least as often as it brings joy, and is so often used to excuse a lover’s bad behavior that I can’t see why the word has such prestige.

And then there’s religious love, the kind of love that justifies atrocities on a large scale. The philosopher Walter Kaufmann pointed out many years ago, in his book Without Guilt and Justice, that over the gates of Dante’s Hell, along with the more famous “All hope abandon, ye who enter here,” are the words

Justice moved my Architect above,
What made me was divine Omnipotence,
The highest Wisdom and the Primal Love.

(That’s Kaufmann’s translation, I believe.) I wouldn’t agree that Hell has anything even to do with justice, but to invoke Love in its rationale is, as Kaufmann observed, as obscene as the words that were inscribed over the gates of Auschwitz: Arbeit Macht Frei, “Work liberates.” I recall too that in a book on homosexuality and religion that I reviewed, one Jewish scholar pointed out that it wasn’t very compelling to argue that homosexuality is good because it’s Love, since so many terrible things have been done in Love’s name.

As for hate, it can be as shallow as love. I’ll concede happily that indiscriminate, impersonal hatred is not a good thing, but I feel the same way about indiscriminate, impersonal love – the kind of love that many modern Christians think is called agape. Personal hatred is, I submit, as necessary and valid as personal love, though like personal love it shouldn’t be given free rein. Haters, like lovers, had better think about the ways in which they express their hatred – which bigots seldom do. (I suppose that’s part of the fun of it.)

There are people I hate, much as there are people I love, sometimes based on long acquaintance and considered judgment, though sometimes I have experienced hatred at first sight. Though there are people of whom I’ve said that I wouldn’t piss on them if they were lying in the gutter on fire, I’m not sure it would actually be true except in the literal sense. If someone I hate were lying in the gutter on fire, I probably would refrain from pissing on them, but would get a fire extinguisher, call 911, and get an ambulance. If they died, I wouldn’t waste any tears on them, but my immediate reflex would be that someone in trouble needs help. That doesn’t mean that underneath the hatred there is really love; I don’t think love has anything to do with it.

I haven’t noticed either that people who prattle about diversity and love and the need for an end to hate because hate discriminates, are any less free of hate than anyone else. Indeed, they are big haters, as you will see if you listen halfway closely when they are talking about Bible thumpers and rednecks and trailer trash and Rethugs and the Chimp and the Village Idiot in the White House.** (Or about Ralph Nader – John Caruso has pointed out that many liberal Democrats seem to hate Nader even more than they hate Bush.) Nor do they seem to feel any cognitive dissonance about this, and I’m wary of anyone who exhibits so little self-knowledge, so much intellectual dishonesty about their own motives and expression. It seems to me that on some level, such people are just pogroms waiting to happen.

The philosopher Michael Neumann put it very well in an article on “respect” (another diversity management buzzword) that I’ve quoted here before. Substitute “love” for “respect” here, and the point is much the same:

Respect is not a duty; it is not even desirable in many cases. Where ‘respect’ means not beating people or putting them in jail or driving them from their homes, it is a fine idea. But you shouldn’t do those things even to people you hold in contempt. To call this sort of restraint ‘respect’ is to disguise clear moral values in gummy slush.

You can hate anyone you like, but you can’t burn down their house, or drop bombs on them or impose sanctions that kill half a million children with starvation and disease. You can call them Bible thumpers or trailer trash or Rethugs, but if they turn around and call you militant flaunting homosexuals or limousine liberals or Socialists, you are not in a strong position to accuse them of "hate." Name-calling isn't productive, but sometimes it lets off steam and makes it possible to clear the decks and start dealing with the issues. I realize that’s a profoundly un-American position for me to take, but I’m used to being odd person out.

*Maybe I should say something about the term “diversity management.” I first encountered it in Vijay Prashad’s book Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (Beacon Press, 2001), page 63:

The idea of difference management (diversity) seems to have largely usurped those agencies that deal with multiculturalism. In my estimation, multiculturalism emerged as the liberal doctrine to undercut the radicalism of antiracism. Instead of antiracism, we are now fed with a diet of cultural pluralism and ethnic diversity. The history of oppression and the fact of exploitation are shunted aside in favor of a celebration of difference and the experience of individuals who can narrate their ethnicity for the consumption of others. That the U.S. state adopted the liberal patina of multiculturalism to fend off an important challenge from the progressive and democratic forces is not reason enough to discount the power of cultural plurality, for multiculturalism opened the space for struggle against the conceit of cultural homogeneity (at the same time as the logic of diversity management quickly tried to close that space off, since it claimed to solve the problem by mutual respect rather than by the struggle to dismantle privilege). “A Multiculturalism that does not acknowledge the political character of culture will not, I am sure,” argues Angela Davis, “lead toward the dismantling of racist, sexist, homophobic, economically exploitative institutions.” The difference between antiracism and diversity management, then, is that the former is militantly against frozen privilege and the latter is in favor of the status quo.

I think that says it very well. It's a topic I want to return to soon.

** Liberal vitriol, by the way, often brings out a revealing response among vitriolic conservatives: lurking beneath their denunciation of the libs' incivility, rudeness, crudeness, and bad manners, is the half-repressed awareness that the libs have, after all, only descended to the conservatives' level.

No Honeymoon

I share Avedon's exasperation with people who

talk like Tuesday was the Inauguration rather than just the election. Watching the Beeb talking about Tuesday as, "The day an African-American became president of the United States," I was shouting at the tube, "No he didn't! He was just elected, dammit!" There are constant references to "President Obama" as if he actually was. It's as if there weren't several dangerous weeks to go."

She also corrected Alice Walker's mislabeling of the President as "the commander in chief of the United States," a mistake usually made by Bush supporters during his regime. I guess whoever has their guy in (or near) power is going to want to inflate his significance in this way.

I'm going to link again to Naomi Klein's important article on the bailout as pillage (and remember that Obama voted to put Bush's hands deep into the till). It reminded me, first, of the Republican claims in early 2001 that the outgoing Clinton administration had vandalized the White House and Air Force One. Those claims turned out to be lies, of course, but as with so many Republican lies about the Democrats they should be taken as projection, foreshadowing what the Republicans will do as soon as they get the chance. Second, I began wondering idly whom Dubya will remember when it comes time for the traditional end-of-term pardons. Oh well, I guess we'll get to be surprised on that matter.

The danger doesn't lie solely in what Bush will do during the coming weeks, though. A good many people on the leftward end of the political spectrum (I know, such terminology isn't very descriptive of anything, but I haven't thought yet of a better label, and "left" is the word that is generally used by commentators) threw their support and energy and labor to Obama, wishing and hoping and thinking and praying that he'd grant some of their wishes. Without those people's strenuous efforts, Obama probably would not have won the election; while his campaign relied on traditional corporate-party sources of funds and other support, the "grassroots" elements (as they've been called) probably made the difference between victory and defeat: volunteers who went door to door campaigning, made phone calls, drove voters to the polls, and so on. The general attitude among party elites and the corporate media now is that, having done so much, those people should go home, shut up, and leave the running of the government to the professionals. The first sign that Obama shares this attitude was his appointment of Rahm Emanuel as White House Chief of Staff.

I've already heard some Obama fans say that it's too early to complain, that we should just wait patiently and See What He Does. Absolutely not. Admittedly, none of the people I've talked to have any idea who Emanuel is and why his appointment is a slap in the face to anyone who hoped that Obama's administration was going to be Different -- just as none of them knew what Obama's actual positions and concrete promises were before the election. This is politics as spectator sport, though few sports fans treat the decisions of coaches and team owners as uncritically as these Obama fans treat the running of their country by the man they supported.

Here's the crux of the matter: the right-wing Democrats, the party hacks, the corporate enablers and the corporate forces they represent are not sitting back to wait and see what Obama does. During the campaign they gave him money; they reacted swiftly to any hint that his policies, on "free trade" for example, would differ from theirs and forced him to backtrack, as if it were really necessary. (By contrast, when Obama did something that upset his progressive-liberal supporters, such as his vote for FISA, he dug in his heels and claimed -- often correctly -- that this was what he had promised to do all along.) Now they want to make sure that his staff and advisors are acceptable to them and their interests. In the real world of politics it is perfectly legitimate for them to do so, and it is also perfectly legitimate for Obama's liberal and progressive and left supporters to watch his every action closely and critically, and demand that his staff and advisors be acceptable to them and their interests.

It's perfectly legitimate, for example, to ask why the President-Elect's many foreign-policy advisors include so many people with records of advocacy for US state violence, aggression, and terror, and so few (any?) who object to invading Iraq on grounds other than "the enormous waste from excess military spending." It's legitimate to ask why a name prominently floated for Secretary of the Treasury is Larry Summers, a former Secretary of the Treasury for Bill Clinton, with a long track record of dubious and even vile positions? Have prominent left economists like Robert Pollin been consulted on policy or appointments? If not, why not?

It turns out I'm not the only person who's been wondering what will happen to the Obama campaign's legions of volunteers, virtual and meat machines alike. I never expected that the President, any more than his Establishment worriers, would want his organization to possess any real autonomy. But these supporters include those who said that once Obama was elected it would be legitimate to criticize and pressure him, and indeed that they would be among those holding his feet to the fire, and they need to start thinking about how they're going to do that. And the time to do it is now. Not after January 20, when Obama will have announced his Cabinet and other senior staff appointments and, gosh darn it, it will be just too late to do anything about them; when his first wave of executive orders and proposed legislation will already have been prepped for deployment; when, in short, the foundations of his first term in office will have already been laid. Anthony Arnove wrote at the Socialist Worker's site (and my only disagreement with him is that "the first day he takes office" is already giving Obama too much room to breathe):

The first thing to say is that there should be no honeymoon. The Democrats have held a majority in the House and Senate for two years, yet have continued to fund the occupation of Iraq, to allow warrantless wiretaps, to expand the military budget.

The Democrats can no longer use the excuse of Bush and the need to win the White House to continue to defy the widespread desire for change. That means we need to challenge Obama from the first day he takes office, with public protest and mobilization.

My not-so-ambivalent Obama friend asked me rhetorically the other night if the US had ever elected a left-wing President. I agreed with her that we hadn't, but I was wrong. As Avedon wrote at the Sideshow,

You know, we were told over and over that Obama was "the most liberal member of the Senate" (not true, but I'm sure lots of people believed he was really liberal), and the Republicans even insisted that Obama was a socialist - and yet the people elected him! So Obama has a mandate to be at least a screaming liberal, or even a socialist, right?

She's absolutely right. Obama is not a socialist or a screaming liberal -- not even a "progressive" as a commenter at another blog tried to tell me, but a "centrist" or in plain English, a right-wing Democrat -- but he was elected by American voters who almost certainly believed that he was one. (Similarly, though I'm boggled by the misperception of people who believe Bill Clinton was a liberal, that belief is usually a factor in their nostalgia for his administration, when as they believe, things were better than they are now.) The attacks by McCain and Palin and the media failed: American voters want "redistribution of wealth," downward for a change, and they'll be very disappointed if Obama doesn't deliver it. It may no longer be possible for critical voices to reach Obama, and it certainly will be impossible after Rahm Emanuel becomes his doorkeeper. But the time to try to reach Obama with news from outside the Democratic Leadership Council is now. There can be no honeymoon.

Poetry Friday - Song of the Signal Girl

Song of the Signal Girl

when its time to railroad
you must railroad
when its time to railroad
i will be ready

goodbye lovey
o the clouds are supported
at strategic points
by the tips of the skyscrapers
its nice to have met you
o the toes of the skyscrapers
are lost in mist
goodbye lovey
o the eyes of the skyscrapers
are lidded with frost
i won't forget you
o the skyscrapers shiver
in their thin new coats
of morning paint

a snap of my fingers
brings streetlights dancing
a clap of my hands
makes the sidewalks sing
a wink of my eye
blows down hurricane fencing
a tap of my foot
makes the doorbells ring

city was my cradle
city was my playpen
city taught my everything i knew

but the sun never rises in the city

Soft railroaders on your midnight trips
all i understand is love between my lips
and i want you there
with your javelin laid aside
to give me time to let me be your bride

--December 11-13, 1970

I'd been vacillating whether to post this poem or not. I feel vaguely embarrassed by it, though that is a reason to post it.

I know where it came from: I'd been listening to Laura Nyro, in particular to New York Tendaberry, and this poem was channeling her. The final stanza was probably inspired by "Gibsom Street", where she sings of sucking the juices from a strawberry a man had given her. Obvious fellatio imagery, though it now makes me think of Christina Rossetti's wildly oral "Goblin Market." I wonder if Nyro knew that poem, which is much better known now than it was then.

I'm not sure whether I wrote it before or after I saw her perform at Indiana University Bloomington -- there's a good chance it was soon after. She played in the university auditorium, with just a piano, which I sensed disappointed much of the audience who knew only that she'd written "Stoned Soul Picnic" and was expecting a full band. Some were fans, though: at one point a male voice called "He's a Runner!" from the upper balcony, but she didn't fulfill or even acknowledge the request. Her opening act was Jackson Browne, who, like her, was better known at the time for other people's versions of his songs -- he hadn't yet made a record of his own. I'd heard of him, but knew little about him, and was stunned when this beautiful hippie boy walked out on the stage with a guitar and began to perform.

"Song of the Signal Girl" seems very uneven to me now, at its weakest when it's most obviously Nyro. But there are some nice things in it. The first three stanzas still seem good to me. Maybe someday I should try setting them to music, and finish the poem/song according to its own inner logic, rather than as a pastiche.

(Image by Lawrence Housman from the 1893 edition of "Goblin Market"; via The Victorian Web.)

Victor, Spoils

I’m still sorting out my feelings about Obama’s victory. One thing I’m sure of: I’m very relieved that McCain wasn’t elected, especially with Sarah Palin as his Vice President. But “relieved” doesn’t equal “happy,” let alone ecstatic that Obama will be President. And a lot of people were ecstatic, though we’ll never know how many of them were confusing relief at the end of Republican control of the White House and Congress with ecstasy over Obama. The same grandiose rhetoric was all over the place today (via), and that depressed me even more.

The other day Kelley Eskridge posted a story on her blog. Told by Bono, who got it from Harry Belafonte, it involved Civil Rights leaders’ reaction to Robert Kennedy as his brother’s Attorney General. This would have been 1961 or so. Bono quoted Belafonte:

We knew we were in deep trouble. We were crestfallen, in despair, talking to Martin, moaning and groaning about the turn of events when Dr. King slammed his hand down and ordered us to stop the bitchin’: ‘Enough of this!’ he said. ‘Is there nobody here who’s got something good to say about Bobby Kennedy?’

“We said, ‘Martin, that’s what we’re telling ya! There is no one… There is nothing good to say about him. The guy’s an Irish Catholic conservative bad ass, he’s bad news….’

“To which Martin replied: ‘Well, then, let’s call this meeting to a close. We will re-adjourn when somebody has found one redeeming thing to say about Bobby Kennedy, because that, my friends, is the door through which our movement will pass.’”

(Hm. I really doubt that King would really have said “re-adjourn” when he meant something like “re-convene.” I wonder whose error that is?)

So, okay, I’ve been trying to think of at least one redeeming thing about Barack Obama. Not necessarily as a person – I am sure I’d like him if I ever met him – but as a Presidential candidate (and now, of course, as President). That he’s an eloquent speaker is immaterial – that just makes me more wary, frankly. He is, as far as I know, pretty securely pro-choice, and so the great Fear over Supreme Court Justice nominees that liberals have waved during the past several Presidential campaigns can probably be retired: as the older Justices finally lay their burdens down, it’s probably reasonable to hope that President Obama will choose sound replacements. And something else occurred to me while talking to a friend about this (actually, she drew it to my attention and rubbed my nose in it): Obama's courage in running for high office in what is still a dangerously racist country.

I expect we’ll see some incidents of white racist violence in backlash against Obama’s election, though I think the same would have happened (worse, probably) if McCain had won – the bigots would have taken a McCain presidency as a promise of impunity for their crimes. (And as Avram Grumer noted at Making Light, "I fully expect to get sick of hearing coded racial slurs in criticisms of Obama over the next few years.") McCain’s campaign deliberately stirred up his constituency’s worst attitudes, to the extent that McCain himself was booed by his own mob when he tried to get them to tone it down. (Some of that was audible in the responses to his concession speech Tuesday night.) McCain has a lot to answer for.

And this is really a side issue for me personally, but I recognize the importance of having elected our first President of visibly African descent. I’d always thought the first African-American President would be someone like Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice. My ambivalent pro-Obama friend, mentioned here numerous times before, is African-American, and he left a message on my answering machine today. His parents, he told me, who are in their eighties, were thrilled that they had lived to see the election of an African-American president. I can imagine how that must feel, and I'm really happy for them. Obama’s election is unquestionably a victory over American racism – but like every other such victory, it doesn’t mean the end of American racism. Our prisons will still be overstuffed with African-American males, African-Americans and other people of color will still be subject to special attention by the police, and so on. (And US missiles will still be shredding Afghan wedding parties, but that’s another issue.) Obama’s victory won’t affect any of that.

I’m also haunted by something I once read about the election of the first black mayors to major American cities (Ed Bradley, Marion Barry, Harold Washington) – that the local political machines only allowed them to get so far because the cities were in major trouble (political, financial) and the blame for their worsening condition could then be put on their black mayors, not on the white power brokers who were really responsible. Obama faces a similar crisis, only worse, and I don’t see any reason to believe that he knows how to fix it.

It's taken me some time to figure out why I don't feel right, as a person of pallor, about feeling triumphant about the election of America's first African-American president. I think it's because I've seen too many white people congratulate themselves for overcoming their own racism, when so much remains to be corrected. And there's also what might be called the colonialist or paternalist move, where Bwana gives himself too much credit for the natives' celebration, or appropriates colorful native garb or customs in order to feel diverse. Racism isn't (in my hubristic opinion) primarily a personal failing, it's a structural failing that sometimes expresses itself in personal attitudes of greater or lesser virulence. But in any case, while I concede that white Americans' attitudes have improved to the point where a black President could be elected, that only means that we've begun to catch up with the Third World, and as this writer points out, that women and ethnic minorities have become heads of state in such countries "does not prove anything positive about the status of those communities." Anyway, Obama's election doesn't feel to me like something that white people are entitled to use to feel better about ourselves or our country, not just yet.

So, what could cure my blues? So far the announcements of the new administration abuilding are not encouraging: Obama has asked Democratic Leadership Council party hack and attack dog Rahm Emmanuel to be his chief of staff, Larry Summers’s name is high on the list of choices for Secretary of the Treasury, and there is word Robert Gates will be kept on as Secretary of Defense – one of those bipartisan gestures Obama is so big on. Okay, okay, I know: to the victor belong the spoils. Besides, these people worked hard for Obama. They want to be respected and to continue to be involved in what he does. They expect to have a voice in governing. I know that some raw meat will have to be thrown in their direction. I’ll just be waiting to see what crumbs Obama is going to throw at the grass-roots supporters who played an equally important role in getting him elected. Noam Chomsky for Secretary of State, maybe? Amy Goodman as Press Secretary? I’m not holding my breath.

(P.S. I spent some time this evening adding some links and making some other revisions.)