Yet again, I’m going to be fashionably late getting this out, but it’s been sticking in my craw for a little while now, so here goes nothing.
For all the attention paid to the back-and-forth over healthcare, our ongoing difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan, an economy that’s still apparently built on feet of clay, and a myriad of other issues, the one thing that’s really beginning to piss me off is the lack of anything resembling intelligent debate coming from the Right. It isn’t as though the proposals currently being floated to resolve any of these problems are so perfect as to not need, or deserve, thorough debate. But what we’ve gotten instead is more smoke than substance. Rather than disrupting, trying to pre-empt, or attempting to shut down, the debate, I would much sooner see something approaching concrete and realistic proposals.
What we’ve gotten instead is… this: Glenn Beck informing people that “Obama has a hatred of white people, of white culture.”
The question is, what “white culture”? I think it’s idiotic to talk about a singular, monolithic “white culture” in the same way I think it’s pretty dumb to put a Jesse Jackson or an Al Sharpton out front as a “black leader.” For all the complaints from the right about multiculturalism, the plain truth is that the United States has, from its earliest times, been multicultural. It isn’t just differences in skin color that create identity; even people who self-identify as Americans without any kind of hyphenated modifier being involved will generally acknowledge that they’re not rooted in some nebulous white-ness, but in a specific set of identifiers. Their ancestry comes from Ireland, Poland, Germany, what-have-you, and while people leave the physical geography behind them, they invariably bring something of the psychological geography—language, cuisine, customs, folkways—with them when they emigrate. Continue reading
If you believe 
It certainly sounds like a great idea: bring together two DJ’s, one from North America and one from South America, along with about forty guests. Simmer for four years, and then unleash upon an eager public. In practice… well, that’s something else again. The Spirit of Apollo sounds, and feels, like a frustrating relic of what might have been, but wasn’t quite.
We’ve never suffered from a dearth of books on Christianity. Even leaving aside the Bible, books on all things Christian–apologetics, fiction, inspirational tracts, and even books that take on Christianity from an atheistic viewpoint–have never been in short supply. The Christian publishing industry takes in revenues in excess of billions of dollars per year, much of it spent preaching to the converted, and much of the rest attempting to convert the rest.
My wardrobe–outside work, anyway–consists mostly of blue jeans and black t-shirts. If I’m feeling particularly flashy (the nights I want to go out and paint the town beige), I might wear a shade of dark grey. The closest I’ll ever get to a runway is white-knuckling it in an idling jet plane. I like nice clothes just fine, but on my list of priorities, they generally appear several pages back.
I’ve been told by a handful of people that I have to read Michael Chabon. Given the sources–thankfully not the same people who told me I had to read Dan Brown–I kept it in the back of my mind. I still haven’t gotten to the book generally regarded to be Chabon’s masterwork (thus far), The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier And Klay, but my gut tells me that The Yiddish Policemen’s Union would likely give its predecessor a run for the money. I mean, this is a book you’d get for the title alone, if you’re of a certain cast of mind. If you’re a browser of other cultures, if you’re inexplicably drawn to things Yiddish to begin with, and you generally like the better class of detective fiction (the kind that doesn’t prominently feature crime-solving cats), it’s a bit of a no-brainer.