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I was in a conversation today with some colleagues about the importance of raising children’s levels of belief that they are good at learning. Studies have consistently shown that people rise to their level of belief in themselves – if you think you are good at learning something, you actually do learn it better – and vice versa.

Unfortunately poor children and children from ethic minorities are consistently told they are inferior learners, and this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s a difficult trend to reverse, but when children are given an opportunity to learn by doing things they already know they are good at -like playing computer games – there is real potential to level the playing field and give these kids better educational opportunities.

I am always astonished at how the mere knowledge that something is possible can change everything. Until Roger Bannister ran a four minute mile in May of 1954, many people believed it to be impossible. But then John Landy broke Bannister’s record a mere forty six days later.

I’ve seen this sort of thing operate in my own mind. For example, for many years I was completely incapable of finishing The New York Times crossword puzzle on Saturday. For those of you who don’t know, the Times puzzle increases in difficulty throughout each week – Monday is easy, Tuesday a little harder, and so on, with Saturday being the killer (the Sunday puzzle is very large, but it’s generally somewhat easier than Friday).

Each week I would start hopefully on another Saturday puzzle and then proceed to wrack my brains in frustration for an hour or so. At some point I would generally put down the paper – which was usually remarkably unblemished by answers – and go to the kitchen to make coffee. Then I’d circle back around warily, glare down at my fiendish newspaper nemesis, pick up my pen and look the whole thing all over again, scanning uselessly for something to dawn on me. Sometimes I’d doodle in the margins while waiting for inspiration to strike. Sometimes I’d even make more coffee. But none of it ever worked. Eventually, as the day wore on, I would always have to admit defeat.

But all this changed one day in March of 2002 – the day that The New Yorker came out with an article about the world of crossword puzzlers, and I finally got an inside glimpse into that fascinating collection of brilliant eccentrics and literate cranks. One datum in particular jumped out at me: one day in 2001 famed crossword puzzler Ellen Ripstein had managed to finish a Saturday puzzle in four minutes and forty six seconds flat.

Here I was not even able to finish the darned thing, and there were people out there who were doing it in under five minutes. The next Saturday, when the paper came, I vowed that I would stick with the puzzle until I finished it – and so I did. Then I finished it the following week, and then the week after that, and the week after that too.

In fact, in the six years since I read that New Yorker article I’ve never not finished a Saturday puzzle once I’ve started it. Sometimes it takes me a while – I don’t think I’ve ever done better than thirteen minutes, and it usually takes me about twice that, but I always finish.

All it took was to know it was possible. Go figure.

I’m just going to say at the outset – getting it out of the way – that I don’t think there is anything stupid about Sarah Palin. My sense is that she is an excellent politician, with great skills and instincts at what she does, which up to this point in her career has primarily been to win over voters.

But that doesn’t even begin to let John McCain and his political advisors off the hook. The fact is they appointed someone who is painfully unqualified for the job of vice president. She was clearly not vetted properly, and she doesn’t know the first thing about the issues she is being asked about. Even her supporters understand this.

Having said that, I’d like to return to last Thursday’s vice presidential debate. The Sarah Pallin “victory” consisted primarily of the Republican vice presidential candidate making use of a loophole in the debate rules to avoid showing any ability to answer questions. Or, in fact, to do anything other than recite predefined talking points.

Why does this matter? Can’t we just congratulate the Republicans on having successfully hacked the debate, by getting their underqualified V.P. candidate through a tight spot?

My argument is that it matters a lot. It matters because the Republican strategy is a gross insult to all women, with Sarah Palin as her gender’s stand-in. By putting up somebody who is completely unprepared not only to discuss the issues, but even to understand them, they are reducing Palin to the status of a talking chimp – one of those sad trained animals you see on roller skates in old T.V. shows.

None of the people cheering her “victory” last Thursday evening believes that she has any demonstrated knowledge of the issues. It’s rather obvious, from her performance, that her entire debate strategy was, in fact, to refuse to acknowledge such prosaic ground rules as the need to answer the questions asked by a moderator. She actually announced this strategy at the start of the debate.

If she were a man holding up as a “victory” the spectacle of having cleverly avoided needing to show any knowledge of issues, or even the ability to answer a simple debate question, she would have been laughed off the stage. The subtext here is clearly that because Sarah Palin is a woman, it’s ok for her to act like an ignorant clown, reciting pre-rehearsed speeches rather than responding to serious questions. In fact – if I understand the dynamics of this properly – people love her for this deliberate show of ignorance. They find it somehow sexy.

It’s like the bubble-head act that Jessica Simpson was putting on several years ago, before she started to realize that people were taking the act seriously. Sarah Palin is playing tha part of the non-threatening silly little woman. Sure, she drops her g’s, gets all folksy, and oozes a sort of down-home charm. But when you listen to what she actually says (and I think people do hear what she actually says – deep down people are not stupid) her statement is actually: “Because I am a woman, I don’t need to know the issues, or in fact to show any competence.”

Basically what the Republicans are doing – and my theory is that Governor Palin is too ambitious to allow herself to admit that she iis being roped into this agenda – is promoting their V.P. candidate as the female equivalent of an Uncle Tom. The subtext is that women are a slave race – pretty and stupid and very charming when they know their place. Make babies, pose with a shotgun when called for, and avoid serious questions by “answering” with non-sequitors. Let those menfolk worry about silly things like actually being able to answer a question or speak to an issue.

This positioning of Sarah Palin as a sort of modern-day minstrel show may be the single most focused assault on the dignity of women that our nation has seen in a very long time.

The wonderful thing about birthdays is that, according to the rulebook — I happen to have my copy of the rulebook right here and I’m looking at it as I say this — if someone misses your birthday because they don’t know about it until, say, the day after, but they still want to celebrate your birthday, that just means your birthday lasts longer, extending the general celebration.

That’s what it says in my rulebook anyway. 🙂

This video that Sally pointed out to me is just amazingly adorable:

Hey Sarah Palin

I have an image in my mind of this couple, who obviously get along really well, having a total blast writing these lyrics, this catchy tune, working the whole thing out together. It’s just too romantic for words.

Well, you know what they say: The couple that bashes a fool together is cool together. The couple that is aghast together will last together. The couple that gives peace a chance together finds romance together. The couple that exposes deceit together is sweet together. The couple that fights the good fight together will find delight together. The couple that battles greed together will succeed together. The couple that keeps fascism at bay together will stay together. The couple that stops wilderness drilling together is thrilling together. The couple that exposes G.O.P. ploys together finds many joys together. The couple that fights ignorance and hate together goes great together. The couple that gives Palin the boot together is cute together.

OK, I’ll stop now.

No wait, one more: The couple that helps defeat McCain together will remain together.

😉

I had been curious to see how Sarah Palin would answer questions in a debate. What I hadn’t anticipated was the clever strategy employed by the McCain camp, which was to make sure she could avoid answering any questions – a strategy that the debate format indeed allowed. While Joe Biden gave us real insights about how his mind works in real time, Palin used the lax rules of the debate to negate the debate itself — responding to pretty much every question by choosing a pre-prepared speech to recite.

These prepared speeches often had little to do with the question that had been asked. Since she rarely answered the specific question posed by the moderator, Palin was able to avoid that strange deer-in-the-headlights quality with which we’ve grown familiar – the one she gets when she is required to respond directly to a direct question, without notes.

In a sense this meta-performance was fair. The McCain camp had forcefully pushed the organizers of the debate into modifying the rules so that recitation of pre-prepared speeches would be permitted. The Democrats had taken a hands-off policy during these negotiations, no doubt figuring that any changes would maintain a level playing field. The Democrats figured wrong. When you allow your opponents to define the terms of the debate, then you are giving them a way to nullify the purpose of the debate.

So now we know, just as we did before, that Republican strategists are very good at redefining rules, and at replacing actual events with puppet shows. But we still have no idea – apart from a few glimpses over the last week in interviews – what Sarah Palin might do when faced with a crisis that does not call for a prescripted response.

Let us hope, for the sake of our Nation’s well-being and security, that we never need to find out.

Yesterday I mentioned Tina Fey’s impression of Sarah Palin. I have found myself becoming fascinated in recent days by the way Fey’s mimicry of Palin has taken on an eerie life of its own. This really struck home the other day, as I observed Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin, back on the Katie Couric show after the first presidential debate. Palin was struggling to explain why, almost immediately after McCain had sharply criticized Obama for raising the possibility of sending US troops into Pakistan, she had told a voter: “If that’s what we have to do stop the terrorists from coming any further in, absolutely, we should.”

It was an embarrassing moment for the Republican team. The best defense they could muster for the gaffe was to argue that we live in an “age of gotcha journalism” – a somewhat confusing defense, since the voter had asked a straightforward question and Palin had responded with a straightforward answer. But to me that wasn’t the interesting part. The interesting part was that suddenly, as I watched Sarah Palin struggling to come up with a viable answer to Couric’s question, I felt as though I was seeing Tina Fey performing her “Sarah Palin in the headlights” impression on Saturday Night Live. The reality had come to resemble the parody.

I’ve checked in the last day or so with various friends and acquaintances, and this seems to be a universally held impression: When the people I know see Palin now, they see the Tina Fey impression superimposed. In a very real sense Fey has managed to hijack Palin’s image. I have been struggling to think back on whether I have ever seen anything quite like this before. Certainly there is a long tradition of entertainers parodying political figures, sometimes with great success. David Frye made an entire career out of his perfectly pitched impression of Richard M. Nixon. Vaughn Meader was so successfully identified with his parody of John F. Kennedy that the assassination of the President in 1963 effectively killed Meader’s career – nobody could ever again look at him without being reminded of their grief over Kennedy.

But people did not look at Nixon and see only David Frye, nor were they reminded of Vaughn Meader when they saw the actual President Kennedy speak. I think we may be looking here at something new — the successful hijacking of a politician’s public image by an entertainer.

And I have a theory about why this is the case: Many politicians are easy to parody. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the two Clintons, and John McCain himself come readily to mind. And yet each of these politicians has risen to prominence, for better or worse, not merely through the force of their charisma, but by virtue of a series of clearly articulated positions that have come to define them in voters’ minds.

In contrast, the Republican strategy has been to downplay Palin’s views, which are considerably more radical and less palatable to most voters than those of her running mate. Instead, she has been running on appearance, style and force of personality, rather than remind voters of her considerably right-of-center views on everything from the censorship of books to the extermination of polar bears.

But this strategy now seems to have backfired. By presenting herself more as a celebrity than as a serious candidate conversant with the issues – the very shallowness that the McCain campaign tried and failed to pin on Obama – she has left herself wide open to purely image-based ridicule.

Perhaps the system is working as it should after all. If you deliberately focus on running as a celebrity, ultimately the public will perceive you, and perhaps even dismiss you, as just that — a celebrity.

I admit I am getting swept up in the drama of it all. The way the Bush Presidency is playing out is like a Shakespearean tragedy (ie: a tragedy in which the hero engineers his own downfall, as opposed to a Greek tragedy, in which the Gods just had it in for him all along).

Bush consolidated his power by taking the concept of the anti-Goldwater Republican, first espoused by Reagan’s trickle-down advisors, to extremes. By making sure that the citizenry’s money flowed steadily into the hands of a small number of industrial elites, he pretty much forced the rank-and-file Republicans, even those Libertarians opposed to his big-spending ways, to follow in his shadow.

I remember asking my friends five years ago: “Wouldn’t it be easier to just use taxpayer money to directly pay the friends of Bush and Cheney the billions of dollars they are siphoning off? It seems very inefficient for our nation to lose trillions of dollars of an actual productive economy just so a few people can aggregate mere billions of dollars from an artificial war economy. Sooner or later, given the level of inefficiency of this particular form of graft, our tax base is going to run out wealth supporting these guys.”

Sure enough, we have finally hit that point. Now that his friends no longer have control of the money, Bush’s circle has lost the forced allegience of the Libertarians, who for years have resented being told to tag along with the big-money pre-emptive war profiteers who represent everything they hate.

Now the Republican party lies in pieces. In the massive rush to the exit candidate McCain can’t even get his own party to pay any attention to him, which pretty much demolishes his claim to leadership.

So now it looks as though the Senator from Illlinois will be inheriting one heckuva recession, and we’re not even going to have four years of those delightful Tina Fey sketches to look forward to. I guess that last part, on balance, is a good thing.

Today’s evocative title is from a recent blog post by Matt Taibbi that a friend helpfully pointed out to me to this morning (presumably after having read my disquisition on the “Poitier effect”). It’s an amazing piece, full of very intelligent and thoughtful rage – which in this case is not at all a contradiction.

But please don’t take my word for it. Read it for yourself.

Enjoy!

Like many people in this country I spent this past Friday evening at a debate party. My friend Peggy graciously lent us the use of her giant flatscreen TV. Everybody brought some food, and promptly at 9 PM eastern standard time we all crowded around in front of the screen to see what would happen.

Since this was a party in Manhattan, it was a safe bet that everyone in the room was rooting for Obama. After the debate ended there was intense conversation about what we had just seen. Everyone agreed that Obama had come across as the more reasonable and thoughtful of the two candidates whereas McCain had seemed rather disdainful and jingoistic.

And yet people were unsatisfied. There were so many opportunities for Obama to wield a knockout punch, and he took none of them. Sure enough Maureen Dowd made pretty much the same observation in her column this last weekend in the New York Times. And this rather obvious observation has left a number of people wondering: since Barack Obama is evidently the smartest guy in the room, why isn’t he jumping at the many opportunities for a clever and bitingly decisive attack?

Could it be that for all of his knowledge and intelligence, Obama simply does not have good debating skills? I don’t think that this is what’s going on here. It was quite apparent throughout the debate that Obama was visibly holding himself back, carefully not saying things that one could plainly see were going through his mind. He was deliberately avoiding any opportunity to cleverly one-up McCain.

A conversation I had at the debate party got me thinking about his reticence, and what it might mean. A friend of Peggy’s told me that she had recently been to a dinner party at which a woman had told her: “I could never vote for a black man”. The woman who had told her this was extremely well educated and much admired for her professional brilliance in a demanding field.

Peggy’s friend told me that she hadn’t responded to the woman’s statement because she had felt completely at a loss. The statement seemed so outrageous on its face that anything she could think of to say would have resulted in a rapid escalation of hostilities.

Of course the woman who made that statement, as much as she might have believed that she was speaking as an enlightened individual, was actually making the mistake many people make when they assume that democracy is an entitlement, that the freedom our citizens enjoy is simply a given, when in fact it is something that must be defended and affirmed in every generation.

Unaware of the full measure of her own words, that woman was actually expressing an ugliness at the core of our society. Somehow Americans have developed the myth that we as a nation are morally superior. We look with smugness at what happened to the Germans in the 1930s and we tell ourselves that we could never be capable of such atrocity. Yet in that moment, the woman who made that statement might as well have been wearing a Nazi armband or the white sheet of the Ku Klux Klan. She was that villager with a burning torch, the angry white mob burning houses and lynching innocent people in Springfield Illinois in August 1908. And it is the burden of this monstrosity, this hateful and stupid viciousness just beneath the surface of the American soul, not John McCain, that is Obama’s real opponent in November.

With this in mind, I have come to the conclusion that Obama’s strategy is deliberate, and that he is cognizant of what might be termed the Poitier effect. I name this, of course, after the great American black actor Sidney Poitier. In 1967 he starred in three films: To Sir with Love, In the Heat of the Night, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. We are concerned here only with the latter two films, each of them a notable examination of race relations in the United States.

In Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Poitier plays a kind of white ideal of the brilliant black man. Although he is a Yale educated doctor, highly learned, widely read, and clearly an intellectual leader in his field, nonetheless he is modest, unassuming, and unfailingly polite to all around him. White Americans might have little problem voting for a guy like that, a guy who (as that woman might have said) knows his place.

In his film In the Heat of the Night, Poitier plays quite a different brilliant black man — one who stands up to white prejudice with proud defiance. Perhaps the most memorable line, in a film that is filled with memorable lines, occurs when his character says to Rod Steiger (as the Southern sheriff who has been calling him “boy”): “They call me Mister Tibbs!” Audiences clearly admire this quality in an ethnic minority when they see it in a movie, but many are made uncomfortable when it shows up in real life.

Obama must have been tempted many times during this debate – and during these past weeks – to hurl the moral equivalent of this line at the Republicans who have been baiting him with racial code words like “disrespectful” and “uppity”. But to do so would cause him to lose more votes than he would gain, because the ugliness that is in the soul of this nation has not gone away. It has simply learned somewhat better ways to disguise itself.

Those of us who realize that the fiscal, civil, and military crises brought about by the current administration can only be fixed through competent leadership must be patient with the senator from Illinois. It’s a numbers game, and in order to get into a position where he can effectively begin to undo the damage that has been done to this country in the last eight years, he needs to watch every word he says, so that he does not inadvertently trigger the latent racism that will send too many voters scurrying, against their own self interest, toward the white sheets and coiled ropes.

Trust him — he knows what he’s doing.

The concept in modern pop culture narrative fiction of transporting the main characters to an alternate version of reality goes way back. Obviously it was a mainstay of many of the stories of Philip K. Dick, and Bradbury’s brilliant short story “A Sound of Thunder” pretty much set the bar for nearly everything that has followed.

“The Twilight Zone” had quite a few episodes that played around with the concept, but I think that the real introduction of this idea into what most people still think of as contemporary pop culture was Zemeckis’s 1985 film “Back to the Future”. I think the success of that movie was probably one of the main factors in the green-lighting 10 years later of the television show “Sliders”. Unfortunately “Sliders” was only allowed three good seasons before it was destroyed by incompetent executives at the Fox network.

But I think it was Joss Whedon, in the fifth season of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, who first (correct me if I’m wrong) hit upon the idea of having the main characters, the ones the audience identifies with and cares about, shift their own perceptions with the changing reality so that they themselves believe that nothing has changed. In particular, the universe was altered so that a new character (Dawn) suddenly appeared, and all the other characters believed she had always been there.

From a writer’s point of view this notion opens up all kinds of exciting possibilities that Whedon only began to tap. We are all familiar with the concept of the unreliable narrator. Why not construct a narrative around the concept of the unreliable universe?

What I’m envisioning here is an episodic structure: In every episode a new character might be introduced or an existing character might be taken away. The other characters have no concept that anything has changed – only the audience knows that the universe has shifted. For example, one morning grandma comes down to breakfast, even though there had never been a grandma on the show. Nobody is surprised, except of course the audience. As far as the other characters on the show are concerned, she has always been there.

This conceit would allow both writer and audience endless opportunities to explore different dimensions of the characters they have come to know, as the dynamics of family, friendships and romantic attachments continually shift into new configurations.

But what would be a good name for such a show? I don’t know about you, but I would call it “Every day another Dawn”.