Today we all got to listen to the conversation between Marc Maron and President Obama. But based on what I'm reading/hearing, you'd think all the President did was walk into Maron's garage, say the N-word, and walk out.
All day today I've been seeing people either blast the President for using that word or defend the context. Let me add my 2 cents: THAT'S NOT ALL PRESIDENT OBAMA SAID!
Over the course of an hour, he talked about some fascinating topics, like:
- How/why he was able to craft an identity for himself, as a Black man, that was different from his father.
- How he still believes that the American people are better than our politics.
- The angriest he's ever been at Congress was when - after all those babies were killed in Newtown - they still couldn't pass common sense gun control.
- The thing that makes him happiest is to watch his daughters grow into such kind, compassionate young women.
- How turning the ship of state a couple of degrees in a different direction gives us the possibility for a whole new trajectory as a country.
Any one of those topics could be turned into a whole article by themselves. And over the course of the next few days, I just might do that.
Those are the things we should be talking about - not letting the media pull our strings into a pointless argument.
Amen, Nancy. But please keep in mind that YOU (particularly with the Washington Monthly exposure) are part of the US news and commentary media. Which is a very good thing. I'm hopeful that as you and others who do deeper political analysis, who are not connected to the DC village, are introduced into "main stream" sources, the type of sensationalist, click or view driven pablum will become, if not unprofitable at least more unsavory. Otherwise, maybe we're midway toward Idiocracy.
ReplyDelete"Any one of those topics could be turned into a whole article by themselves. And over the course of the next few days, I just might do that."
ReplyDeleteOh, good! I'm looking forward to that. :-)