Chris Boese's Weblog

Rebooting this blog

Hey, I've been away a while, but I'm starting a new project, and decided this might be a good place to track the ideas as they all come in quickly and connect in all kinds of unusual (and serendipitous!) ways.

I've got the RebelMouse post on the top, because I'm most active in social media and microblogging on Twitter.

But meanwhile, rationalizations, integrity, honesty, and authenticity is much on my mind. So let's kick it off right, with this great video while the moon is void of course. Signifying nothing.

R.I.P. Geraldine Ferraro, a feminist pioneer

1984. I was in college. The '70s feminist movement was more than a memory. It was present tense, active, on campus and off.

For a time, I was a president of the Student Feminist Alliance. I was an appointed student representative on the University Commission on the Status of Women.

I attended and shot (as a photojournalist) sporting events that would not have been allowed to exist, would not have been funded, if it weren't for Title IX. (Even so, the women's basketball team wasn't allowed to play in the best fieldhouse on campus, except for big tournament games. Not in the early '80s, yet. By the late '80s, I would find myself shooting NCAA Women's Basketball in the University of Arkansas's primary arena).

We got a woman chancellor hired on campus, the first. We pushed for women to be legitimately considered for every major administrative position national search on campus. We didn't push nominally. Nobody just paid us lip service and hired some crony of a crony instead. Not unless they wanted to feel our wrath.

And somewhere in there, it all got woven in with Geraldine Ferraro. Back then we didn't falter. Didn't accept second-best or also-ran (not the way I see it repeatedly accepted now). Sure, good old boys made harumphing jokes about our lack of humor. How dare we refuse to laugh over being belittled or made the butt of unquestioned jokes?

I really don't think too much of all the compromises and "settling" that happens with the so-called "third wave" feminists. Give me some uppity, strident women any day. We've got NOTHING to apologise for.

And if we had any doubt about that, Geraldine Ferraro's nomination as the first woman as the Democratic Party's vice presidential candidate blew that doubt away.

We'll miss her. But then, we have already been missing her and her (our) generation of feminists for a long time.

That said, we might also note that the first woman who was Speaker of the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is a 71-year-old grandmother, and besides making history as one of the most effective Speakers ever, now as House Minority Leader, she is still taking NO prisoners.

I just wish we could get Hillary to run again. I'm not ready to let that greatest generation (after the Suffragettes, of course) pass into retirement.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/us/politics/27geraldine-ferraro.html

New York Times Obituary:

Geraldine A. Ferraro, First Woman on Major Party Ticket, Dies at 75

Geraldine A. Ferraro, the former Queens congresswoman who strode onto a podium in 1984 to accept the Democratic nomination for vice president and to take her place in American history as the first woman nominated for national office by a major party, died Saturday in Boston.

[...]

“If we can do this, we can do anything,” Ms. Ferraro declared on a July evening to a cheering Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. And for a moment, for the Democratic Party and for an untold number of American women, anything seemed possible: a woman occupying the second-highest office in the land, a derailing of the Republican juggernaut led by President Ronald Reagan, a President Walter F. Mondale.

[...]

But Ms. Ferraro’s supporters proclaimed a victory of sorts nonetheless: 64 years after women won the right to vote, a woman had removed the “men only” sign from the White House door.

It would be another 24 years before another woman from a major party was nominated for vice president — Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, the Republican running mate of Senator John McCain, in 2008. And though Hillary Rodham Clinton came close to being nominated that year as the Democratic presidential candidate, a woman has yet to occupy the Oval Office. But Ms. Ferraro’s ascendance gave many women heart.

Ann Richards, who was the Texas state treasurer at the time and went on to become governor, recalled that after the Ferraro nomination, “the first thing I thought of was not winning in the political sense, but of my two daughters.”

“To think,” Ms. Richards added, “of the numbers of young women who can now aspire to anything.”

In a statement, President Obama said Saturday, “Geraldine will forever be remembered as a trailblazer who broke down barriers for women, and Americans of all backgrounds and walks of life.”

[...]

Happy Birthday, Stephen Hawking!

And look! The whole Errol Morris film on A Brief History of Time is up on Google Video! (I loved that movie...  just hearing the opening bars of the incredible Philip Glass score sets me off).

You know, this is probably awful, but you know what I miss? The newer computer voices have more inflection than that early computer voice that I just always associated with Stephen Hawking.

Even with other voices to choose from, I always picked the one that sounded like Stephen Hawking, just so I could pretend that I had the famous physicist talking to me inside my computer. I just like having him around!

I used to listen to the NOAA weather repeaters on my scanner as I drove around the country too (until they changed the voice), because I wanted Stephen Hawking giving me the weather report. I could just pretend he'd tell me about the tornado watch, and then after, give a short discourse on entropy or black holes in the hearts of tornadoes. Or maybe past tornadoes that existed at that particular point in the space-time continuum.

Perhap the most important editorial I've read this year

Op-Ed Columnist - Bob Herbert - Glenn Beck in Washington - NYTimes.com.

Thank you, Bob Herbert!

Also, a belated thank you to Alexander Zaitchik, whose book on Glenn Beck came out this year, Common Nonsense. It's a great read, with terrific research, but I am biased, as I helped him out on one particular chapter. Which is why I know how much time he put into digging up and documenting all kinds of previously unknown things about Beck's life. 

I have my own academic obsession going back to the 1990s. I worked on papers analyzing the polemical rhetoric of the far right, after the American Family Association tried to censor and attack a school where I worked in Arkansas because it was connected to Gov. Bill Clinton. More recently, the peculiar brand of freaky demagoguery espoused by Beck got on my last nerve when he indirectly intersected with my life while I was working at CNN Headline News.

Alex nails it particularly well in his book.

Meanwhile, Bob Herbert is properly scathing here! I'd been having personal iss-ewes all day, wanting to purge the memory of Beck's rally from the psychic space of the anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.

This evening I am even watching Cabaret on my DVD, waiting for that chilling scene in the beer garden, "Tomorrow Belongs to Me."  It always creeps me out, and something in the stars tonight is stirring my emotions up anyway. Maybe if I let that scene creep me out as it always does, it will purge the creepiness of the image of Beck and his abstract rhetoric-miming goose-steppers on the Lincoln Memorial today. 

Meanwhile, I celebrate the wonderful invective of Bob Herbert. Polemic is just SO righteous sometimes! Some great zingers below, all right on the mark.

America Is Better Than This

By BOB HERBERT

Published: August 27, 2010

America is better than Glenn Beck. For all of his celebrity, Mr. Beck is an ignorant, divisive, pathetic figure. On the anniversary of the great 1963 March on Washington he will stand in the shadows of giants — Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Who do you think is more representative of this nation?

Consider a brief sampling of their rhetoric.

Lincoln: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

King: “Never succumb to the temptation of becoming bitter.”

Beck: “I think the president is a racist.”

[...]

The climax, of course, was Dr. King’s transcendent “I Have a Dream” speech. Jerald Podair, a professor of American studies at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, has called Aug. 28, 1963, “the most important single day in civil rights history.” This is the historical legacy that Glenn Beck, a small man with a mean message, has chosen to tread upon with his cynical rally on Saturday at that very same Lincoln Memorial.

Beck is a provocateur who likes to play with matches in the tinderbox of racial and ethnic confrontation. He seems oblivious to the real danger of his execrable behavior. He famously described President Obama as a man “who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.”

[...]

Facts and reality mean nothing to Beck. And there is no road too low for him to slither upon. The Southern Poverty Law Center tells us that in a twist on the civil rights movement, Beck said on the air that he “wouldn’t be surprised if in our lifetime dogs and fire hoses are released or opened on us. I wouldn’t be surprised if a few of us get a billy club to the head. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of us go to jail — just like Martin Luther King did — on trumped-up charges. Tough times are coming.”

He makes you want to take a shower.

In Beck’s view, President Obama is driven by a desire to settle “old racial scores” and his ultimate goal is “reparations” for black Americans. Abe Lincoln and Dr. King could only look on aghast at this clown.

Beck has been advertising his rally as nonpolitical, but its main speaker is Sarah Palin. She had her own low moment recently as a racial provocateur, publicly voicing her support for Laura Schlessinger, radio’s “Dr. Laura,” who went out of her way to humiliate a black caller by continuously using the n-word to make a point, even after the caller had made it clear that she was offended.

Palin’s advice to Schlessinger: “Don’t retreat — reload.”

There is a great deal of hatred and bigotry in this country, but it does not define the country. The daily experience of most Americans is not a bitter experience and for all of our problems we are in a much better place on these matters than we were a half century ago.

But I worry about the potential for violence that grows out of unrestrained, hostile bombast. We’ve seen it so often. A little more than two weeks after the 1963 March on Washington, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham was bombed by the Ku Klux Klan and four young black girls were killed. And three months after the march, Jack Kennedy was assassinated.

[...]

Chuck Roberts leaves CNN's Headline News (or HLN, or CNN2, or whatever you want to call it)

Link: Chuck Roberts Departing HLN - mediabistro.com: TVNewser.

Knew there was a reason I held on to this silly blurry snapshot I grabbed from Election Night, 2004, with the incomparable, witty and razor-sharp Chuck Roberts holding down the anchor chair as the results flew in fast and furious after 7P ET.

More blurry snapshots of a wild night covering the 2004 national election at the CNN Center in Atlanta after the jump.