Graphic (Via Clint Eastwood)

Condoleezza Rice Speech

Reader thoughts via The Daily Beast:
There was a stanza that hit me very hard in former Secretary Rice's speech last night in Tampa:

A little girl grows up in Jim Crow Birmingham, the most segregated big city in America. Her parents can't take her to a movie theater or a restaurant. But they make her believe that even though she can't have a hamburger at the Woolworth's lunch counter, if she wants to, she can be president of the United States - and she becomes secretary of state.

Rice's resume includes an undergrad degree from the University of Denver, master's from Notre Dame, and Ph.D. from University of Denver. She now holds an academic position at top-flight Stanford University.

The point is: there is little difference in Rice's story and President Barack Obama's. Both are the ideal Republican narrative of triumphing despite considerable adversity (perhaps Obama'a even more so, being raised by grandparents and a single mother). The two figures both determined their own futures, worked hard as hell, and have changed the course of history. Yet when Obama tells his story, he's believed by many to be a foreigner with a faked birth certificate, a weak affirmative action beneficiary who can't give a speech without a teleprompter, and contemptible. When Rice tells her story she is greeted with raucous applause and old folks moved to tears.

I shook my head when I heard Rice tell her story, because despite it beauty and inspiration, Republicans don't care about stories like that unless they can use them for their own political grandstanding. I hear the stories of Barack and Condoleeza, and also the respective treatments of the military records of John McCain and John Kerry, and I vote Democrat.

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Abandoned amusement park, New Orleans. More photos here.

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Poem

Love in the Country

by William Stafford

We live like this: no one but
some of the owls awake, and of them
only near ones really awake.

In the rain yesterday, puddles
on the walk to the barn sounded their
quick little drinks.

The edge of the haymow, all
soaked in moonlight,
dreams out there like silver music.

Are there farms like this where
no one likes to live?
And the sky going everywhere?

While the earth breaks the soft horizon
eastward, we study how to deserve
what has already been given us.

"Love in the Country" by William Stafford, from Stories that Could Be True. © Harper & Row, 1977.

Two Headlines

Seen side by side today: Romney: Obama policies are "old" and "outdated. Obama declares support for gay marriage.

Poem

Storage
by Faith Shearin

That year we left the house we couldn't afford and put
our belongings in storage. We were free now
to travel or live in tiny spaces. We kept our chairs

and tables in a cement cell, our bookshelves,
our daughter's old toys, clothes we wouldn't wear
or discard. There were books we liked but did not

need and mattresses and pots and pans. Sometimes
we went to visit our things: sat in our rocking chairs,
searched for a jacket, listened to an old radio. It was like

visiting someone I loved in a hospital: the way, removed
from the world, a person or object becomes thin,
diminished. The furniture on which we lived

our young life had no job but to wait for us.
It remembered our dinners, the light through
our windows, the way the baby once played on the floor.

"Storage" by Faith Shearin, from Moving the Piano. © Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2011

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Via Like Cool.

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Via Cabin Porn.

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Being There - Happy New Year from Field Productions on Vimeo.