I’d mentioned in an earlier post how the right wing uses “dog whistle” politics to communicate to certain groups within the electorate. Karl Rove’s depiction of Obama playing “pick-up” basketball was an early example of how the Republicans would frame Obama. Here’s a clip, via Media Matter of the always obnoxious Bill O’Riely. MM was highlighting his outright attack on Liberal institutions. However, his guest Laura Ingraham manages a dog whistle. More »
About three weeks ago, our friends at East Anglia posted a brief introduction on The Edge of the American West,a fantastic blog written by historians, Eric Rauchway and Ari Kelman. I had first discovered them a few months back through Historiann’s “History Geek Squad”, and found myself often clicking through her blog into Rauchway and Kelman’s portal. Lately I’ve been reading daily and felt an introduction here was long overdo. More »
Obama and America’s Racial Stalemate: A Counter-wedge to the Southern Strategy
This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy – particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.
Obama has just delivered a speech (which he wrote himself) for the history books. I won’t go into a full analysis but like any memorable speech from the American scene, his included the themes of; American exceptionalism, generational progress, religious freedom and tolerance, and of course, founding myths of American democracy. More »
This is Ginsberg reciting his poem but I don’t know why the word order is changed from the original. I’m sure Bent could help us with this.
I think this re-mix is fantastic. I’ve emailed the creator of the video to ask her/him about the music and video that was chosen. I love how Ginsberg is adopted and recreated as contemporary political and social commentary.
UPDATE: Here’s the reply I received from the video’s author.
The project had more to do with American history (1932-62) than Ginsberg himself or the Beat movement. It accompanied an essay about how we got from the New Deal to the Communist witch hunts and Cuban Missile Crisis.
The music is from Angelo Badalamenti and the Prague Philharmonic. The reading is from a Library of Congress recording from San Fransisco in 1959. The video is public footage from news reels from the above period and my own archive of family home movies from the Fifties and early Sixties.
I suppose the intention is to project how the population’s own divided feelings about the national identity reflect Ginsberg’s confused feelings about his own identity as American.
While researching examples for my last post, Postmodern Presidential Branding, I stumbled across some typesetting blogs discussing the Obama campaign’s font, or typeset; Gotham.
So I was naturally interested in the typography as a visual political narrative. What does Obama’s choice of Gotham say about his campaign, about his political philosophy? I imagine that Obama had nothing personally to do with choosing the font but his design team saw Gotham perhaps as a reflection of the candidate. Here’s what Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones, the designers of Gotham have to say;More »
Something I’ve been thinking about but just never got around to writing about is the use of visual media in these presidential campaigns. Much has already been written about the explosion of internet based communications this cycle, from blogging to user created video. One of things I had looked at early on were the candidates’ front page web presence, especially their logos. Now the field has narrowed to 3 remaining candidates so I missed my chance at a grand comparative visual analysis of all the campaign websites.
C’est la vie. More »
