A new start

Jenn and I wanted to see the inauguration near my office in Soho—but preferably not in a bar. Jenn thought of calling McNally Jackson, one of our favorite independent bookstores. It turned out that they planned to set up a big screen with a TV projector in their cafe. It was the perfect place to see the inauguration of a president who, among other things, is one of only a handful of presidents who have been really good writers. (Lincoln, Jefferson, and Teddy Roosevelt are the others that I think of first.)

Once the singing and the oath of office and the inaugural address were over, the store gave out free copies of Obama’s two books, plus the collection Change We Can Believe In. I’m old enough to remember Jerry Ford’s inaugural, when he said “our long national nightmare is over.” Those words seemed to apply even more today than they did then.

Open Society by George Soros

George Soros has a new book out about the current global financial meltdown. I haven’t read it yet, but I’m finding that his older book Open Society, published in 2000, contains some timely warnings about what we’re going through. Soros thought then that the world was headed for a global crisis, and he believed that it would be triggered not by national policies or the actions of particular corporations but by the financial system itself. He thought at first that the Asian currency crisis of 1997-1999 would mark the crash. Though he freely admits he was wrong about that, his belief that factors such as inflated housing prices, reckless lending, and poorly regulated new securities would lead to catastrophe now looks prescient.

Open Society, however, is less about Soros’ financial wizardry than it is about his life as a philanthropist. The book is intended to be his central work, and it is a disarming combination of enormous ambition and surprising humility. Soros believes his Open Society Institute can accomplish what national governments, the World Bank, and the UN cannot in terms of advancing democracy, human rights, and the free flow of ideas. Yet he is far from believing that he himself has all the answers. As he describes it, each of the foundations in his international network has wide latitude to set its own priorities. The central headquarters appears to exist more to coordinate than to direct them.

Soros is so far from worshiping certainty that he has turned fallibility itself into a philosophical principle. Unlike the truths of science, he argues, the truths of human life are subject to what he calls reflexivity. Just as a physicist cannot determine the position of an electron without changing that position, each of us changes society through our actions and beliefs, and in an open society we are constantly reassessing and renegotiating the values we live by.

A closed society lives by a ruling ideology that stifles dissent, whether that ideology is Communism or (a greater threat today) what Soros calls market fundamentalism, the belief that the bottom line is or should the measure of all that is good. An open society makes it possible for us to disagree and to make the mistakes we need to be creative and to find solutions to the problems that face us.

Keith Olbermann in 60 seconds

Whether you agree with his politics or not, the blistering “special comments” that Keith Olbermann delivers on his Countdown show have rare entertainment value. The folks at 23/6 have boiled them down into 60 seconds.

Not the New York Times

On my walk to work yesterday I picked up one of the free copies of the New York Times that were being handed out by clean-cut young men around the city.

It didn’t take long to realize that this wasn’t the real thing — too thin and too slippery — but it obviously took considerable effort, creativity, and expense. I hear that over a million copies were handed out. Happily it’s available online as well.

The faux Times was the creation of the Yes Men, along the lines of John Lennon’s billboard “War Is Over (If You Want It). You help create the world you want by imagining it’s already here.

Obama and “postracial” America

Support for Obama has been so strong in New York City that both campaigns hardly bothered to run commercials here, and not many residents bothered to wear pins or put out yard signs. But when the election was called for Obama at around eleven last night, my neighbors in Fort Greene spilled out into the streets, hooting and yelling and grinning at strangers. White and black folks milled around, blocking traffic, and crammed into cafes and bars to hear Obama’s acceptance speech. It was a thrilling night.

An Obama presidency will be good in a variety of ways, starting with (to look at my own priorities) the war, the environment, human rights, and the economy. But does it mean that this is now a “postracial” society, as some of the pundits have been saying? Have we solved our racial problems overnight by putting a black man in the White House? Not so fast.

When Jenn and I had our bookstore cafe in Fort Greene, there were recurring debates (not only among black customers) about the racial state of America. Some claimed racism was a thing of the past. Others said America was still racist to the core, as bad as it had ever been. The truth, I think, is closer to what’s summed up in the title of the book Long Way to Go. The country has come a long way, but it’s still got a long way to go.

That said, Obama’s election was a watershed moment in race relations. You could see it on Jesse Jackson’s face last night. It wasn’t just that he was weeping: it was that he looked totally stunned, as if his brain couldn’t process what his eyes were seeing. A milestone had been reached, and it had been done with methods very different from those that Jackson had used as an activist and a presidential candidate. Those methods were needed: entrenched political power does not yield without a confrontation. But to take things to the next level required a different approach.

Obama’s strategy, which seems to grow naturally out of his own personality, was to appeal to the better angels of our nature. He knew that as individuals and as a country we have not lived up to our ideals, but he trusted that many of us would like to. Obama’s early victory in the Iowa primary was a sign that something unusual was going on. A very white state had voted for a black man, and not because they had been made to feel they were racists if they didn’t. They did it because Obama seemed to offer acceptance and a better way, rather than rubbing their faces in the sins of the past (and the not so past).

African American parents, some of the pundits are saying, can now tell the truth when they tell their children, “You too can grow up to be president.” But if they are wise, they won’t hide the fact that it will be tougher than it would be for a white person with similar qualifications — just as it is for people of color in every aspect of life.

It doesn’t help you to succeed in business when the “self-made” millionaire tells you you can be like him if you pull yourself up by your bootstraps. And it doesn’t help you to overcome the racial barriers in American society to be told that this is a postracial America, that those barriers are all in your mind, and that if Barack Obama can do it you can too. Having Obama in the White House will help create opportunities and heal racial wounds, but putting him there is the beginning, not the end.