The New Globals

"At the center of this optimistic future is a group he labels the 'First Globals,' consisting of the current 18- to 29-year-olds across the United States. This group, he finds, is 'the most outward-looking and accepting generation in American history... far more likely than their elders to accept gays and lesbians. For all practical purposes, they're the first color-blind Americans and the first to bring a consistently global perspective to everything from foreign policy to environmental issues to the coffee they buy, the music they listen to and the clothes they wear." And they feel far more connected personally to the rest of the world. They expect to travel to exotic locales such as Cape Town and Dubai. 'A quarter of them think they'll end up living for some significant period in a country other than America,' Zogby notes."

— review of The Way We'll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream by John Zogby

“There's a fine line between clever and stupid”

The most purely political decision in the whole campaign — mischievous, startling, Rovian, impulsive. It feels like a stunt — a firework, lobbed into his opponent's lap. McCain was boxed in, and so played the wildest card he could find. It helps him rally the base and combat the out-of-touch theme, but at the same time takes Obama's inexperience off the table, reignites McCain's age and health as issues and reopens the charge of recklessness: He had only met once before he gave her the job and only for 15 minutes. She is also under investigation for corruption charges and will have to take time off from campaigning to be deposed; the bipartisan investigation will deliver its verdict five days before the election. Did he even vet her? Was he thinking she wouldn't get questioned about national security or foreign policy? That she needn't both her head with that stuff? "I make them as quickly as I can, quicker than the other fellow, if I can," Mr. McCain wrote of his decision making process, with his top adviser Mark Salter, in his 2002 book, Worth the Fighting For. "Often my haste is a mistake, but I live with the consequences without complaint." These are a pilot's instincts. Are they a president's?

The election in one word: 'Enough!'

So he finally showed why he is so lethal. He sits and he waits and he listens to what you have to throw at him, and then, when he's sized you up, seen your best shots, and he's sure that you've exhausted yourself, he puts you on the floor: Enough.

That speech gave me species pride. If aliens landed tomorrow and said, so what have you got, what can you humans do, I would point to Barack Obama's acceptance speech for the democratic party nomination and say "there. That's what we can do. What have you got?"

God knows how the Republicans come back from that. What do you say? How do you clear your throat, put up your hand, and seek to formulate some kind of reply? Its hard to pick a fight with such eminently reasonable positions without looking cramped and peevish. Obama didn't just do his own positions proud, he did his opponents own positions better than they do. He came up with everything they might possibly say about him and then pre-rebutted it. It made you wonder why on earth they had the idiocy to raise it in the first place.

Weak on national security? "You don't defeat a terrorist network that operates in eighty countries by occupying Iraq" — the last word on the matter. "John McCain likes to say that he'll follow bin Laden to the Gates of Hell – but he won't even go to the cave where he lives" — a year's worth of schoolboy boasting cut down to size. "If John McCain wants to have a debate about who has the toughness and temperament to be commander in chief, that is a debate I am willing to have." It is one they no longer need to have.

Perhaps the most devastating line was this: "I don't believe that Senator McCain doesn't care what's going on in the lives of Americans. I just think he doesn't know". Its one thing to demolish your opponent, but to do so while extending so charitable an interpretation of their motives is in another league altogether. Ditto the wonderful, Sorkinesque passage at the end neatly filleting three hot button issues — abortion, gun control and gay rights.

We may not agree on abortion, but surely we can agree on reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies in this country. The reality of gun ownership may be different for hunters in rural Ohio than for those plagued by gang-violence in Cleveland, but don't tell me we can't uphold the Second Amendment while keeping AK-47s out of the hands of criminals. I know there are differences on same-sex marriage, but surely we can agree that our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters deserve to visit the person they love in the hospital and to live lives free of discrimination.

He made reason look so easy. And he keeps getting better. Tonight, he looked awfully close to being unbeatable.

Sorenson on Obama

"Kennedy at 43 proved that age matters in the White House. His energy, appeal to other young world leaders, calm under pressure and openness to new thinking, well served our nation. Denounced as a candidate for lacking executive experience, he displayed sound judgment in leading a successful nationwide campaign, choosing a top-notch team, negotiating with difficult leaders, and out-organizing and out-thinking his adversaries—just as he would as president, particularly when, with prudence and courage, he induced the Soviets to withdraw their nuclear missiles from Cuba without the U.S. firing a shot; and the world gave thanks that the more experienced Richard Nixon had lost that close election." — Ted Sorenson, JFK's speech-writer, at the Democratic convention today

Returning to form, in perpetuity

Woody Allen's new movie, Vicky Cristina Barcelona has been hailed as the "best Woody Allen movie in years", just like the last one. Why is every Allen movie these days hailed as a return to form? They can't all be. Its like each return to form comes, and goes and is forgotten just in time for the next return to form. With so many returns, doesn't any one of them, you know, stick around?

It's pretty thin stuff — a lubricious fandango satirising women's infatuation with the creative temperament, as embodied in the hunky form of Spanish painter Javier Bardem. Johansson doesn't seem to have figured out she's the butt of the joke; Cruz knows and doesn't care, which makes her performance hilarious. Rebecca Hall both knows and cares, and it registers in every frame: she gives a wonderful performance, intelligent, fragile, her face swimming in and out of its beauty, depending on the scene. I can't wait for her to be in something else.

Biden bites

More of a mauling, perhaps — but impassioned, fiercely moral and hard as flint. Great stuff. (Although if I were McCain's campaign manager, I'd put out an ad that goes: "Given a choice between change and experience, Obama picked experience. Which will you pick?")

Jerky rivulets of rain

In his new book, How Fiction Works, critic James Wood renews his objections to John Updike's sumptuous prose style, quoting the following description of a window pelted with rain from Of The Farm:

Its panes were strewn with drops that as if by amoebic decision would abruptly merge and break and jerkily run downward, and the window screen, like a sampler half-stitched, or a crossword puzzle invisibly solved, was inlaid erratically with minute, translucent tesserae of rain.

“Aestheticism is the great risk here, and also an exaggeration of the noticing eye," says Wood, who claims Updike turns "detail into a cult of itself.” The New York Times, however, reminded me of Nicholson Baker’s U & I, in which Baker singles out for praise the very the sentence Wood so dislikes:

I cried at the aforementioned description of the raindrops on the window screen like a crossword puzzle or a ‘sampler half-stitched’: it killed for the time being a patch of screen description of my own, but that didn’t matter, because Updike’s paragraph was so fine that my competitiveness went away; and when I found that Elizabeth Bishop’s 1948 New Yorker short story called The Housekeeper also had a screen whose clinging raindrops ‘fill[ed] the squares with cross-stitch effects that came and went,’ this parallel only demonstrated to me how much more Updike could do with the same piece of reality: he had lifted it from the status of incidental setting and made its qualities part of the moral power and permanency of his mother’s house.

I mention this only because I recently tried to describe, in my novel, those jerky rivulets of rain you get running down windows panes. I called them the "jerky rivulets of rain." That's the difference between me and Updike, I guess.