Obama Omnipresent
Overheard in downtown DC this morning:
"They should just put Obama's likeness on the dollar bill and get it over with." (spoken during a conversation in which the ubiquitous presence of his likeness these days was alluded to.)
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That's change we can believe in. ?
December 11, 2008 12:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
Somewhat related, I just have to share with someone I know will understand.
The Obama collector plate and Obama collector coin commercials that have been running in the NYC area on cable TV news channels the last few weeks are hilarious.
One in particular is my favorite, with this white family that is dressed and groomed in the style of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, sitting in their den doing things like gazingly lovingly at their new Obama collector plate. They thrown in a black family towards the end just to grab the black granny with the MLK wall pictures market, but mainly it features the white family.
Also in the last few weeks in phone calls with folks back home in the Midwest, I've heard from several 80-something generation proud to announce to me, off-topic of conversation and atypically on politics, that they voted for Obama, like just out of the blue, i.e. "and I want you to know before I die that I voted for Obama!" There's really some kind of interesting thing going on there culturally.
December 11, 2008 3:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
gazingly should read gazing
December 11, 2008 3:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
(Smile. For the record, I am also feeling quite hopeful, and cautiously optimistic, these days. Since I rarely ever feel non-cautiously optimistic when it comes to our politics, I suppose from now on, between you and me, I can just omit the modifier 'cautiously' when using the O word.)
Although I occasionally do set foot in stores other than bookstores, the conversation I referred to took place among employees at a bookstore. One of them mentioned that they'd just sold some huge poster of Obama the day before and another, the one who made the comment I referred to, then preceded that comment by snarking "Yes, because, you know, it's really hard to find likenesses of Obama these days."
After he made his dollar bill comment, a young black female fellow employee said "No. That could never happen."
She apparently has not received, or has not yet read, the memo informing us we're moving at warp speed out of the Fear and Loathing Bush Years to the Surprisingly Cool Things Are Possible Post-Bush Years.
I'm half-expecting a fellow denizen to open up a thread on what folks are watching on the Idiot Box these days. Let's face it, it's cheap. I haven't gotten as many LOLs out of a TV character in years as I am these days from Jack McBriar on Thirty Rock. I'm not sure if the fact that he makes me think of John Edwards somewhat in his physical appearance is a) entirely a casting coincidence and b) part of the reason why.
December 12, 2008 7:39 AM | Reply | Permalink
She apparently has not received, or has not yet read, the memo informing
I can see how someone who grew up and still lives in the "real" D.C., if that were the case with that particular clerk, might be left off the memo list. For example, they might not get many phone calls from white 80-somethings in flyover country.
Just an inkling, but it seems to me like it's one of two things with my greatest generation experiences on this front--either they are sort of asking for some kind of absolution against past sins, or they want to be in on the new dawing of the age of aquarius, too, they don't want to miss out like they might have before. :-)
As to final results of culturally-related changes, it is always in the back of my mind how it's possible this would restore an American Exceptionalism thing internationally and pondering what that means. That in itself would have domestic effects as well as international ones.
It's all interesting. Even if Obama has a very short honeymoon, and he gets stymied by attacks that quickly make his approval rating tank, there is still this: there will still be a president with black skin. That can't not change a lot of things, might be for good or ill, but there's gonna be change.
December 12, 2008 4:28 PM | Reply | Permalink