Remember When?

If you've heard talk that Andrew Sullivan seems to change his political mind more often than he changes his condom, you might be right. My theory?

It all depends whose weekend internet posts his intern underlings are reading, and cribbing their ideas from that particular day:

Survive? So how did we survive a contained nuclear Soviet Union and a contained nuclear Communist China? And yet this comparatively puny, creaking, theo-fascist regime threatens America's very survival? Well: no one can say we haven't been warned.  You want a return to Cheneyism in foreign policy? You know what to do. Vote Mitt Romney, for a real change.  (President Obama just reads what his people give him, off the teleprompter...)

Plus:

The video of the Daily Caller reporter interupting and arguing with Obama in the middle of his prepared Rose Garden remarks was a sad spectacle.  It also highlighted a core, positive attribute of Obama: his calm, adult and restrained responses to a number of indignities ranging from Joe Wilson yelling "You lie!" during his State of the Union speech, to Boehner's unprecedented rejection of a requested date to address a joint session, to the continuing demand that he "show his papers" and prove he is a citizen.

But, on a different tack, this episode reminds me of one of the biggest surprises and disappointments of the Obama presidency: how is it that Obama did not revive the JFK-style practice of frequent (and engaging) press conferences?  

and:

For two centuries people with every sort of idea have picked over Burke’s writings for their own benefit and justification; and the lesson of their success is not that Burke was mercurial and changeable, but that he was relentlessly interested only in what worked, what was best for the most, what was real and what was high-flown nonsense or worse.

Flattered, I am. (hat tip: Yoda)
Doubling down on the originality here, fresh -- not reprocessed -- thoughts, as always...

------------------
Btw:  I didn't mention this way back when, but VP Biden recently said clearly is wrong: people who weren't already inclined to support gay civil rights were not watching Will and Grace, who are now credited for being the...  change that mattered. (From what I know, the gayest character on that show was neither Will nor Grace, but the uber-femme male friend. I suspect many tv-watchers didn't waste time being convinced of anything by him and never tuned in.  And the white women, kids and gays who watched that show surely needed no further convincing to accept those types of men in their lives.)

No, it was something much bigger than a prime-time TV show.

It was the AIDS crisis, dummy.* 

It was the bodies being returned "home" to bury.  It was the photos, or real-life bedside visits, with dying sons, cousins and brothers who in the end took on the look of liver-spotted human skeletons.  It was the inability to continue hiding... people were forced to sit up and take notice.  You couldn't escape it if you tried.

Remember the travelling AIDS quilts, when the surviving friends, family and supportive others spent hours making, traveling and publicly showing remembrance tapestries, all to remember those whom they may not have every really known?  No possibility now of denying them; their horrific deaths "outed" thousands-- some who were co-workers, neighbors, brothers, sons, grandsons, cousins, friends, neighbors, priests, former school classmates, etc.

In their deaths, which touched rich and poor, black and white, gay and yes, even straight too, America as a whole was forced to accept their presence, and eventually, understand there was simply no going back to the old ways of denial.  Once people realized -- and ultimately came to accept -- the presence of real gay people in their midst, society (=real people) began to ... evolve.  Some people, and communities, more quickly than others.

How quickly we seem to forget, and ... trivialize, citing silly tv comedies instead of acknowledging what came before... 

Somebody tell Joe?*

-------------------------------

 * Nobody ever said old Joe was the sharpest pencil in the pack, but I didn't see anyone else write to set him straight...  (Probably the underlings were in preschool in those days?)


** I think he's been hanging with that loud Hollywood crowd so long now, he's lost touch with the reality of more quiet American life -- and why real people think, act, and yes, change their minds -- the way they do.

If you don't understand where real people are really coming from, why they decide the way they do, how are you going to effectively lead them anywhere in the future?  Serious question, btw.