Millennial Athwart
Obama the Morbid Jokester
It’s almost caricatural now to claim that politics these days transcends caricature. The absurdities that regularly come out of Trump’s mouth—and Cruz’s, Clinton’s, and Sanders’ at times—don’t need parody, as so many have pointed out. The examples are self-evident: Tina Fey’s impression of Sarah Palin’s surreal endorsement of Trump was tamer than the original. The implausible inanity that “Veep” is premised upon is all too plausible. It was unclear whether Donald Trump was the butt of his SNL appearance or we were.
How can we exaggerate, and therefore satirize, an election cycle with a man who thinks “it really doesn’t matter what the media write as long as you’ve got a young, and beautiful piece of ass”?
Don't Keep the Change
Few people deserve to be the face of American currency more than Harriet Tubman. She is a fierce and universally recognized symbol for liberty, whose contributions to protecting our nation’s fundamental principles are paralleled only by her contributions to our nation’s understated history of black, female badassery. She is our nation’s most celebrated female war hero, as well as a personal hero of mine.
In one of my favorite incidents in American history, Tubman decided to undergo open-skull brain surgery to alleviate a childhood injury when she was in her 70s—she refused anesthesia, instead deciding to bite down on a bullet, like she saw Civil War soldiers do when their limbs were being amputated.
The Myth of Tone Policing
“Calm down so we can discuss this like adults.”
Today’s social activists are quick to call out the seductive, siren’s call appeal of this specious argument. Tone policing, they claim, unfairly discounts the substance of an argument because of its presentation and prioritizes civility over truth. In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King faults not just the Ku Klux Klan member, but the “white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than justice.”
Obama's Disillusioned Doctrine
Next month’s cover story for The Atlantic is the final installment of Jeffrey Goldberg’s series of foreign policy interviews with President Obama, a conversation that has spanned all eight years of his presidency. If each interview has served us a taste of what the most powerful man on earth was thinking at the time, then this final piece—an essay, not a transcript like the others—was the whole meal start to finish.
As the name of the essay suggests, Goldberg’s piece lays out The Obama Doctrine, the organizing principle behind the momentous foreign policy of a man whose unlikely rise to the American presidency often overshadows his far more unlikely rise to the seat of Commander in Chief. Here’s a man who went from being the Illinois State Senator to the commander of our armed forces in a mere four years—quite a remarkable feat.
Florida is Everything
For the characters of 30 Rock, Florida is a mélange of conservative Cubans, Jewish retirees, serial killers, secretly gay Disney princes, bus passengers who ran out of money, swamp people, and pirates. For author Tim Dorsey, it’s the state where prosthetic legs covered in Willie Nelson bumper stickers regularly wash ashore. And for Marco Rubio, it’s a last-chance opportunity to convince the American people that he is a feasible alternative to the unstoppable Trump juggernaut—and, far more consequentially, that the Republican party can still be the flagship of an increasingly and perhaps irretrievably populist, pseudo-conservative American right.
Rubio, who spent his Super Tuesday in Miami, presumably realizes the high stakes of the Florida primary. Unlike most of the previous ones, Florida’s is a winner-take-all competition with just shy of 100 delegates up for grabs. Perhaps more important than the prospect of doubling his paltry delegate count, a Rubio victory here would play into the theme of momentum that the Senator’s team has so strategically pushed to cover his meager showing in elections so far—Rubio’s electability shouldn’t be discounted because of his losses of the past, but bolstered by his potential for success in the future. The Florida primary is also critical because it answers a question that perhaps Rubio doesn’t want answered: If he cannot win in his home state, where can he?