My grades are now in, which means that
Spring Break week begins. It's more of a symbolic break--and brake--than a real one, though, since I still have to finish a syllabus for a new course I'm teaching next quarter, but that's always an enjoyable task. (Well, all except the document-scanning part.) I'm hoping the weather stays beautiful here so that we can start planting by this weekend, before I head back to Chicago, where, I read and heard, it snowed. Yikes. It was 70F here on Saturday, and between the scaling of prose I did get out and about. Spring, please, hang around.
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 |
The Democratic Leadership
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi celebrates
with other Democrats after
the health care reform
bill passed through the House
of Representatives by a vote
of 219 to 212 Sunday.
(Kevin Dietsch/UPI) |
Perhaps it was always so, but politics these past few years have sometimes seemed more thrilling than the most artfully created dramas. To put it another way, there's an art and some farce to--and tremendous artifice in--our political system that was greatly on display yesterday. As I read short and marked up stories and essays and cooked, and C did his thing, we periodically would stop and watch the speechifying and punditizing and all the other lead ups to the dramatic vote last night for the terribly flawed, Republite, but still necessary
Senate Health Insurance Reform and
Reconciliation bills which passed last night, 219-210 and 220-209 respectively, in the
US House of Representatives. We should all give great credit to President
Barack Obama and his administration, and to House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and her caucus's leadership, for pulling off this major and longtime-coming accomplishment.
The recent path to last night's momentous events, easily the most important of President Obama's presidency and one of the landmark non-military votes of the last 35 years, involved ugly scenes and behavior of the sort that have been all to common in our history.
Tea Party protesters massed outside the Capitol Building called civil rights hero Congressman
John Lewis (D-GA) and a fellow Democrat, Indiana Congressman
Andre Carson "nigger"; they spat on black Congressman
Emmanuel Cleaver (D-MO); and hollered "faggot" at out gay Congressional leader
Barney Frank (D-MA). In addition someone hurled bricks through the windows and doors of Representative
Louise Slaughter's upstate New York office, and someone
shattered a window at Congresswoman Gabrielle Griffiths's (D-AZ) Tucson-area office window. These acts mirrored some of the most hideous racist, homophobic, and violent rhetoric that emerged during the 2008 campaign, and which has reappeared in various forms in the Teabaggers' protests and gatherings over the last year; in all cases, fear, ignorance and hatred of the Other is motivating these people as much as any economic or economically ideological concerns.
