MotherPie

Cowboy Bush: A Proud Texan...

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram gave a huge front page splash for the story of Bush going home (to Texas) with his head held high.  He swaggers back, enveloped in his own idea of frontier diplomacy, the law of the six shooter.

The man, whose style caused the term *cowboy diplomacy* to be coined, will return to a state that would like to see the cowboy restored to the historic place of honor that it held in these parts from the days of the Western Frontier until...oh, say about eight years ago.

In July 2008 Texas Monthly's cover story by Elmer Kelton, True Grit, Kelton wrote:

There was a time when the word “cowboy” evoked respect, even envy. In ranching circles it was an honorable label that had to be earned. One proved himself worthy of it through character, deed, and skill. Many a wannabe ranch hand—like me—never acquired it. Yet regrettably, in recent times “cowboy” has come to denote rashness, a shoot-from-the-hip readiness to use force without regard to consequences—in short, a total reversal of the word’s original and true meaning.

...‘Cowboy’ no longer refers to a specific person or line of work but a style or way of doing things… The real cowboy has somehow been lost in all the reckless rhetoric that uses his name in vain. It may be too late to save his reputation from the sneers of the pundits and politicians, but let us at least try to present some of the truth about who he is and what he does.”

All Texans revere the historic cowboy of western mythology that exists even to the present day - the hard-working range-rider who saddles up with integrity. The rest of the world now holds a different view of what cowboys are all about.  Barack Obama stampeded into Bush's old stomping grounds, roping in 57% of the vote in Dallas County - a county that has not voted for a democratic president since 1964). Bush is now off his high horse of political office and any day will leave his Crawford ranch and settle into his new Dallas home in the Preston Hollow neighbhorhood, where he had lived 14 years ago before he became governor of Texas.

This week I'm observing real cowboys (not lost in the reckless rhetoric) at the Fort Worth Fat Stock Show and Rodeo.

Update: Well, the dudes at Davos are calling for an end to cowboy capitalism: "The chairman of Lloyds of London, Lord Peter Levene, (the company has avoided trouble) called for banks to be boring again. “Boring is good,” quoth Lord Levene. The message to cowboy capitalists was clear, and it resounds in Davos: your free-ranging days are over"

Men in Skirts, Losing the Tie...

Fashion designer Marc Jacobs broke out the skirt last fall and now other designers for men's fashion are following suit.  This won't fly in my part of the country.  I've been trying to figure out what this means, culturally. 

The tilt-back to the Scottish kilt?  A desire to find a white man's uniform, a way to find oneself when the power of the white man cultural domination has fallen?  The malleability of the roles of men and women in our society when the women are wearing the pants and men are filling in the mommy-at-home role?

When the 21 Club in NYC became the last establishment there to lose the tie requirement as a dress code this month, you know that things have become relaxed.  Casual church services changed the traditional dress codes about the same time that cocktail outfits and "dress up" became "snappy casual" in hot hot Houston.  Heading up a cotillion class for eight schools, I had to calm down the dance instructors from Colorado Springs when Sunday School dress was given as the cotillion dress code and kids showed up in skorts without hose and guys didn't wear leather-soled shoes and some came without collared shirts.  That was in the 90s.  In the early 2000s Atlanta came unglued with casual codes at what they called Groovy Church (informal services) where women wore full length minks to the traditional services.

Hillary Clinton changed the dress code for women in Congress when she started wearing pantsuits.  Obama was photographed on his first day in the Oval Office without his suit jacket, creating a tizzy in the capital and it is business casual on weekends.

This week I'm looking at cowboys.  You wouldn't catch one of them dead in a skirt.  It was the cowgirls who first started wearing pants, back in the 1800s out West. 

Big World Matters (Davos, Fed & Such)...

What a day this is if you pay attention to business news.  Media love a crisis, telling the story, explaining the news, hooking readers with controversy, using a good-guy, bad-guy narrative. The "fluid" and oblique Fed issues a statement as to what some are calling a "Zero Interest Rate Era".  Obama meets with CEOs, the House prepares to pass the economic stimulus bill and Davos kicks off today with the theme Shaping the Post-Crisis World (post-crisis???? did some assume the global financial crisis would be over?).

The media is yet to call this a Depression, just as powers that be and the media were reluctant to call this a Recession as it became named the Global Financial/Economic Crisis.  Reading Vanity Fair Editor Graydon Carter's letter, The Year of Investing Dangerously, he dances around the names for this further-sinking time with these terms: the Second Great Depression; the Great Retrenchment; the Great Reckoning. Paul Krugman forst came out with the D-word: Depression 2.0. 

Several media outlets are covering Davos. Here are the ones I'm following: Financial Times Davos 2009; Dispatches from Davos, a Forbes blog; Time's Davos 2009 Blog; and Tracking Davos - a HuffPo Big News page.  Arianna Huffington is participating in several panels at Davos involving new media, politics and bottom-up technology and media fusion potential.

Interesting reads on Private Equity: The Ultimate Bubble? by Michael Wolff in Vanity Fair (a "shadow banking system" in a fluid situation and God himself couldn't turn a profit at most companies now") and a Bloomberg exclusive on the gravest crisis in the 40-year history of leveraged buy-outs.

The World Economic Forum is buzzing.  The crisis is building.

(update I: Wonder how we got here?  A good explanation for this perfect storm came out today.) update II: Still, the media is covering Davos for a multitude of reasons (and I wanted to add the link to the story in the photo), several outlined by the Time blog article on Davos, including that "for the global tv networks, it is the equivalent of College Football Gameday on ESPN -- Davos offers a backdrop that adds variety and excitement to the proceedings. Plus, the presence of lots of prominent talking heads in one place turns the perpetual challenge of booking enough guests to fill all that airtime into an exercise in shooting fish in a barrel."

update III: I'm also following Twitter Davos

What We Learn: Art (Contemporary Chinese Art)...

After thinking this past week of the art of oratory (Obama's  Inaugural speech),  and the art of Russia's leader, I had to swing to Asia and ideas in contemporary art regarding the art of learning.

The Chinese Art Prize Gold Winner Min Xiaofang entered  two meter-tall paintings of children's homework - mathematics, grammar, English - all graded and corrected in red ink. 10cm-wide patches of white, which looks like correction fluid, add to the authentic appearance of the paintings.  This is what is new new in Chinese Contemporary Art.

As mothers we save our children's work, but I think of this as well as something else, perhaps a little more profound in the annals of text.  As I immerse in the digital, having completed courses online, the red marks on ruled paper take me back, way back.  Learning and educational trends are leaving the blackboard behind and collaborative efforts make the red pen less... authoritative.  MIT's move to ditch the large lectures for interaction has reduced failure rates by 50%.

If art is about ideas, and good art makes you think, then... I leave you with this contemporary art work.  Would you hang this on your wall?

photo credit: Chinese Art Prize

Putin Sees Stars...

Vladimir Putin picks up the paintbrush and paints a starry night, a view from inside, looking out a window.  Lace curtains, perhaps rather provencial, a touch of red...

Prince Charles paints landscapes in watercolor and I don't know if outgoing President G.W. Bush ever painted a thing but fear itself, in broad brush strokes.  But, to look into this deeper, Putin paints himself as an insider.  I found this interesting as Obama is an outsider's outsider.  So I've thought of what might a window represent, symbolically... I think of this especially as this week I notice that one of the first official photos of President Obama showed him at work, sitting in an empty Oval Office, his back to the windows.  The windows frame him.  The view is not to the outside, but to the activity taking place at work in front of the windows.

What is the window, as an idea, such as the one Putin has painted?  A window is a barrier between in and out.  Unlike a door, through which one may pass to enter another place, a window only allows a view to elsewhere, not direct participation.  It is the frame of a watcher.  Some view the world from the inside looking out, and others, from the outside looking in.  What views the windows frame, and especially those in our dreams or visions, such as the ideas that Putin paints, could be representative of deeper meanings.

So. Putin sees stars from the comfort of a place contained. 

Sign of the Times, Words on the Brink...

Signs like these are around every corner, it seems, in Santa Fe.  This Quitting Business banner on a downtown business holding a liquidation sale this weekend flashes bold. When you see these words across a business that has been serving customers for many years, we are reminded that we are on the cusp, as the poet Elizabeth Alexander writes. 

I'll pull my favorite lines from her Inaugural Poem:

We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.
...
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.
...
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp...

Ramble: Afterthoughts on Those (Obama) Words...

Six in ten Americans watched the inauguration live.  Only 20% didn't pay any attention at all.  I recorded the speech, ran off to a commitment and when I returned my husband had printed out the text and provided his comments in the margin.  46% of Americans rated Obama's Inaguration speech excellent.

My favorite snippet: let's dust ourselves off and get to work.  (Such a reference to kids, such a call to business.)

So - links: The speech transcript, the live video and text; and my favorite review of the rhetoric was from presidential speechwriting pros, Experts Critique the speech, with opinions from: William Safire and William Gavin, speechwriters to Nixon; Jeff Shesol, a speechwriter to President Bill Clinton and others.

Numerous dailies increased their single-copy press runs, some by as many as 800% for inauguration day coverage which is a new trend to print-as-commemorative editions I noticed with our local paper in Santa Fe.  The Wall Street Journal pushed into new unprecedented big headlines, too, for their commemoration paper.

Hanging onto the words... important to note this since this is a president who rose to office on words.  (update: My own opinion: a soaring day, sunny with strong rhetoric. He was short on logos, strong on ethos and pathos.  Logos is what is needed now).

update II: Letterman's Greatest Moments in Presidential Speeches.

Blue State Headlines...

The entire front page of today's Santa Fe New Mexican is covered in photos.  The only text is photo cutlines. 

That's something different for a daily newspaper.  I can't remember seeing an entire print newspaper devote a front page to nothing but photos from only one story.

Visual literacy.  Where is the text?  Where is the written narration?  Is this a move for a commemorative edition?  Is this a sign of a blue state? Or a paper for an state that ranks low on education?

Obama's Inauguration: Be The Change?

The official Inaugural Poster is by ...(who else, but) -- Shepard Fairey, whose famous Obama Poster now hangs in the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery.  From an edgy street artist who understood propaganda and the power of the visual, this seems a little too official. 

The most interesting change from the old poster into this one is the title: a command (Be the Change) instead of a one-word challenge, or an inspiring team chant yes-we-can. That turn of words...

I'll be watching the turn of words from a man who rose on rhetoric.  Most Inaugural Addresses are forgettable. His might not be.

And, the First Lady fashion as it relates to cultural statements, too.

Signs of the times, the cultural semiotics of it all in visuals, dress and words.

update: WhiteHouse.gov first blog post

The Great (White? Black? Mestizo? Mullato?) Hope...

 Reading culture by covers: Time put Obama on the cover for 13th time this year in a special Inauguration Preview, at left.  In 2008 political themes were on the cover 19 times at Time and only one movie star was on the cover (George Clooney).  Newsweek had 26 cover stories on politics last year -- including two on Michelle Obama. 

How to fix our world and our problems requires the mojo of a rock star, the heft of a pope, the cojones of a king, and the uuummmph of an underdog - soft power, hard power, social power and political power.  The cultural yearnings cut across the currents here and this proliferation of the O-man everywhere isn't just the hope for a leader to fix our problems, but also, and perhaps more significantly, a mirror to our (post-white) selves. 

WaPo notes this media trend: "Once, making the covers of Time and Newsweek was an event. Now... it is more of a cultural blip, one more bit of data in a crowded marketplace."  I disagree. Covers are a huge visual graphic of our society, with a date.  This obsession with Obama continues, because we're no longer black and white but nuanced.

Our great hope is a reflection of ourselves, an about face, a media vuelta, a volte-face.  No longer a Great White Hope, we need a revision of our identity.

Atlantic Monthly's Jan/Feb issue cover featuring a full-face frame of Obama, and series of articles raises the issue of our post-white world (links to all of these good articles on the flip). I was in Houston when whites became the minority there in the mid-1990s. The 1990 Census for the first time allowed respondents to check more than one box for race.  For my Oklahoma friends who had long carried Indian blood, this was a long-awaited move to recognize our mixed heritage. But yet the talk of race, in terms of who are we, continues. Frank Rich says we're not post-white in his article this week  White Like Me.  My mother sends me an email with the subject line: I Am Not A Racist! talking about Leonard Pitt's recent op ed article wondering what Abraham Lincoln would think of Obama's presidency: "Lincoln famously said in 1858 that "there is a physical difference between the white and black races, which ... will forever forbid the two races living together upon terms of social and political equality." I've called my parents down for politically incorrect behavior.  We're in new times, but they've not been named. Post-White? 

I've just been wondering, for quite awhile, how come Obama, who is half white, is considered Black, not White?  When will we have a new term for our gumbo-ness?  When will race not matter?