e-Bomb, the fire cracker in a small package. e-Bomb, the philosopher. e-Bomb, the late bloomer staging her own life revolution. e-Bomb, the history watcher. e-Bomb, the lover. e-Bomb, the friend.
Welcome to My World. Here's my story.
Tonight, my mind went numb and stagnant. Threads of thoughts seem cut up into small strands ... beginnings with no ends, ends with no beginnings, and middle parts that are just lost.
I looked around, foggy, and watched myself look around, foggy. I looked around in my life as if I have forgotten what it is that I'm looking for and where it is that I am looking in.
How do I remember? How does it work?
Then, I heard this Regina Specktor song that I've heard about a hundred times. Maybe this is how it works. Life and who you are deep inside are just circles. I read a book that teaches people how to be "who they are" and to "find their purpose." But really, what if "who you are" is a recurring lesson?
Everything that you come into contact with remakes your perception of who you are --a bit like showing you a different angle of your Self. The sunshine, the wind, the ground beneath your feet, the smell of the breath you take, the morning stretch on your back, conversations, meals, movements, each smile, each tear ... everything.
After all, Truth is only true to you, and it depends on HOW you perceive it each time you perceive it. Truth is so vast that each of us has to shift our energy enough times to see even just a little bit of it. Thus, the constant Truth will not look exactly the same twice.
The question is ... Are you gonna stick around long enough to do it over and over again?
ON THE RADIO ... This is how it works You're young until you're not You love until you don't You try until you can't You laugh until you cry You cry until you laugh And everyone must breathe Until their dying breath
No, this is how it works You peer inside yourself You take the things you like And try to love the things you took And then you take that love you made And stick it into some Someone else's heart Pumping someone else's blood And walking arm in arm You hope it don't get harmed But even if it does You'll just do it all again. ...
From the book, "What I Know Now: Letters to My Younger Self"
Introduction to Ann Curry, News Correspondent -- Today
Though you wouldn't know it from watching her on NBC's Today, Ann Curry has a way of throwing her whole body into a conversation. She settles her long limbs into a chair, leans forward, and listens deeply, all parts on alert. The calm, mellifluous voice that reports daily on wars, floods, and famine in Ann's role as news anchor has a magnetic effect in a confidential chat.
She's the kind of person who might have inspired author George Eliot when she wrote, "Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person; having neither to weigh thoughts nor to measure words but to pour them all out, just as it is, chaff and grain together, knowing what is worth keeping, and then, with he breath of kindness, blow the rest away."
If Ann, now forty-seven, emanates acceptance, it's due in part to the experience of dislocation that she writes about in this letter to herself at age twenty-two. By the standards of today's diverse racial combinations, her lovely face seems only slightly exotic, but as a kid she was made to feel that her mixed-race look was radically different. "My entire life people have looked to me and interpreted what they would from seeing that I'm unusual-looking. When I gave birth to my son and he was blond and blue-eyed, people thought I was the nanny. I swear to you. I actually was asked just two months ago if I was a baby-sitter at my daughter's school," she says.
The winner of two Emmy awards as a reporter for KCBS in Los Angeles and four Golden Mike awards, Ann put herself through the University of Oregon School of Journalism. She graduated in 1978, the same year that her father, Bob Curry, finished college -- the first two members of the family to do so. "My best friend was always my father. He would tell me I could do anything. For all the issues and insecurities and suffering and pain of trying to figure things out at this age, there was a person who was fervent in his belief in me," says Ann.
Hey there, Anner,
I'm watching you fend for yourself at your first job in a six-man newsroom in Medford, Oregon, population fifty thousand. Every day that you walk into that smoke-filled all-male stronghold, you feel like it could be your last day on the job. You're doing twice as many stories as your middle-aged colleagues, but failure seems to lurk just around the corner. One of these gentlemen even said it to your face: "You have no news judgment -- and besides, you can't carry the camera."
Oh yeah? Watch me, you thought, ever more ferocious in your determination. You feel energized knowing that your performance could pave the way -- or close the door -- for the women behind you. Bu there's a profound fear underneath the bravado. Will you -- the half-Japanese outsider who never fit in while growing up in all-white Ashland, Oregon -- have to change some deep part of yourself to make it in this world? Your heart is weighed down by the worry that you'll never be seen for who you really are, that you'll always be misunderstood.
The irony is that you, Ann, have struggled your whole life against being put in an easily categorized box. And now, the girl whose appearance always prompted questions like "What are you? Hispanic? Asian?" is thrusting herself into an industry where looks count for so much. The girl who's happy in grungy flannel shirts and jeans has to learn how to pluck her eyebrows, put on makeup, and wear suits. You're conforming to what people expect you to look like -- but it's scaring the heck out of you.
Think back. You've never bent to those kind of expectations before. Remember that your Japanese immigrant mother wanted so much for you to be pretty and popular that when you were in fifth grade, she hemmed your skirts to miniskirt length and bought you a pair of go-go boots. You wore the mini skirt to school and ripped out the hem because you knew it didn't matter if you were pretty or fit in. You wanted to be smart.
You were happy being a maverick. You were extremely opinionated, but were also extremely nonjudgmental. No matter what anybody thought, if they truly felt it, it was okay with you. You refused to judge other people.
But now you're in the real world and the real world seems to have no hesitation about judging you on appearance, so you're changing as fast as you can. You've cut off your waist-length hair, gotten a perm, and you wear floppy bow ties to the station. You're even cussing. No more "Horsefeathers!" or "Heavens to Mergatroid!" You're spewing real curse words to make sure these old guys don't feel threatened by heaving a woman in the newsroom. Is it surprising that you hardly recognize yourself?
You should understand that being different is fantastic. In fact, rejoice in all those things that make you different. Ultimately, it's not how you look or what group you're in that will determine your success in the world. I think you can carve new territory, you can do something completely out of the box, and if it is an act of love and goodness, it will be completely embraced -- as bizarre as that may seem.
If you can have faith in your real self, you'll suffer less. You won't waste valuable time that could be spent on more important things At forty-seven, I sometimes feel like a late bloomer. I feel it would have been possible to do much more, much sooner, if I hadn't been so worried. What I know now after the loss of my mother, my brother and all the suffering I've covered as a news reporter is that there's no time to waste. It's time to be bold about who you really are.
From the book, "What I Know Now: Letters to My Younger Self"
Introduction to Lisa Scottoline, novelist
Before she became a best-selling mystery writer, Lisa Scottoline was on a fast-track legal career. Born and raised in Philadelphia, she attended the University of Pennsylvania, where she made time to help establish the Penn Women's Row Team while cramming four years of credits into three. After graduating magna cum laude, she went to Penn's law school, married, and landed a prestigious clerkship for a state appellate judge in 1981.
A demanding job as a litigator at Dechert, Price & Rhoads follwoed. By teh time she was pregnant with her daughter, fiver years, later, however, her marriage was failing. It ended shortly after her daughter was born, leaving Lisa, who wanted to stay at home with her baby, in a bind. A devotee of Grisham and Turow books, she speculated that readers might have an appetite for legal thrillers written by a woman. Much to the consternation of her parents, the spunky thirty-year0old decided to give herself five years of fifty thousand dollars in debt -- whichever came first -- to write and sell her first novel.
Five years later, she had five maxed-out credit cards and a completed novel, "Everywhere That Mary Went." The book sold to HarperCollins a week after Lisa began a part-time job clerking for a judge, and it was nominated for the Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America. Lisa, now fifty, has written twelve books, including the New York Times best-seller "Mistaken Identity" and "Moment of Truth." Her latest, published in March 2006, is "Dirty Blonde." Though her unusual career path took guts to pursue, Lisa's list of essential knowledge for herself at age twenty-five shows that she wasn't always so confident.
Dear Lisa,
Here are the ten things you need to know.
1. Your hair matters far, far less than you think. 2. In fact, the way you look matters far less than you think. 3. "Can I ask a dumb question?" is never a good thing to say. 4. In fact, asking permission to speak is never a good idea at all. 5. While we're on the subject, don't speak too fast because you're afraid of wasting your listener's time. Listening to what you have to say is the highest and best use of anyone's time. Even if your hair looks terrible. 6. And don't edit what you say before you say it. That would be you getting in the way of truth, and worse, of your heart. 7. You are already working approximately 25 percent harder than you have to to get the result you want. Chillax. 8. Don't hang out with anyone who doesn't understand why you're so wonderful, or who needs to be told, or who doesn't tell you at regular intervals or when you forget. 9. That little voice you keep ignoring is the only one you should ever listen to. 10. Love.
It's when I see headlined articles like the one below that make me think maybe -- just maybe -- the US is still kind of barbaric. As much as many of the country's people advocate for other countries' human rights, it seems blind to its own transgressions.
Capital punishment is just one of them.
As a note 47 out of 50 European countries have completely abolished the death penalty. About half of the countries in the African continent has some form of abolition of death penalty. Most of South American has some form of death penalty abolition penalty as well.
Now, here's the interesting thing. The point of contention that has been brought to the Supreme Court by a couple of Kentucky death-row inmates is that the common 3-Step lethal injections (Sedate, paralyze and death) might be inhumane. They claim that there is no clear evidence that this will be a painless and dignified death, which, the inmates argue, is guaranteed by the constitution (cruel and unusual punishment). So they are asking for a more "humane" form of lethal execution protocol, such as an overdose of barbiturate, which is pretty much what they use on anesthesia in hospitals anyway. But the question here again, is "is there guaranteed proof that this will be a humane and constitutional death?" We can go on for ages because, like they've found, nothing can be guaranteed in this matter of death, and there's always a factor of human error.
The fact remains, though, whether they realize this or not, that we're trying to find the most "humane" way to kill people. What a travesty! If it's so accident-prone, then don't do it. If you're afraid of accidents, don't do it. If you are to do it, though, don't be so wishy-washy and just do it already. The thing is, there's no doing it "right," when the matter is pretty much wrong.
April 17, 2008 Supreme Court Allows Lethal Injection for Execution
By DAVID STOUT Correction Appended
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld Kentucky's method of putting criminals to death by lethal injection, not only clearing the way for Kentucky to resume executions but ending an unofficial moratorium in the 35 other states that have the death penalty.
However, Justice John Paul Stevens, while concurring reluctantly with the judgment of the court, wrote that he now believed capital punishment itself is unconstitutional, and that Wednesday's ruling might serve to reignite the debate over whether it should exist in the United States.
By 7 to 2, the court rejected challenges to the Kentucky execution procedure brought by two death-row inmates, holding that they had failed to show that the risks of pain from mistakes in an otherwise "humane lethal execution protocol" amounted to cruel and unusual punishment, which is banned by the Constitution.
The prisoners had contended that the three-drug procedure used on death row — one drug each to sedate, paralyze and end life — was unconstitutional, and that in any event there were strong indications that Kentucky had bungled some executions, creating unnecessary pain for the condemned. Through their lawyers, they maintained that problems could be largely solved by administering a single overwhelming dose of a barbiturate, as opposed to the three-drug procedure.
The prisoners' challenge had implications far beyond Kentucky. Of the 36 states with the death penalty, nearly all use the same three-drug procedure that Kentucky uses, as does the federal government, although some states allow a prisoner a choice of how to die.
In February, the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled against electrocution as the state's execution method, meaning that Nebraska is no longer the only state to have the electric chair as the only means of putting someone to death. Now, with the Kentucky challenge disposed of, other states that had set aside executions seem poised to begin them again.
Gov. Tim Kaine of Virginia quickly announced that his state would lift its moratorium on executions, and the Rev. Pat Delahanty, head of the Kentucky Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, said, "We're going to be facing some executions soon," The Associated Press reported.
Executions across the country have been on hold since last September, when the Supreme Court decided to take the Kentucky case. About two dozen executions did not go forward as scheduled while the case was pending, death penalty opponents told the A.P. Because pre-execution procedures can be time-consuming, there was no immediate way to gauge how quickly they might resume. One prisoner who could be facing death soon, in view of the Governor Kaine's remarks, is Edward Bell, who is on Virginia's death row for killing a Winchester police officer. Mr. Bell's execution had been set for April 8.
In a decision written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., which weighed the Kentucky prisoners' claims that they faced an unacceptably high risk of suffering at the hands of their executioners, the court concluded that "Kentucky's continued use of the three-drug protocol cannot be viewed as posing an 'objectively intolerable risk' when no other state has adopted the one-drug method and petitioners have proffered no study showing that it is an equally effective manner of imposing a death sentence."
The prisoners who brought the challenge were Ralph Baze, who killed a sheriff and a deputy who were trying to serve him with a warrant, and Thomas C. Bowling, who killed a couple whose car he had damaged in a parking lot.
The procedure that they challenged uses a barbiturate, then pancuronium bromide, a paralyzing agent, followed by potassium chloride, which stops the heart and brings about death — but with terrible pain if the barbiturate does not work as intended, the condemned men's lawyers maintained. And because of the paralyzing agent, a prisoner could appear peaceful and relaxed even while suffering, they argued.
Lawyers for the prisoners contended that the barbiturate-only method is widely used by veterinarians, who are barred in many states from using the same paralyzing agent employed in executing people. But the court rejected that argument, stating that "veterinary practice for animals is not an appropriate guide for humane practices for humans." The justices who concurred in the judgment — with varying degrees of agreement — were Anthony M. Kennedy, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Stephen G. Breyer, as well as Justice Stevens.
Alluding to the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, the court said history leads to the conclusion that "an execution method violates the Eighth Amendment only if it is deliberately designed to inflict pain," a standard that bars disemboweling, burning alive and other excruciating ways of bringing about death. "Judged under that standard, this is an easy case," the court held.
But the deliberations were not easy, if the number of opinions is any indicator. Although seven members concurred in the judgment of the court, only Justices Kennedy and Alito (who filed a concurring opinion of his own) joined Chief Justice Roberts's opinion. Justices Scalia and Thomas joined each other's concurring opinions.
Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David H. Souter dissented from the court's judgment. "I would not dispose of the case so swiftly given the character of the risk at stake," Justice Ginsburg wrote, declaring that she would have sent the case back to the Kentucky courts for further scrutiny of the condemned men's claims.
Perhaps most interestingly, Justice Stevens filed an opinion concurring in the judgment of the court, but turning against capital punishment itself. Indeed, he asserted that recent decisions by state legislatures, Congress and the Supreme Court itself to preserve the death penalty "are the product of habit and inattention rather than an acceptable deliberative process that weighs the costs and risks" of the ultimate punishment.
Justice Stevens noted that in the 1976 decision in which the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of capital punishment, Gregg v. Georgia, the court declared that "three societal purposes" justified the death penalty: "incapacitation, deterrence and retribution."
"In the past three decades, however, each of these rationales has been called into question," Justice Stevens said. The possibility of a life sentence without parole, he said, has often caused people to soften their positions in favor of inflicting death.
"Full recognition of the diminishing force of the principal rationales for retaining the death penalty should lead this court and legislatures to re-examine" the ultimate question, Justice Stevens wrote, using a phrase used by a former Texas prosecutor and judge: "Is it time to kill the death penalty?"
Coming from Justice Stevens, those words were especially significant. The justice (who will turn 88 on Sunday) was one of the seven justices who voted in 1976 to uphold capital punishment. Since then, he has heard many challenges to various aspects of the death penalty and the "evolving standards of decency" often invoked by its opponents. In 2002, Justice Stevens was in the majority as the court ruled that mentally retarded killers could not be executed, and in 2005 he was in the majority as the court banned the death penalty against juvenile offenders.
Deborah Denno, a Fordham University law professor, said further death-penalty litigation is all but certain in light of the court's "heavily splintered" opinions on Wednesday, in part because the court recognized that "a risk of harm can qualify as an Eighth Amendment violation."
On Wednesday, after handing down their opinions in the Kentucky case, the justices heard arguments in a death penalty case from Louisiana. The question was whether the Constitution allows capital punishment for the rape of a child who is not killed.
Correction: Earlier versions of this report erred in say that Nebraska used the electric chair for executions. It did use execution by electric chair until a February ruling by the Nebraska Supreme Court found it unconstitutional. The state must now adopt a constitutional method of execution.
I had been very pissed off for the past ... oh, who knows how many days.
I can't say that it's all just one thing or another. It's mostly a combination of many things, each thing small. I have a list of the things I was pissed off about, which included the squeaking sound the rocking chair made.
Amongst which also include the stereotypes people put me in, the stereotypical and antiquated concepts that people use to explain who I am, the people that keep telling me that I'm not strong enough or those that mistake my being "timid" as being weak and make a point to "help me," the foolishness that my roommate shows sometimes, the people that can't even do a simple thing such as run a country right -- let alone using proper spelling, punctuation and grammar (!!!) ... to name just a few.
But you know what? Ego and form aside (Eckhart Tolle words), it can be liberating to be pissed off ... just as long as you know you'll come out laughing.
Today, it worked like this for me: You need to know that it's ok to be pissed off; let it be there. The worst, really, is when you are pissed off, but you're trying not to be -- an added layer of frustration. Come on, if you're pissed off, mean it. Stop being counter-productive. Distinguish it from pain -- you're no victim, and right now you're ANGRY, not HURT. (I tend to deal with my pain and my anger more or less separately) You need to know that you are not obligated to "remedy it" or "turn negative energy into positive," or whatever. All you need to know is that 1) it feels worse that it really is, and 2) you'll come out of it with gladness in your heart. List all the things that are bugging you -- down to the squeak of the rocking chair. This puts everything into manageable perspective. And then, chances are, you'll start to get tired of listing it, and start laughing. That's when you know your anger has run out, and you can start on a blank page again.
You know, life is troublesome. But if nothing else, at least the humor is worth it.
Courtesy: Thank you, everyone. Thank you, Nora, for your care.
Today, I finally got fed up with several on-going annoyances that I took it out by writing a terrible critique on the movie, Zeitgeist.
It started with reading about astrology, then the reading of the zodiac, which reminded me of the movie's beginning.
But the idea was that Nora showed me the movie, and I have been annoyed with Nora. I have been annoyed by her constant reminder of "you're not strong enough yet," or "I'm a couple of years ahead of you," or other remarks to, in effect, "put me in my place."
Ideas and understandings that I have, she would take credit for, as if she had forgotten they came from me, the one who's "not strong enough yet" or the one who's "a couple of years behind."
First, I am sorry that whatever that I wrote offended you. It wasn't meant to be that way. I didn't have your interest or your detriment in mind.
Second, you know what? Yes, I am in a poopy mood.
I am in a poopy mood because I feel something in my life right now is stifling. I feel the annoyance of 1) long being used as something to validate others' selves and 2) having my "problems" stereotyped. And try not to over-process what I state here. Try to just take it for what it is.
Truly, in Eckhart Tolle's words, I could just be trying to maintain my ego. But then again, if that's the case, then I'd rather own up to my ego than not. Because at least then, I will have something to deconstruct.
I am tired of being told that I'm just a 25-year-old who doesn't know any better. I am tired of being assumed that I "just" started my life, that I "just started this journey." The fact of the matter is I started my journey a long time ago. I came into this world "knowing," as a conscious being. I did not spend the earlier years of my life wasted in the idle world of city-life. I LEARNED in the city. I OBSERVED human life. And I reflected on my own. I realized the art of gentleness, of harmony, of learning and listening, of patience, of silence, of yielding, of being strong when weakness is expected of me, of not being indignant to seem timid and humble despite the demand of the world around me for a "strong woman." But what is a strong woman? To me, a strong woman is one who does not confuse her outer appearance with her inner self. Women -- people -- like that change others and the world quietly ... with poise. I strive to be one.
What I don't understand is why all I have heard for so long is either 1) be more gentle, 2) be stronger, or 3) you're just not there yet. It irks me that I have yet to meet a person that tells me anything in between. Perhaps what they don't know is that my strength is what they don't see ... perhaps they are too absorbed with their "strength" that they need to tell others how weak they are to validate their strength. Or perhaps these are only values that people who live in between and amongst different countries and racial cultures will understand.
I am also irked that my "problems" are being stereotyped. Just because I am Chinese and female doesn't mean that my "problems" are only due to traditions or that I've long been oppressed as a female or whatever the hell people come up with. I am tired of explaining over and over again that the reality of culture is a fluid concept -- culture and tradition, like everything else, change. Even though stereotypes is how people make sense of their reality, they must take their own stereotypes with a grain of salt and not force it down my throat by diagnosing my "problems" with their stereotypes (ego).
It's finally starting to annoy me that people will not see me for who I am: an individual with depth and layers, with a rich and unique set of experience that brings to the table what they have never seen before.
I would guess that this is why I am so irritated at the Zeitgeist movie: there is no in between, when the truth is most likely somewhere in between. It also stereotyped its entire audience as having problems that are caused by the extreme, such as the poisoning of religious believes and the media and the banking system. It tells its audience one extreme and conveniently omits the subtle, nuanced things that make reality what it is. See, the more complicated a matter, the more likely that reality is "in between." So for the most part, I maintain my stance that Zeitgeist has taken too much "artistic freedom" at the expense of facts. But then, I guess the presentation of facts is much easier without footnotes, and I'm sure the writers have figured that out, too.
However, it is by no means an attempt to paint a picture of you being a naive and easily-swayed member of the audience. I'm sure you did your share of filtering. What happened was just there's more in the movie that you found useful than I did.
Today, I am fascinated with myths and religions (namely Christianity) and their comparative studies.
It is as if I am trying to find, not answers, but any trace of evidence that can show me that my own ideas are worthwhile.
And my idea is that the story of humanity's companionship with Christianity, to a certain degree, must be looked at objectively, in a "formless" fashion (as author Eckhart Tolle might call it). In the name of Christianity, certainly many evil things have occurred. Christianity, through time, has evolved from the left to the right, from the classical liberal to classical conservative, from communitarianism to fascism ... a never-ending political cycle. Moreover, it is a never-ending HUMAN cycle. It is my belief that we must reserve a portion of our critical analysis and, indeed, critique of Christianity, for "human terms," for the understanding of the human trajectory.
In the process, I thought about the movie, Zeitgeist, which, in my opinion, is just that -- a movie ... a propagandizing movie. Worse than Michael Moore's productions, which, at least, still has factual basis, Zeitgeist, I found, was more into inflammatory conspiracy than anything else.
Now to think of it, it didn't even offer me much new information: I knew that the Christian religion was based on pagan believes, and pagan mythological believes were largely supported by astrological systems, which are based on astronomical observations, which are essential pieces of knowledge of any agricultural society, which is why China, India, the Middle East and Egypt were so big on astronomy -- because they needed it. With this train of thought, then, one can logically deduce that Christianity to be a product of the stars. I trust that most students of history have already gotten that figured out.
But don't portray the ancients as ignorant, unassuming bunches of people.
I support that the underpinnings of the Christian religion came from ancient Egyptian believes. And because of the necessity of knowing the stars during those times, having such a myth provided a framework for an under-educated populace to basically remember how to tell time or direction to give their agricultural lives some type of structure. (similar phenomenon occurred in other parts of the world ... like the Far East, for instance)
In other words, the Christian myth, and various other religious myths, were more or less essential for practical usage.
In other OTHER words, in contrary to the ruckus the movie made, whether Jesus was real or not really doesn't matter. The population at the time was just grateful that they can tell when their crops will grow. And when they became more adventurous, they were just glad that they could tell directions when at sea.
In other other OTHER words, these religious myths weren't necessarily "fraud of the age," like the movie stated. Furthermore, Christianity and other myths DIDN'T "serve to detach the species from the natural world, and likewise, each other" (see note 1). It's very much the opposite. It provided the opportunity -- the excuse, if you will -- to "hang out" with each other.
One must understand that in agricultural societies, people did not have a lot of dispensable resources, time and energy. Their attention was devoted to raising crops. Solstice, equinox, and other key points of the year were the only times they could gather around to celebrate. (I, for one, was raised to celebrate winter solstice with a feast when my grandmother was still alive.)
See, people of the past did not just get duped into believing in Christianity.
Fast forward to sometime between 300 and 400 AD.. What happened at that time? This is around the time of the Axial Age. This is also around the Early Middle Ages, which, in the year 303 AD, Christians were ordered to be persecuted. This lasted for 10 years. In 313 AD, Constantine became Rome's first Christian emperor. Why? Superstition. He thought the god of the Christians killed one of his opponents. Constantine died in 337 AD. Around 400 AD was the fall of the Roman Empire (sack of Rome by the Visigoths).
What else? The same stars that created the Christian myths have shifted in the European skies. The Southern Cross (Crux), for example, has not risen above the Athenian horizon since -- common knowledge that is even cited on Wikipedia.
See, this is a dramatic story of how a common pagan myth rose above all others to become "THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION" that we all revere and fear. The fact of the matter is, if it wasn't the Christian myth, it would have easily been another myth that arose politically (so the makers of Zeitgeist might as well say they're atheists and protest all myth-based religions ... which would be all religions). Another fact of the matter is that, by that same time, the Roman calendar had already been invented (thanks to Julius Caesar). So the practical usage of the Christian myth would have waned at the time. To add to the mix is that some of the same constellations that molded the Christian myth have shifted. People no longer have tangible ties to the Christian myth as they once did (by just looking up). All they had to hold on to was the memories passed down from previous generations that they still kept. All these things combined gave people the reason to hold on to Christianity the way they did, making the rest history.
This isn't a story about fraud. Essentially, this is a story about the human tendency to hold on to the past for much too long, which the underlying idea here is the human instinct to hold on to the tangible (what's already happened) instead of facing the unknown of the future ... just the way they hung onto the Christian myth when they no longer had clear ties with it anymore, just the way they clung onto the Christian calendar when they could have used the Julian Calendar.
Do not be confused. Religious fanaticism and anti-religious fanaticism are essentially the same. I will not allow paranoia to cloud my judgment.
After all, this is just a story of human's "letting go."
NOTE 1 From Zeitgeist: "Christianity, along with all other theistic belief systems, is the fraud of the age. It serves to detach the species from the natural world, and likewise, each other. It supports blind submission to authority. It reduces human responsibility to the effect that "God" controls everything, and in turn awful crimes can be justified in the name of Divine Pursuit. And most importantly, it empowers those who know the truth but use the myth to manipulate and control societies. The religious myth is the most powerful device ever created, and serves as the psychological soil upon which other myths can flourish."
I was thinking about the state of the world today. Yes, when you live a wonderful bum life, you tend to have time to worry about frivolous things like that.
A few weeks ago, under the urge of my friend, I watched the award-winning movie, Zeitgeist, for the first time. A riveting movie, I must say. Or, at the very least, controversial and daring, though not the first to be so. (ask Michael Moore -- I mean, come on. anyone who's seen Zeitgeist SHOULD know that there is a not-so-hidden agenda to be inflammatory ... so to get your attention. so get a bottle of salt ready for the things you hear. You'll need more than just a grain.) Well, riveting mostly because of its sound effects. The bass-heavy beginning with a rather verbose man speaking for 6 minutes straight, complete with Windows Media Player-like graphics was ... riveting. Then, its conspiracy theory content was also, at the very least, entertaining. So entertaining that it stuck with me until today, when I decided to think about what I watched a little more. If I'm going to be brainwashed, I want to at least know what the hell I'm being brainwashed with. So today, I looked up the movie's transcript, which they only have the first part available. I cannot wait for the rest of it to come out.
The movie was divided into three portions. In my words: Part I: Christianity's flaw Part II: The 9/11 Conspiracy Part III: International bankers' plot
I am a strong believer in that there is still value in a badly-written piece of literature as long as it raises reasonable doubt in the pre-existing world order. That being said, I also am a strong believe in conviction, journalistic and scholastic integrity ... AND a substantial bibliography.
And I am extremely interested to see how Zeitgeist fares because there is absolutely no bibliographical mention in the movie at all, short of The Bible, really.
As you can hear in my tone here, I am not the most convinced audience in the world. Why? Well, because I'm part of what you would call the educated, logical and analytical public, and I am determined to live up to it.
Why am I such a pooper critic? Well, ok. Here it is.
I've been really into astrology lately. Not just because I've been trying to "find myself" or whatever the hell people call it. It's also because I'm fascinated with the astrological system's rich social and historical implications (aka. archaeoastronomy, comparative mythology and religion, and identity politics). So I did my research, did my reading, did my thinking, and realized that (DUH!) there isn't just ONE zodiac system. With advancement in astronomy, astrology has been forced to change for the past many, many years. Now, "since when" is a good question to be asking right now. Well, astronomy has been advancing for as long as astrology has been developed. In fact, when the tropical zodiac system (the conventional 12-character system you see on you daily horoscope), it was already known that it wasn't entirely accurate -- far from it! (It has been known that the precession of equinox causes adjustments once every 70 years ... this has been fact for some two hundred years before some guy was born in the manger who grew up to be nailed to a tree). And during all those years, the constellations have changed dramatically. In fact, for the longest of time, there were at least 3 systems in Western astrology: Tropical, Sidereal/Vedic, and the basic Sun in Constellation (in which there are more than 12 constellations).
And all of this, though topically insignificant, lingers in my mind with implicit significance:
While the movie did a very good job presenting the zodiac system and its inherent flaws, it 1) did not mention the rest of the systems existed at the time that were more astronomically accurate (thus, slightly less mythologically biased), and 2) also did not mention the fact that the ancients KNEW that their system was flawed for hundreds of years before baby Jesus was born, and before collective government systems were built in the time of the Pagans!!
So what's the point in conveniently not presenting all of THE OTHER information? Why focus on one that's most convenient in supporting its argument? Hmm. Wouldn't this be grounds to call it "bias," if not "misleading?" *gasp!*
The truth is, stars changed and people changed. The ancients chose what they believed in, and WE twisted them around. We are the ones that took their sea-faring believes too literally (as we all know, other than agriculture and land directions, the boom in astronomy started when people began their sea adventures). For thousands of years, Christianity, for worse (or WORST!), became the slaying sword in the hands of the vicious few (which is the point of the movie), but, for better, it provided an anchor of hope for many people.
Christianity hasn't always been the way Americans see it to be. And I say "Americans" because if we look at Western the Western political climate, the US is by far the most affected by Christianity in its policies. For example, did you know that in the Middle Ages (uh, CATHOLIC), doctors and women knew better ways for birth control, contraceptives and abortion than we do today? Yes, they used herbs, not hormones. Why didn't the movie just say "It doesn't have to be this way ... and it hasn't always been this way," instead of "You've been duped"? The interesting thing for me here is that the movie chose to ride the "inflammatory" route instead of a calm presentation that doesn't take the artistic license of scholastic works of others.
Speaking of scholastic works, what I'm also surprised to find out is that there is no trace of the works of Joseph Campbell, a prominent and well-known scholar in the field of comparative mythology and religion. What I noticed in the bibliography is frequent mention of a certain Acharya S, whose real name, according to the much beloved Wikipedia, is M.D. Murdock, and her first book is named "The Christ Conspiracy."
I don't know what to make of all this. Actually, it's more like I don't have the words to describe the scholastic failure presented here by the lack of breadth in Part I's bibliography. Any scholastic work -- or movies that made a point to rile up scholastic scrutiny -- would have at least CONSIDERED citing prominent scholarship! Remember? This is something we learned even in high school, one of the cardinal rules of respectable scholastic work. Competency speaks volumes in scholastic work.
Another interesting thing I noticed is that, even though the movie makes such an effort to bring about the impression that the Christianity conspiracy is based on some worldwide fact, it fails to mention China, as one of the world's foremost astronomical powerhouses for thousands of years. (It did, however, mention Japan, if you care to notice because it passes by really fast in font. But Japan, during those times, was quite different than China ... read history.)
So that's the beginning to my skepticism of Part I.
No no. I don't mean that the whole thing doesn't make sense. In fact, I would say that it is thought-provoking. But I would also say that it lacks depth. It lacks the depth of truly understanding, aside from conspiracy theory or the "truth" about God and Man, what ELSE these myths and religion and star constellations say about humanity. There's so much more than Horus and Set, light and darkness, and right and wrong. And there's already so much work done on the reality somewhere in between the two extremes.
Zeitgeist is obviously behind the times.
For more information, please refer to Joseph Campbell and his league of scholars. No, not even that. Before going there, check out PBS and their specials. (The truth is ... TRUTH is everywhere. You don't always have to invent it.)
Part II and III, I cannot comment on in great detail or any detail at all because I am still waiting for the transcript and bibliography to become available. But I will say that, in regards to the war on Iraq, the movie also conveniently "missed" the internal politics of the administration, as demonstrated clearly by its blatant disregard of the National Security Advisor and the Secretary of Interior by the Vice President and Secretary of Defense. Much of the war and its debauchery is a result of internal unrest in the cabinet itself, clearly illustrated in the timeline of occurrence and events throughout the war effort. This INCLUDES the passing of the Patriot Act and the President's disregard (yes, more disregard!) of the proper procedure he must follow with the Office of Legal Counsel. Also, the "war on terror," as we all know, began in the 1980s, during the Reagan administration! Does anyone remember the twist that became of the Iraq-Iran War of the 1980s, during which the US foreign policy took a misstep by intervening ... just like it did in so many different events around the world?
Come on. We ALL KNOW that the 9/11 and subsequent (even consequent) events did not just start on 9/11/2001. And we ALL KNOW that the military-industrial complex has a hand in our foreign and domestic policies -- I first learned this in high school. But let's not forget that there are some very complex, but very tangible, politics at work here that are not unheard of. ... Apparently, though, the makers of Zeitgeist thought these political struggles (as illustrated even on PBS!) are not tangible enough.
OK, sure enough, like the movie advocates, we cannot always trust the media (ironically, the movie also wants its audience to trust it). But for all I know -- and NPR knows it, too, because it did an interview special on it -- at the very least The New York Times (I mean, come on. It's only one of the most well-known news media in the world ....) published articles about how the administration was trying to by-pass the Office of Legal Counsel to pass the Patriot Act, which the movie made such a big deal about. It is true that the administration tried to dissuade The NYTimes from publishing it, but the brave editors went ahead with it anyway.
You see, just like the scandalous Watergate, just like the ugliness of the Vietnam War (I mean, how else did you think that war came to an end?), and just like everything else that is put out there by the media, THERE IS STILL JOURNALISTIC INTEGRITY IN THE WORLD.
DO NOT FORGET THAT WE AS HUMANITY, THROUGH ITS UPS AND DOWNS, STILL HAVE INTEGRITY. It's all around us, if we care to notice. You know, between a happy-go-lucky, head-in-clouds worldview and the Zeitgeist portrayal of the world, the reality is most likely somewhere in between. Paranoia must not be hurled in with healthy skepticism. So, I, for one (and I know I'm not alone), would not be so naive to be so easily affected by Zeitgeist's mediocre attempt to sway me one way or another. (And honestly, there are better conspiracy theory movies out there -- even Michael Moore's movies prove to be better.)
I'm reading "The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" as a snack. Have you read it? You know, there is nothing like a witty book. For example, this is the beginning:
"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
This planet has -- or rather had -- a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
And so the problem remained; lots of people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.
Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.
And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized that it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.
Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terrible, stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost for ever.
This is not her story.
But it is the story of that terrible, stupid catastrophe and some of its consequences.
It is also the story of a book, a book called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- not an Earth book, never published on Earth, and until the terrible catastrophe occurred, never seen or even heard of by any Earthman.
Nevertheless, a wholly remarkable book.
In fact, it was probably the most remarkable book ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor -- of which no Earthman had ever heard either.
Not only is it a wholly remarkable book, it is also a highly successful one -- more popular than the Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better selling than Fifty-three More Things to Do in Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Coluphid's trilogy of philosophical blockbusters, Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes and Who Is This God Person Anyway?
In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitchhiker's Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects:
First, it is slightly cheaper; and second, it has the words DON'T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.
But the story of this terrible, stupid Thursday, the story of its extraordinary consequences, and the story of how these consequences are inextricably intertwined with this remarkable book begins very simply.
It begins with a house."
It made me laugh. haha!
After reading about two chapters of this book, I decided to take a nap -- I've been very worn out lately, and I don't really know why. In my sleep, I had a moment of a dream where I was rigorously inscribing words and sentences on a rather large chalkboard, much like a mad scientist, who is afraid that his ideas would be lost with each passing minute, would make busy chalk-on-board noises with a restless arm that is attached to his body full of energy and the excitement of new formulas that might -- just might -- explain Everything.
Well, that's me, trying to capture each drop of thought with words, with white scribbles on black chalkboard.
You're Darn Right I'm Bitter By Bitter Jon on April 13, 2008 11:21 AM
One of the most refreshing things about Barack Obama is his fearlessness when it comes to voicing a hard truth. It's an ice cold glass of unsweetened lemonade: hard to swallow, but unmistakably pure. The truth is, if you aren't bitter, you're probably voting for someone who is going to give us more of what we've been getting all along. And all Clinton and McCain seem to be saying is "Let them eat Lemons."
Both Clinton and McCain's response to Barack's comments about voters were incredibly elitist, which is funny since that seemed to be their charge. Hillary said we aren't bitter, we're resilient. In other words, we can take it, right? We can take our wages being frozen while the cost of living doubles. We can take lucrative jobs packing up and moving overseas. We can take the oil companies turning less than a 20% increase in operating expense into a 200% increase in profits. Hey, it's all part of being American. We take a beating and still wake up with a smile on our faces. Since Clinton is so sure the voters are just hunky dory with the way things are going, what would be her imperative to bring rapid and meaningful change? Clinton is completely out of touch. Hilldog, the thousands of people losing their homes right now aren't feeling very tough. They're feeling pretty bitter.
McCain's people had the nerve to call Obama's label of "bitter" condescending and elitist. From the camp of a politician whose first response to the housing crisis was to essentially allow fiscal Darwinism to run its course, this accusation is laughable. There is nothing condescending or elitist about Barack's assessment. In fact, it is just the opposite.
While Clinton and McCain live within the pomp and circumstances of their political propaganda, Obama is showing that he truly understands where voters are coming from. It is why he is winning. Obama's assessment that we are bitter comes directly from understanding that we are tired of the things that come from status quo politicians like Clinton and McCain that have driven the middle class to the edge of extinction. We should be proud to be bitter. It's not a bad thing to be, it just means you have been impacted, and it's not okay.
Of course, the real culprit here is the media. You would expect journalists to know a thing or two about the English language. The use of words like 'Typical' and 'Bitter' to skew a message, apply a racist tone, or deem verbage an insult, is a practice true writers should be abhorred to participate in, and journalists who play into these games should forfeit any claim to integrity. Isn't it more newsworthy that campaigns twist a word to political game, marginalizing our intelligence and language for petty trickery?
It requires minimal intelligence to interpret that Obama meant we were Bitter in that we are fed up, turned off, and have had enough of politics as usual. Personally, I've voted in 5 presidential elections; when I look at what has become of this country during the course of those 20 years, I do feel intensely acrid on the inside. Over the last eight years in particular, when our leaders talk about how they are going to fix something I do respond with cynicism.
So yes I am bitter, and you should be too, and in November we should all vote bitterly against the status quo and for a leader that truly knows how to make Lemons into Lemonade.
Wednesday, Apr. 09, 2008 The Story of Barack Obama's Mother By Amanda Ripley/Honolulu
Each of us lives a life of contradictory truths. We are not one thing or another. Barack Obama's mother was at least a dozen things. S. Ann Soetoro was a teen mother who later got a Ph.D. in anthropology; a white woman from the Midwest who was more comfortable in Indonesia; a natural-born mother obsessed with her work; a romantic pragmatist, if such a thing is possible.
"When I think about my mother," Obama told me recently, "I think that there was a certain combination of being very grounded in who she was, what she believed in. But also a certain recklessness. I think she was always searching for something. She wasn't comfortable seeing her life confined to a certain box."
Obama's mother was a dreamer. She made risky bets that paid off only some of the time, choices that her children had to live with. She fell in love—twice—with fellow students from distant countries she knew nothing about. Both marriages failed, and she leaned on her parents and friends to help raise her two children.
"She cried a lot," says her daughter Maya Soetoro-Ng, "if she saw animals being treated cruelly or children in the news or a sad movie—or if she felt like she wasn't being understood in a conversation." And yet she was fearless, says Soetoro-Ng. "She was very capable. She went out on the back of a motorcycle and did rigorous fieldwork. Her research was responsible and penetrating. She saw the heart of a problem, and she knew whom to hold accountable."
Today Obama is partly a product of what his mother was not. Whereas she swept her children off to unfamiliar lands and even lived apart from her son when he was a teenager, Obama has tried to ground his children in the Midwest. "We've created stability for our kids in a way that my mom didn't do for us," he says. "My choosing to put down roots in Chicago and marry a woman who is very rooted in one place probably indicates a desire for stability that maybe I was missing."
Ironically, the person who mattered most in Obama's life is the one we know the least about—maybe because being partly African in America is still seen as being simply black and color is still a preoccupation above almost all else. There is not enough room in the conversation for the rest of a man's story.
But Obama is his mother's son. In his wide-open rhetoric about what can be instead of what was, you see a hint of his mother's credulity. When Obama gets donations from people who have never believed in politics before, they're responding to his ability—passed down from his mother—to make a powerful argument (that happens to be very liberal) without using a trace of ideology. On a good day, when he figures out how to move a crowd of thousands of people very different from himself, it has something to do with having had a parent who gazed at different cultures the way other people study gems.
It turns out that Obama's nascent career peddling hope is a family business. He inherited it. And while it is true that he has not been profoundly tested, he was raised by someone who was.
In most elections, the deceased mother of a candidate in the primaries is not the subject of a magazine profile. But Ann Soetoro was not like most mothers.
Stanley Ann Dunham Born in 1942, just five years before Hillary Clinton, Obama's mother came into an America constrained by war, segregation and a distrust of difference. Her parents named her Stanley because her father had wanted a boy. She endured the expected teasing over this indignity, but dutifully lugged the name through high school, apologizing for it each time she introduced herself in a new town.
During her life, she was known by four different names, each representing a distinct chapter. In the course of the Stanley period, her family moved more than five times—from Kansas to California to Texas to Washington—before her 18th birthday. Her father, a furniture salesman, had a restlessness that she inherited.
She spent her high school years on a small island in Washington, taking advanced classes in philosophy and visiting coffee shops in Seattle. "She was a very intelligent, quiet girl, interested in her friendships and current events," remembers Maxine Box, a close high school friend. Both girls assumed they would go to college and pursue careers. "She wasn't particularly interested in children or in getting married," Box says. Although Stanley was accepted early by the University of Chicago, her father wouldn't let her go. She was too young to be off on her own, he said, unaware, as fathers tend to be, of what could happen when she lived in his house.
After she finished high school, her father whisked the family away again—this time to Honolulu, after he heard about a big new furniture store there. Hawaii had just become a state, and it was the new frontier. Stanley grudgingly went along yet again, enrolling in the University of Hawaii as a freshman.
Mrs. Barack H. Obama Shortly before she moved to Hawaii, Stanley saw her first foreign film. Black Orpheus was an award-winning musical retelling of the myth of Orpheus, a tale of doomed love. The movie was considered exotic because it was filmed in Brazil, but it was written and directed by white Frenchmen. The result was sentimental and, to some modern eyes, patronizing. Years later Obama saw the film with his mother and thought about walking out. But looking at her in the theater, he glimpsed her 16-year-old self. "I suddenly realized," he wrote in his memoir, Dreams from My Father, "that the depiction of childlike blacks I was now seeing on the screen ... was what my mother had carried with her to Hawaii all those years before, a reflection of the simple fantasies that had been forbidden to a white middle-class girl from Kansas, the promise of another life, warm, sensual, exotic, different."
By college, Stanley had started introducing herself as Ann. She met Barack Obama Sr. in a Russian-language class. He was one of the first Africans to attend the University of Hawaii and a focus of great curiosity. He spoke at church groups and was interviewed for several local-newspaper stories. "He had this magnetic personality," remembers Neil Abercrombie, a member of Congress from Hawaii who was friends with Obama Sr. in college. "Everything was oratory from him, even the most commonplace observation."
Obama's father quickly drew a crowd of friends at the university. "We would drink beer, eat pizza and play records," Abercrombie says. They talked about Vietnam and politics. "Everyone had an opinion about everything, and everyone was of the opinion that everyone wanted to hear their opinion—no one more so than Barack."
The exception was Ann, the quiet young woman in the corner who began to hang out with Obama and his friends that fall. "She was scarcely out of high school. She was mostly kind of an observer," says Abercrombie. Obama Sr.'s friends knew he was dating a white woman, but they made a point of treating it as a nonissue. This was Hawaii, after all, a place enamored of its reputation as a melting pot.
But when people called Hawaii a "melting pot" in the early 1960s, they meant a place where white people blended with Asians. At the time, 19% of white women in Hawaii married Chinese men, and that was considered radical by the rest of the nation. Black people made up less than 1% of the state's population. And while interracial marriage was legal there, it was banned in half the other states.
When Ann told her parents about the African student at school, they invited him over for dinner. Her father didn't notice when his daughter reached out to hold the man's hand, according to Obama's book. Her mother thought it best not to cause a scene. As Obama would write, "My mother was that girl with the movie of beautiful black people playing in her head."
On Feb. 2, 1961, several months after they met, Obama's parents got married in Maui, according to divorce records. It was a Thursday. At that point, Ann was three months pregnant with Barack Obama II. Friends did not learn of the wedding until afterward. "Nobody was invited," says Abercrombie. The motivations behind the marriage remain a mystery, even to Obama. "I never probed my mother about the details. Did they decide to get married because she was already pregnant? Or did he propose to her in the traditional, formal way?" Obama wonders. "I suppose, had she not passed away, I would have asked more."
Even by the standards of 1961, she was young to be married. At 18, she dropped out of college after one semester, according to University of Hawaii records. When her friends back in Washington heard the news, "we were very shocked," says Box, her high school friend.
Then, when Obama was almost 1, his father left for Harvard to get a Ph.D. in economics. He had also been accepted to the New School in New York City, with a more generous scholarship that would have allowed his family to join him. But he decided to go to Harvard. "How can I refuse the best education?" he told Ann, according to Obama's book.
Obama's father had an agenda: to return to his home country and help reinvent Kenya. He wanted to take his new family with him. But he also had a wife from a previous marriage there—a marriage that may or may not have been legal. In the end, Ann decided not to follow him. "She was under no illusions," says Abercrombie. "He was a man of his time, from a very patriarchal society." Ann filed for divorce in Honolulu in January 1964, citing "grievous mental suffering"—the reason given in most divorces at the time. Obama Sr. signed for the papers in Cambridge, Mass., and did not contest the divorce.
Ann had already done things most women of her generation had not: she had married an African, had their baby and gotten divorced. At this juncture, her life could have become narrower—a young, marginalized woman focused on paying the rent and raising a child on her own. She could have filled her son's head with well-founded resentment for his absent father. But that is not what happened.
S. Ann Dunham Soetoro When her son was almost 2, Ann returned to college. Money was tight. She collected food stamps and relied on her parents to help take care of young Barack. She would get her bachelor's degree four years later. In the meantime, she met another foreign student, Lolo Soetoro, at the University of Hawaii. ("It's where I send all my single girlfriends," jokes her daughter Soetoro-Ng, who also married a man she met there.) He was easygoing, happily devoting hours to playing chess with Ann's father and wrestling with her young son. Lolo proposed in 1967.
Mother and son spent months preparing to follow him to Indonesia—getting shots, passports and plane tickets. Until then, neither had left the country. After a long journey, they landed in an unrecognizable place. "Walking off the plane, the tarmac rippling with heat, the sun bright as a furnace," Obama later wrote, "I clutched her hand, determined to protect her."
Lolo's house, on the outskirts of Jakarta, was a long way from the high-rises of Honolulu. There was no electricity, and the streets were not paved. The country was transitioning to the rule of General Suharto. Inflation was running at more than 600%, and everything was scarce. Ann and her son were the first foreigners to live in the neighborhood, according to locals who remember them. Two baby crocodiles, along with chickens and birds of paradise, occupied the backyard. To get to know the kids next door, Obama sat on the wall between their houses and flapped his arms like a great, big bird, making cawing noises, remembers Kay Ikranagara, a friend. "That got the kids laughing, and then they all played together," she says.
Obama attended a Catholic school called Franciscus Assisi Primary School. He attracted attention since he was not only a foreigner but also chubbier than the locals. But he seemed to shrug off the teasing, eating tofu and tempeh like all the other kids, playing soccer and picking guavas from the trees. He didn't seem to mind that the other children called him "Negro," remembers Bambang Sukoco, a former neighbor.
At first, Obama's mother gave money to every beggar who stopped at their door. But the caravan of misery—children without limbs, men with leprosy—churned on forever, and she was forced to be more selective. Her husband mocked her calculations of relative suffering. "Your mother has a soft heart," he told Obama.
As Ann became more intrigued by Indonesia, her husband became more Western. He rose through the ranks of an American oil company and moved the family to a nicer neighborhood. She was bored by the dinner parties he took her to, where men boasted about golf scores and wives complained about their Indonesian servants. The couple fought rarely but had less and less in common. "She wasn't prepared for the loneliness," Obama wrote in Dreams. "It was constant, like a shortness of breath."
Indonesia has the world's largest Muslim population, but Obama's household was not religious. "My mother, whose parents were nonpracticing Baptists and Methodists, was one of the most spiritual souls I ever knew," Obama said in a 2007 speech. "But she had a healthy skepticism of religion as an institution. And as a consequence, so did I."
In her own way, Ann tried to compensate for the absence of black people in her son's life. At night, she came home from work with books on the civil rights movement and recordings of Mahalia Jackson. Her aspirations for racial harmony were simplistic. "She was very much of the early Dr. [Martin Luther] King era," Obama says. "She believed that people were all basically the same under their skin, that bigotry of any sort was wrong and that the goal was then to treat everybody as unique individuals." Ann gave her daughter, who was born in 1970, dolls of every hue: "A pretty black girl with braids, an Inuit, Sacagawea, a little Dutch boy with clogs," says Soetoro-Ng, laughing. "It was like the United Nations."
A year later, Ann followed Obama back to Hawaii, as promised, taking her daughter but leaving her husband behind. She enrolled in a master's program at the University of Hawaii to study the anthropology of Indonesia.
Indonesia is an anthropologist's fantasyland. It is made up of 17,500 islands, on which 230 million people speak more than 300 languages. The archipelago's culture is colored by Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim and Dutch traditions. Indonesia "sucks a lot of us in," says fellow anthropologist and friend Alice Dewey. "It's delightful."
Around this time, Ann began to find her voice. People who knew her before describe her as quiet and smart; those who met her afterward use words like forthright and passionate. The timing of her graduate work was perfect. "The whole face of the earth was changing," Dewey says. "Colonial powers were collapsing, countries needed help, and development work was beginning to interest anthropologists."
Ann's husband visited Hawaii frequently, but they never lived together again. Ann filed for divorce in 1980. As with Obama's father, she kept in regular contact with Lolo and did not pursue alimony or child support, according to divorce records.
"She was no Pollyanna. There have certainly been moments when she complained to us," says her daughter Soetoro-Ng. "But she was not someone who would take the detritus of those divorces and make judgments about men in general or love or allow herself to grow pessimistic." With each failed marriage, Ann gained a child and, in one case, a country as well.
Ann Dunham Sutoro After three years of living with her children in a small apartment in Honolulu, subsisting on student grants, Ann decided to go back to Indonesia to do fieldwork for her Ph.D. Obama, then about 14, told her he would stay behind. He was tired of being new, and he appreciated the autonomy his grandparents gave him. Ann did not argue with him. "She kept a certain part of herself aloof or removed," says Mary Zurbuchen, a friend from Jakarta. "I think maybe in some way this was how she managed to cross so many boundaries."
In Indonesia, Ann joked to friends that her son seemed interested only in basketball. "She despaired of him ever having a social conscience," remembers Richard Patten, a colleague. After her divorce, Ann started using the more modern spelling of her name, Sutoro. She took a big job as the program officer for women and employment at the Ford Foundation, and she spoke up forcefully at staff meetings. Unlike many other expats, she had spent a lot of time with villagers, learning their priorities and problems, with a special focus on women's work. "She was influenced by hanging out in the Javanese marketplace," Zurbuchen says, "where she would see women with heavy baskets on their backs who got up at 3 in the morning to walk to the market and sell their produce." Ann thought the Ford Foundation should get closer to the people and further from the government, just as she had.
Her home became a gathering spot for the powerful and the marginalized: politicians, filmmakers, musicians and labor organizers. "She had, compared with other foundation colleagues, a much more eclectic circle," Zurbuchen says. "She brought unlikely conversation partners together."
Obama's mother cared deeply about helping poor women, and she had two biracial children. But neither of them remembers her talking about sexism or racism. "She spoke mostly in positive terms: what we are trying to do and what we can do," says Soetoro-Ng, who is now a history teacher at a girls' high school in Honolulu. "She wasn't ideological," notes Obama. "I inherited that, I think, from her. She was suspicious of cant." He remembers her joking that she wanted to get paid as much as a man, but it didn't mean she would stop shaving her legs. In his recent Philadelphia speech on race, in which he acknowledged the grievances of blacks and whites, Obama was consciously channeling his mother. "When I was writing that speech," he told nbc News, "her memory loomed over me. Is this something that she would trust?" When it came to race, Obama told me, "I don't think she was entirely comfortable with the more aggressive or militant approaches to African-American politics."
In the expat community of Asia in the 1980s, single mothers were rare, and Ann stood out. She was by then a rather large woman with frizzy black hair. But Indonesia was an uncommonly tolerant place. "For someone like Ann, who had a big personality and was a big presence," says Zurbuchen, "Indonesia was very accepting. It gave her a sense of fitting in." At home, Ann wore the traditional housecoat, the batik daster. She loved simple, traditional restaurants. Friends remember sharing bakso bola tenis, or noodles with tennis-ball-size meatballs, from a roadside stand.
Today Ann would not be so unusual in the U.S. A single mother of biracial children pursuing a career, she foreshadowed, in some ways, what more of America would look like. But she did so without comment, her friends say. "She wasn't stereotypical at all," says Nancy Peluso, a friend and an environmental sociologist. "But she didn't make a big deal out of it."
Ann's most lasting professional legacy was to help build the microfinance program in Indonesia, which she did from 1988 to '92—before the practice of granting tiny loans to credit-poor entrepreneurs was an established success story. Her anthropological research into how real people worked helped inform the policies set by the Bank Rakyat Indonesia, says Patten, an economist who worked there. "I would say her work had a lot to do with the success of the program," he says. Today Indonesia's microfinance program is No. 1 in the world in terms of savers, with 31 million members, according to Microfinance Information eXchange Inc., a microfinance-tracking outfit.
While his mother was helping poor people in Indonesia, Obama was trying to do something similar 7,000 miles (about 11,300 km) away in Chicago, as a community organizer. Ann's friends say she was delighted by his career move and started every conversation with an update of her children's lives. "All of us knew where Barack was going to school. All of us knew how brilliant he was," remembers Ann's friend Georgia McCauley.
Every so often, Ann would leave Indonesia to live in Hawaii—or New York or even, in the mid-1980s, Pakistan, for a microfinance job. She and her daughter sometimes lived in garage apartments and spare rooms of friends. She collected treasures from her travels—exquisite things with stories she understood. Antique daggers with an odd number of curves, as required by Javanese tradition; unusual batiks; rice-paddy hats. Before returning to Hawaii in 1984, Ann wrote her friend Dewey that she and her daughter would "probably need a camel caravan and an elephant or two to load all our bags on the plane, and I'm sure you don't want to see all those airline agents weeping and rending their garments." At his house in Chicago, Obama says, he has his mother's arrowhead collection from Kansas—along with "trunks full of batiks that we don't really know what to do with."
In 1992, Obama's mother finally finished her Ph.D. dissertation, which she had worked on, between jobs, for almost two decades. The thesis is 1,000 pages, a meticulous analysis of peasant blacksmithing in Indonesia. The glossary, which she describes as "far from complete," is 24 pages. She dedicated the tome to her mother; to Dewey, her adviser; "and to Barack and Maya, who seldom complained when their mother was in the field."
In the fall of 1994, Ann was having dinner at her friend Patten's house in Jakarta when she felt a pain in her stomach. A local doctor diagnosed indigestion. When Ann returned to Hawaii several months later, she learned it was ovarian and uterine cancer. She died on Nov. 7, 1995, at 52.
Before her death, Ann read a draft of her son's memoir, which is almost entirely about his father. Some of her friends were surprised at the focus, but she didn't seem obviously bothered. "She never complained about it," says Peluso. "She just said it was something he had to work out." Neither Ann nor her son knew how little time they had left.
Obama has said his biggest mistake was not being at his mother's side when she died. He went to Hawaii to help the family scatter the ashes over the Pacific. And he carries on her spirit in his campaign. "When Barack smiles," says Peluso, "there's just a certain Ann look. He lights up in a particular way that she did."
After Ann's death, her daughter dug through her artifacts, searching for Ann's story. "She always did want to write a memoir," Soetoro-Ng says. Finally, she discovered the start of a life story, but it was less than two pages. She never found anything more. Maybe Ann had run out of time, or maybe the chemotherapy had worn her out. "I don't know. Maybe she felt overwhelmed," says Soetoro-Ng, "because there was so much to tell." —With reporting by Zamira Loebis and Jason Tedjasukmana/Jakarta
Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1729524,00.html
And he raised his head and looked upon the people, and there fell a stillness upon them. And with a great voice he said:
"When love beckons to you, follow him, Though his ways are hard and steep. And when his wings enfold you yield to him, Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you. And when he speaks to you believe in him, Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden.
For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning. Even as he ascends to your height and caresses our tenderest branches that quiver in the sun, So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.
Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself. He threshes you to make you naked. He sifts you to free you from your husks. He grinds you to whiteness. He kneads you until you are pliant; And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God’s sacred feast.
All these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart, and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life’s heart.
But if in your fear you would seek only love’s peace and love’s pleasure, Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love’s threshing-floor, Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.
Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself. Love possesses not nor would it be possessed; For love is sufficient unto love.
When you love you should not say, "God is in my heart," but rather, "I am in the heart of God." And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself. But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires: To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night. To know the pain of too much tenderness. To be wounded by your own understanding of love; And to bleed willingly and joyfully. To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving; To rest at the non hour and meditate love’s ecstasy; To return home at eventide with gratitude; And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.
ON MARRIAGE Then Almitra spoke again and said, And what of Marriage, master? And he answered saying: You were born together, and together you shall be forevermore. You shall be together when the white wings of death scatter your days. Ay, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God. But let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.
Love one another, but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.
Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.
ON CHILDREN And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children. And he said: Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth. The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far. Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness; For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
April 10, 2008 Names That Match Forge a Bond on the Internet
By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM From time to time Sam Blackman, a pediatric oncologist in Philadelphia, checks up on people other than patients. Namely, other Sam Blackmans.
No stethoscope is needed to take the pulse of his namesakes, though — just a Google search. And while he has never met the men he refers to as Sam 2.0 and Sam 3.0, when one of those other Sam Blackmans posted a photograph of his wife on the Internet, Dr. Blackman, 39, couldn’t help but feel a twinge of pleasure.
"I’m like ’Oh! Sam Blackman got married,’ " he said. "I felt like I should send a card or check his registry on Amazon."
Now that the telephone book has been all but replaced by the minutiae-rich Web, searching out, even stalking, the people who share one’s name has become a common pastime. Bloggers muse about their multiple digital selves, known as Google twins or Googlegängers (a term that was the American Dialect Society’s "most creative" word last year).
In "Finding Angela Shelton," a book published this month, a writer named Angela Shelton describes her meetings with 40 other Angela Sheltons. Keri Smith, an illustrator, has posted drawings of six of her Googlegängers on her blog. There are name-tally Web sites like SameNameAsMe, and Facebook coalitions including nearly 200 people named Ritz (their insignia is a cracker box logo) and a group aiming to break a world record by gathering together more than 1,224 Mohammed Hassans.
But while many people are familiar with Googlegängers, a fundamental question has gone unanswered: Why do so many feel a connection — be it kinship or competition — with utter strangers just because they share a name?
Social science, it turns out, has an answer. It is because human beings are unconsciously drawn to people and things that remind us of ourselves.
A psychological theory called the name-letter effect maintains that people like the letters in their own names (particularly their initials) better than other letters of the alphabet.
In studies involving Internet telephone directories, Social Security death index records and clinical experiments, Brett Pelham, a social psychologist, and colleagues have found in the past six years that Johnsons are more likely to wed Johnsons, women named Virginia are more likely to live in (and move to) Virginia, and people whose surname is Lane tend to have addresses that include the word "lane," not "street."
During the 2000 presidential campaign, people whose surnames began with B were more likely to contribute to George Bush, while those whose surnames began with G were more likely to contribute to Al Gore.
"It’s what we call implicit egotism," Dr. Pelham, who is now a writer and researcher for the Gallup Organization, said. "We’ve shown time and time again that people are attracted to people, places and things that resemble their names, without a doubt."
Jason Rodriguez, 30, an editor of comic and graphic novels in Arlington, Va., feels connected to another Jason Rodriguez, a stuntman who has worked on films (some inspired by graphic novels) including sequels to "Spider-Man" and "Pirates of the Caribbean."
"He’s a really good stuntman," Mr. Rodriguez said with a hint of pride. He likens himself and the stuntman — whom he has never met — to the physically incongruous brothers in the comedy "Twins" played by Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
"We both sort of have this connection," said Mr. Rodriguez, who casts himself in the Danny DeVito role. "We both support this nerd world."
A photo editor named Tim Connor, who saw a photograph of another man with his name, wrote on his blog that the image "made him intensely real to me. I felt in some way I already knew him."
Mr. Connor’s Googlegänger also provoked comparison and self-reflection. "I don’t feel the usual mixture of rage & shame knowing that my father would have understood and been comfortable with my Googlegänger’s career," Mr. Connor wrote on Timconnor.blogspot.com, "and he never was with mine."
In studies that make believers in free will squirm, Dr. Pelham’s team asserts that names and the letters in them are surprisingly influential in people’s lives. In one experiment, participants of both sexes evaluated a young woman more favorably when the number on the jersey she was wearing had been subliminally paired with their own names on a computer screen.
A feeling of connection between people with the same name is, in a way, little more than sharing an affinity for a brand — like two car owners who give each other friendly toots because they both drive Mini Coopers.
"Self-similarity is really one of the largest driving forces of behavior of social beings," said Jeremy Bailenson, the director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab. "When someone is similar to you, you give them special privileges," like buying something from them or voting for them.
Social psychologists have found that people are more attracted to others with similar faces or identical birth dates. James Bruning, a trustee professor of psychology at Ohio University, said that people’s fascination with their Googlegängers might be an adult expression of the common childhood wish to be an identical twin.
There are more prosaic reasons that people may feel connected to their Googlegängers, though. They may share a name because they belong to the same ethnic group, or their families may have had similar aspirations for them. "There’s a lot of soft evidence out there that parents largely give names based on a set of expectations," Dr. Bruning said. "Parents who name a boy Bronco versus naming the child Cecil, you would expect one would be more likely to get a football on his next birthday and the other would get a book. That might be a starting point for one’s identity being associated with a name."
Skeptics of the name-letter effect question how strong the affinity really is between a person’s name and his or her destiny. "I’m willing to believe that such patterns exist," said Stanton Wortham, a professor of education and anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. "But I’m not willing to grant that those sorts of patterns are going to explain or drive a substantial amount of behavior."
"Even Georgia who moved to Georgia," he added, "she moved to Georgia for other reasons too."
For each of the studies Dr. Pelham and colleagues conducted showing a connection between names and behavior, they compared their results with random chance. The number of Virginias who move to Virginia, for example, is 36 percent higher than could be expected by chance.
Of the 40 Angela Sheltons that Ms. Shelton, the writer, met with in researching her book, many of them were nurses. Only one voted for George W. Bush. Seventy percent, she said, reported they had been raped, sexually assaulted or abused. (Ms. Shelton’s book, subtitled "The True Story of One Woman’s Triumph Over Sexual Abuse," was based on a documentary she made in 2001.)
"I’ve always wanted to be more empowered," Ms. Shelton said. "And searching for my name made me grow into my name. It introduced me to myself."
In addition to such feelings, there is also plenty of sibling, er, cyber, rivalry. People are increasingly aware of how to manage their identity online. As Jon Lee, a student and a Web developer who wants to be the first Jon Lee to turn up in a Google search, explained on his blog, "I have to top a recruitment firm, a washed-up pop star, a dead drummer and an I.B.M. guy."
Maureen Johnson, a writer of young adult fiction in New York, acknowledges on her Web site several Googlegängers, including a self-taught marine biologist known to some as "the Crab Lady of Cape Cod." But for a while Ms. Johnson was "very annoyed" that another Googlegänger, a real estate agent, owned the domain name MaureenJohnson. Now, however, she’s just exasperated by the stream of "Rentheads" who send e-mail messages asking if she has anything to do with Maureen Johnson, the provocative performance artist character in the musical "Rent." Children wonder if in fact she is the "Rent" character.
"This is the bane of my existence," said Ms. Johnson, the non-fiction version. " ’Are you a performance artist? Are you a bisexual performance artist? Are you a bisexual performance artist who lives on 11th Street?’ "
"On principle," she said of the Tony-award-winning show, "I won’t go and see it."
CHRIS MATTHEWS’ WORST INTERVIEW chris matthews on the daily show with jon stewart
April 13, 2008 MAGAZINE PREVIEW The Aria of Chris Matthews
By MARK LEIBOVICH This article will appear in this Sunday’s Times Magazine.
Whenever Chris Matthews says something he likes, which happens a lot, he repeats it often and at volumes suggesting a speaker who feels insufficiently listened to at times. "Tim Russert finally reeled the big marlin into the boat tonight," Matthews yelled — nine times, on and off the air, after a Democratic debate that Russert moderated with Brian Williams in late February at Cleveland State University. Matthews believed that Russert (the fisherman) had finally succeeded in getting Hillary Clinton (the marlin) to admit that she was wrong to vote in favor of the Iraq war resolution in 2002. "We’ve been trolling for that marlin for what, a year now?" Matthews said to Russert.
Comparing Hillary Rodham Clinton to a big flopping fish will do nothing to stop criticism — from Clinton’s presidential campaign, among others — that Matthews and his network, MSNBC, have treated the former first lady unfairly. But this didn’t keep Matthews from bludgeoning the marlin line to death in the postdebate "spin room." "Russert caught the marlin; he got the marlin," Matthews shouted to a school of downcast reporters who had been hanging on every canned word of Clinton’s chief campaign strategist, Mark Penn.
The spin room is a modern political-media marvel whose full-on uselessness is perfectly conveyed by its name, but Matthews appeared in his element. He wore a dreamy smile, walking around, signing autographs. As he went, Matthews seemed compelled to give his "take," which is how he describes his job each night at 5 and 7, Eastern time, on "Hardball" — "giving my take."
Someone from Matthews’s staff mentioned that the office of Senator Larry Craig, the Idaho Republican who got in trouble for his "wide stance" in an airport men’s room, had been looking for interns. "Ha!" Matthews exploded, a trademark outcry. "Guess what, Mom and Dad, I just got an internship with that senator from Idaho, you know the one.
"Ha!
"Did you get a load of Lou Rawls’s wife?" Matthews said as he left the spin room. Apparently the Rev. Jesse Jackson was introducing the widow of the R&B singer at the media center. "She was an absolute knockout," Matthews declared. It’s a common Matthews designation. The actress Kerry Washington was also a "total knockout," according to Matthews, who by 1 a.m. had repaired to the bar of the Cleveland Ritz-Carlton. He was sipping a Diet Coke and holding court for a cluster of network and political types, as well as for a procession of random glad-handers that included, wouldn’t you know it, Kerry Washington herself. Washington played Ray Charles’s wife in the movie "Ray" and Kay Amin in the "Last King of Scotland." She is a big Obama supporter and was in town for the debate; more to the point, she said she likes "Hardball." Matthews grabbed her hand, and Phil Griffin, the head of MSNBC who was seated across the table, vowed to get her on the show.
"I know why he wants you on," Matthews said to Washington while looking at Griffin. At which point Matthews did something he rarely does. He paused. He seemed actually to be considering what he was about to say. He might even have been editing himself, which is anything but a natural act for him. He was grimacing. I imagined a little superego hamster racing against a speeding treadmill inside Matthews’s skull, until the superego hamster was overrun and the pause ended.
"He wants you on because you’re beautiful," Matthews said. "And because you’re black." He handed Washington a business card and told her to call anytime "if you ever want to hang out with Chris Matthews."
Then, a young Irish-looking woman walked up shyly and asked if he was "Mr. Matthews." "Ah, an Irish girl has come to my aid," Matthews said, placing his hand gently on the woman’s shoulder. She was in law school and said her name was Margaret Sweeney. "I went out with a Sweeney once, a nurse," Matthews said, taking her hand. This Sweeney attends law school at Cleveland State, "where Russert went," Matthews told her, before starting again on the marlin thing.
The postdebate tableau at the Ritz was another media-political bazaar, minus the riffraff of the spin room. This is about as glitzy as you’ll get on a snowy night in Cleveland at 1 a.m. The Ohio congresswoman, Stephanie Tubbs Jones, came over from the next table to visit with Matthews, along with the former Ohio congressman, Dennis Eckart, and a guy who told Matthews he ran for attorney general in Ohio and a bunch of suited money people and the actor Timothy Hutton and some fancy Hollywood director. "This is all sort of like a big play world," Griffin, the MSNBC chief, said, surveying the room. "You have all these politicians and media people and Hollywood celebrities in here. It sort of embarrasses me. It feels a little incestuous."
(A disclaimer that advances this notion of incestuousness: I have been a guest on "Hardball" on occasion, but probably not more than a half-dozen times over the years. The New York Times also has a partnership with NBC in which the news organizations coordinate some aspects of their political coverage, posting politics-related stories and videos on each other’s Web sites. And Matthews and I have the same book agent, for what that’s worth.)
"People are a little impressed with themselves," Griffin went on to say, continuing his commentary about the scene. "It’s a bit of an echo chamber." Matthews is central to that echo chamber — at the Ritz, as in the 2008 presidential campaign. He is, in a sense, the carnival barker at the center of it, spewing tiny pellets of chewed nuts across the table while comparing Obama to Mozart and Clinton to Salieri. At one point, Matthews suddenly became hypnotized by a TV over the bar set to a rebroadcast of "Hardball." "Hey, there I am — it’s me," he said, staring at himself on the screen. "It’s me."
There is a level of ubiquity about Chris Matthews today that can be exhausting, occasionally edifying and, for better or worse, central to what has become a very loud national conversation about politics. His soothing-like-a-blender voice feels unnervingly constant in a presidential campaign that has drawn big interest, ratings and voter turnout. He gets in trouble sometimes and has to apologize — as he did after suggesting that Hillary Clinton owed her election to the Senate to the fact that her husband "messed around." He is also something of a YouTube sensation: see Chris getting challenged to a duel by the former Georgia governor, Zell Miller; describing the "thrill going up my leg" after an Obama speech; dancing with (and accidentally groping) Ellen DeGeneres on her show; shouting down the conservative commentator Michelle Malkin; ogling CNBC’s Erin Burnett. And he has provided a running bounty of material for Media Matters for America, a liberal media watchdog, which has devoted an entire section of its Web site ("The Matthews Monitor") to cataloging Matthews’s alleged offenses, especially against Hillary Clinton and women generally.
In addition to doing "Hardball," Matthews is the host of a Sunday morning show on NBC, "The Chris Matthews Show," has been a staple of the network’s coverage of presidential debates and has helped moderate two of them. He is also a frequent guest on NBC and MSNBC news shows and an ongoing spoof target on "Saturday Night Live." It can be difficult not to hear Darrell Hammond’s long-running impression of Matthews when Matthews himself is speaking. Matthews, for his part, says he loves the Hammond impression and sometimes catches himself "doing Hammond doing Matthews." If parody is an emblem of pop-culture status — signifying a measure of permanence — Matthews belongs on any Mount Rushmore of political screaming heads.
Matthews is as pure a political being as there is on TV. He is the whip-tongued, name-dropping, self-promoting wise guy you often find in campaigns, and in the bigger offices on Capitol Hill or K Street. ("Rain Man," NBC’s Brian Williams jokingly called Matthews, referring to his breadth of political knowledge.) He wrote speeches for Jimmy Carter, worked as a top advisor to Tip O’Neill, ran unsuccessfully for Congress himself in his native Philadelphia at 28. In an age of cynicism about politics, Matthews can be romantic about the craft, defensive about its practitioners and personally affronted when someone derides Washington or "the game." He can also be unsparing in his criticism of those who run afoul of his "take." "I am not a cheerleader for politics per se," Matthews says. "I am a cheerleader for the possibilities of politics."
This election season, MSNBC has placed great emphasis on politics, devoting 28 percent of its airtime to the subject last year (compared with 15 percent for Fox News and 12 percent for CNN, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism). The thrilling 2008 presidential campaign has been a boon, and in the first quarter MSNBC’s prime-time audience rose 63 percent over the previous year (compared with 12 percent for the Fox News Channel and 70 percent for CNN, though MSNBC still draws many fewer viewers overall). As Matthews is clearly a signature figure on the network, and one of the most recognizable political personalities on the air, this has been something of a heyday for him.
Yet for as basic as he has become to the political and media furniture, Matthews is anything but secure. He is of the moment, but, at 62, also something of a throwback — to an era of politics set in the ethnic Democratic wards of the ’60s and the O’Neill-Reagan battles of the ’80s. And he is a product of an aging era of cable news, the late-’90s, when "Hardball" started and Matthews made his name as a battering critic of Bill Clinton during the Monica saga.
Cable political coverage has changed, however, and so has the sensibility that viewers — particularly young ones — expect from it. Matthews’s bombast is radically at odds with the wry, antipolitical style fashioned by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert or the cutting and finely tuned cynicism of Matthews’s MSNBC co-worker Keith Olbermann. These hosts betray none of the reverence for politics or the rituals of Washington that Matthews does. On the contrary, they appeal to the eye-rolling tendencies of a cooler, highly educated urban cohort of the electorate that mostly dismisses an exuberant political animal like Matthews as annoyingly antiquated, like the ranting uncle at the Thanksgiving table whom the kids have learned to tune out.
Nothing illustrated Matthews’s discordance with the new cable ethos better than an eviscerating interview he suffered through last fall at the hands of Stewart himself. Matthews went on the "The Daily Show" to promote his book "Life’s a Campaign: What Politics Has Taught Me About Friendship, Rivalry, Reputation and Success." The book essentially advertises itself as a guidebook for readers wishing to apply the lessons of winning politicians to succeeding in life. "People don’t mind being used; they mind being discarded" is the title of one chapter. "A self-hurt book" and "a recipe for sadness" Stewart called it, and the interview was all squirms from there. "This strikes me as artifice," Stewart said. "If you live by this book, your life will be strategy, and if your life is strategy, you will be unhappy."
Matthews accused Stewart of "trashing my book."
"I’m not trashing your book," Stewart protested. "I’m trashing your philosophy of life."
Matthews told me that the interview was a painful experience. Not only did Stewart humiliate him, but the interview exposed an essential truth that people by and large don’t want to hear advice from politicians, a breed that, in many ways, has defined Matthews’s value system. "I think Stewart was right in that he caught the drift of antipolitics," Matthews said.
So has Olbermann, the host of MSNBC’s "Countdown." While Matthews is clearly a stalwart on the MSNBC menu, he is hardly a flavor of the month, or the year. Olbermann is. "Countdown," on at 8, is getting good ratings, usually second in its slot to "The O’Reilly Factor" on Fox News. Olbermann draws considerably more viewers than Matthews — about one million a night, compared with 660,000 for the 7 p.m. broadcast of "Hardball" (which typically runs third in its time slots after Fox News and CNN but is up in the ratings this year). There is a view within the TV industry that MSNBC is positioning itself as the younger, edgier, left-tilting cable network, and no one there embodies this ideal better than Olbermann. NBC executives have been promoting him heavily, and three network officials asked me why I was writing about Matthews and not Olbermann.
Part of this can be viewed purely through a bottom-line lens. Matthews’s contract expires next year, and NBC officials clearly would like to renew it for considerably less than the $5 million a year he is making now. Whether it’s a formal talking point or not, NBC officials seem bent on conveying the message that they could get the same ratings, or better ones, for considerably less money.
But the broader issue involves whether Matthews is a man trapped in a tired caricature. And it touches on the future of his archetype in general — in other words, whither the cable blowhard? The "What happens to Chris" question — a hot topic at NBC these days — infuses the Matthews story with a kind of "lion in winter" urgency, if not poignancy. It also goes to the core of how Matthews sees himself, how cable news is changing and how Americans perceive of and consume their politics.
The morning after the Cleveland debate, Matthews was walking through the airport to catch his flight home to Washington. People kept squinting at him, double-taking, stepping in and out of his monologue.
"I like the fact that people don’t think of me as famous, but that they know me," Matthews said. "They come up to me and say, ’Chris, what do you think?’ There’s no aura. It’s a different kind of celebrity. People assume they have a right to talk to me. They want to know my take."
A woman picked Matthews out of the security line and declared herself a fan. "Don’t tell me, you’re a liberal NPR-listener type," Matthews said, reducing said fan to a psychographic niche (though warmly).
She described herself as "just an old lady going to Florida."
"Who are you voting for?" Matthews asked.
"Hillary," she said, adding in a whisper, "but I don’t want her to win."
"Hey, what’s your name," another person in line asked him.
"I’m Chris Matthews."
"Oh, yes, we watch your show every night."
"Thanks," Matthews said, wondering aloud to me whether it would be possible for someone to watch his show every night and not know his name.
The security agent working the metal detector told Matthews that he had seen him at this airport before, and Matthews volunteered that he was in Cleveland a few years ago to speak at the Case Western Reserve University graduation. "But they didn’t give me an honorary degree," Matthews said. "Can you believe that? I spoke at the graduation and didn’t get an honorary degree?" He gets a lot of honorary degrees, by the way — 19 if you’re counting, and guess who is counting?
As we approached the airport gate, Matthews mentioned that he and his wife, Kathleen, have been contemplating a trip to Damascus. It’s something they have wanted to do for a long time. But he worries that he might make an inviting target for a kidnapper. "I can imagine getting some big-name media figure would be a big propaganda catch for them," Matthews said. "You can imagine what the neocons would say if I were kidnapped. They’d be like, ’See, Matthews, terrorism isn’t so funny now, is it?’ "
There is a level of solipsism about Matthews that is oddly endearing in its self-conscious extreme, even by the standards of television vanity.
"Did you see me on the ’Today’ show?" Matthews asked when I called him one afternoon in early March. "I quoted F. Scott Fitzgerald. I think I’m the only guy around who quotes F. Scott Fitzgerald on the ’Today’ show."
A few days later, Matthews greeted me with a report that he was up at 6 a.m. that day did "Today"; did "Morning Joe," MSNBC’S morning political program; taped the Sunday "Chris Matthews Show"; then talked to a bunch of people in Pennsylvania, his home state, about the primary. He’s big into the Pennsylvania primary, talks a lot to "Eddie Rendell" and urged me repeatedly to call the Pennsylvania governor’s office and "talk to Eddie Rendell about me."
"By the way, have you figured me out yet?" Matthews said at the end of another phone conversation the following day. "You gotta understand, it’s all complicated. It’s not like Tim."
Tim — as in Russert, the inquisitive jackhammer host of "Meet the Press" — is a particular obsession of Matthews’s. Matthews craves Russert’s approval like that of an older brother. He is often solicitous. On the morning of the Cleveland debate, Matthews was standing in the lobby of the Ritz when Russert walked through, straight from a workout, wearing a sweat-drenched Buffalo Bills sweatshirt, long shorts and black rubber-soled shoes with tube socks. "Here he is; here he is, the man," Matthews said to Russert, who smiled and chatted for a few minutes before returning to his room. (An MSNBC spokesman, Jeremy Gaines, tried, after the fact, to declare Russert’s outfit "off the record.")
Matthews has berated Russert to several people at NBC and has told friends and associates that Russert is like John F. Kennedy while he is more like Richard Nixon. Kennedy was the golden boy while Nixon was the scrapper for whom nothing came easily. It’s an imperfect comparison, certainly (Matthews is Irish Catholic, for starters, and Russert is not charismatic by any classic Kennedyesque definition), but it does offer a glimpse into how Matthews perceives himself, especially in relation to Russert. It’s also worth noting that Nixon was obsessed with Kennedy, and Kennedy could be dismissive and disparaging of Nixon.
A number of people I spoke with at NBC said that Russert can be disdainful of Matthews, whose act he often sees as clownish. They also told me that Russert believes Matthews is something of a loose cannon who brings him undue headaches in his capacity as NBC’s Washington bureau chief. This friction was immortalized in notes revealed during the trial of Scooter Libby. Mary Matalin, an adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, was quoted as having suggested that Libby call Russert to complain about Matthews’s rants against the White House’s Iraq policy. "Call Tim — he hates Chris," Matalin supposedly told Libby. Russert denies that he felt this way then or now. "I’ve always had a very good relationship with Chris," he told me. "We do different things." Matalin, for her part, insists that she doesn’t remember ever saying that Russert "hates Chris."
Regardless, Matthews has an attuned sense of pecking order — at MSNBC, at NBC, in Washington and in life. This is no great rarity among the fragile egos of TV or, for that matter, in the status-fixated world of politics. But Matthews is especially frontal about it. In an interview with Playboy a few years ago, he volunteered that he had made the list of the Top 50 journalists in D.C. in The Washingtonian magazine. "I’m like 36th, and Tim Russert is No. 1," Matthews told Playboy. "I would argue for a higher position for myself."
He wanted to feel part of the "first team," he added. "You can be on the second team at 25 or 36. But at some point you say: No, this is my opportunity, my life. I want to be on the first team."
Matthews, the second-oldest of five boys, often talks about birth order and sibling rivalry. One day when I was with him, Matthews kept calling his son Thomas for his 22nd birthday. "You always have to pay special attention to the middle one," Matthews said. "They need to know you’re thinking of them."
Matthews and his brothers deploy the standard line about how their crowded family dinner table made for nightly battles over food and the right to be heard. It is also clear that MSNBC’s political dinner table is getting crowded. NBC views MSNBC as a major source of potential growth and is encouraging its big name talents — Russert, Brian Williams and, from time to time, Tom Brokaw — to appear as guests on the cable channel. It makes for crammed sets, limited airtime and a lot of personalities to keep happy on important campaign nights.
Friends say Matthews is wary of another up-and-comer, David Gregory, who last month was given a show at 6 o’clock, between airings of "Hardball." It is a common view around NBC that Gregory is trying out as a possible replacement for Matthews. Before the flight from Cleveland to Washington took off, an NBC staff member noted that Matthews, Russert and Andrea Mitchell were all on board, and if the plane were to crash, it would devastate the network’s talent pool. Matthews quipped that Gregory was outside the plane arranging for just that. ("I hadn’t heard that," Gregory told me. "I’m quite sure he was joking.")
Matthews is also aware that little brother Keith Olbermann has become the signature talent of MSNBC. Matthews seems less than thrilled with "co-anchoring" MSNBC’s election coverage with him, as he has done on many nights during this campaign. When Olbermann is on the same set, Matthews appears different — restrained, even shrinking at times. According to people at NBC, Matthews has not been shy in voicing his resentment of Olbermann. Nor, according to network sources, has Olbermann bothered to hide his low regard for Matthews, although when I spoke to him, Olbermann denied any personal animosity toward Matthews and told me that he appreciates his "John Madden-like enthusiasm for politics."
But Olbermann does acknowledge that their on-air marriage has been rocky. Stylistically, Olbermann is scripted and disciplined while Matthews is free-form. While Olbermann is a natural anchor, Matthews struggles with its basic mechanics — staying on time, not talking into breaks. "There is a sense at times that we are always joining Chris Matthews already in progress," Olbermann told me. Matthews has been on 10 years, he went on to say, "and he has no idea when it stops and starts. My responsibility sometimes is to grab the wheel when he doesn’t hold it." Matthews has also called their joint appearances "Hardball," which annoys Olbermann and which he has not been shy about correcting on the air. "No, this is not ’Hardball,’ I will say, and in those instances, a correction is appropriate."
Sometimes during commercial breaks, Matthews will boast to Olbermann of having restrained himself during the prior segment. "And I reward him with a grape," Olbermann says.
Chris Matthews loved politics from a young age — starting at around 5, his brothers say. He spent a lot of time with his grandfather Charles Patrick Shields, a Democratic committeeman from the working class North Philadelphia neighborhood of Nicetown. Shields’s "office" was a neighborhood newsstand. "He was a good man of the parish," Chris’s younger brother Jim told me. Chris revered him. "I think Tip O’Neill reminded Chris a little of Grandpa," Jim added, meaning they both fit the urban-ethnic prototype of the backslapping operator from the neighborhood.
Matthews’s father, Herb, was a court reporter and worked all the time. Chris spent his early childhood in a row house, before the family moved to Somerton, a leafy neighborhood at Philadelphia’s northeast tip. The boys went to Catholic schools and took family trips to a summer house on the Jersey shore. The family generally voted Republican. Chris loved John F. Kennedy in 1960, but wound up falling harder for Nixon by the end and cried when he lost. "We weren’t a huggy family — we had our fracases — but we basically got along," Jim Matthews, now the Republican chairman of the board of commissioners in Montgomery County, Pa., told me.
Matthews attended Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. He studied hard and engaged in long, loud political debates in the cafeteria. His political allegiance evolved from Barry Goldwater to Eugene McCarthy ("just like Hillary," he says). He also nurtured a passionate affair with television. He loved Johnny Carson, particularly his persona as a wide-eyed Nebraskan, awed that movie stars were actually talking to him. "Carson was great company," Matthews says. "He was big company. Best company in the world." He identifies with this. "Now, I am people’s company," he told me. "Do you know that women come up to me all the time and say, ’My husband watched you until the end, until he died’?" (Also, Matthews added, Carson "had babes on the show.")
After graduating from college in 1967, Matthews went on to the University of North Carolina to pursue a doctorate in economics, but he left in 1968 to join the Peace Corps. The following year, he was posted in Swaziland, in southeast Africa, where he taught business skills to villagers and rode around on a little Suzuki motorcycle. "He often wore a necktie," recalls Fred O’Regan, a fellow volunteer.
"I remember we were out hitchhiking once," O’Regan told me. Matthews started arguing about Nixon and Vietnam. "It was just like watching his show today. Chris would ask a question, then he would answer it himself and then the person was invited to comment on Chris’s answer to his own question."
Matthews returned after two years and in 1974 ran for Congress in northeast Philadelphia. He lost in the Democratic primary, but it started what became an exhaustive job search that landed him on Capitol Hill and then in the White House as a speech writer for President Carter. He parlayed the White House job into a series of positions on Capitol Hill that would culminate at the side of Speaker Tip O’Neill during the 1980s. Matthews was essentially his media and message guru, such as they were in those days. He would help the lumbering, untelegenic speaker do battle with Ronald Reagan. "Chris was an important bridge for my father between the old and the new media world," said Rosemary O’Neill, the daughter of the late speaker. "You always knew Chris was there. He was a big personality, even then. He was never hiding behind the ficus trees."
Matthews’s 1988 book, "Hardball," distilled lessons from his life in politics and became a best seller. It also could be read as a how-to guide to social and career climbing in Washington. "It’s not who you know; it’s who you get to know" is the title of the first chapter and has been something of a mantra for Matthews throughout his ascent.
After O’Neill retired in 1987, Matthews was offered a columnist’s job at The San Francisco Examiner. He earned $200 a week for his twice-weekly column and envisioned himself a big-city scribe like Jimmy Breslin, who could walk into a bar and have people give him grief about his column. But San Francisco wasn’t one of those newspaper cities. "It looks like an Eastern city," he says. "But it’s pretty hard for people to read newspapers when they’re riding a bike."
Still, the column — at The Examiner and then at The San Francisco Chronicle — gave him an affiliation that helped get him on TV. He appeared on "CBS This Morning" and "Good Morning America" and begged himself onto the political shout fests like "The McLaughlin Group." Fox News’s Roger Ailes gave Matthews his first show, "In-Depth," on an obscure network called America’s Talking. "Hardball" had its debut in 1997, on CNBC, and was catapulted by the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. Matthews built an instant following, and loathing. In his book about the media’s conduct during the Monica saga, Bill Kovach, the founding chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, anointed Matthews as part of a "new class of chatterers who emerged in this scandal . . . a group of loosely credentialed, self-interested performers whose primary job is remaining on TV."
Matthews is clearly an acquired taste, and some of his most devoted followers are Washington media figures and politicians. "The things people complain about I actually like," says Roger Simon, the chief political columnist for the Politico news Web site and an occasional guest on "Hardball." "His interruptions are invariably a reaction to something you just said, which indicates that he is, in fact, listening." Simon calls Matthews "a major political force" whose shows are closely monitored by campaigns and journalists. "I know when I go on the show, I get comments, I get e-mails," Simon told me. "He drives conversations."
If Matthews has an overriding professional insecurity, it is being confined to the pigeonhole of cable blowhard. The insecurity is well founded, since this is how many people view him. "The shorthand for Chris in the gossip columns is always ’blabbermouth’ or ’cable yakker’ or something," said Nancy Nathan, the executive producer of "The Chris Matthews Show." "It’s not fair or accurate. But it’s obviously out there."
Matthews takes great pride in "The Chris Matthews Show," as if its select Sunday morning time slot, just before "Meet the Press," confers him a spot on the coveted first team. "We envision viewers watching up on the West Side of New York," Nathan told me. "They’ve been to Zabar’s. They have their bagel, juice, coffee. These are smart people who want smart analysis. We like to think we’re a complement to ’Meet the Press.’ "
When I asked Matthews about the bloviator stigma, he dismissed it as jealousy or at the very least ignorance among those who don’t know him or who don’t regularly watch his Sunday show or who have not read his books or who are not aware that he is a student of history and film or that he is on the board of trustees of the Churchill Center or that he has received — did he mention? — 19 honorary degrees. (Breaking honorary-degree news: Matthews told me in late March that he expects to be up to at least 22 later this spring.)
He also mentioned — more than once — that he has heard that the historian David McCullough watches "Hardball" every night and that "Arthur Schlesinger watched ’Hardball’ " and that sometimes "Joan Didion watched ’Hardball’ with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, before he died."
Matthews envisions his role in this presidential campaign to that of Eric Sevareid and Walter Cronkite in 1968. "Your job is to illuminate, illuminate the game," Matthews says. He faces a nightly challenge to "bring to life" the unfurling of history. Matthews says he wants to be synonymous with this campaign, like Howard Cosell was with Muhammad Ali.
"Imagine bullfighting without Hemingway," he says. "I can’t."
Is Matthews comparing himself to Hemingway?
"No way," he says. "Don’t you, don’t you [expletive] do that."
Matthews fashions himself a blend of big-think historian and little-guy populist. Steve Capus, the president of NBC News, who is also from Philadelphia, says that Matthews has internalized the "inferiority complex" of his native city. Matthews says that although he’s now 6-foot-3, he was little as a child and has always viewed himself as "a short guy."
"I don’t think people look at me as the establishment, do you?" Matthews asked me. "Am I part of the winner’s circle in American life? I don’t think so."
But he attends many of the same events they do. He is diligent about showing up at the city’s tribal rites — hotel dinners, book parties, tributes. He is dutiful about traveling to family weddings, funerals, graduations and first communions. "I place a high premium on showing up," Matthews says. "It’s the Woody Allen thing. And one of the things Tip said about certain people — and he meant this as a put-down — was, ’You never see him around anymore.’ "
It’s important to be around. When our plane from Cleveland landed in Washington, Matthews learned that William F. Buckley Jr. had just died. Matthews appeared stricken, though he barely knew Buckley. He said he would attend the funeral.
Washington has no dearth of events honoring Matthews himself. Serial bashes seem to follow every Matthews milestone. Within a few weeks last fall, Matthews was feted at the Georgetown home of the socialite and Democratic fund-raiser Elizabeth Bagley to mark the publication of "Life’s a Campaign." He was toasted at a bigger 10th anniversary party for "Hardball," which doubled as a book party for "Life’s a Campaign," at Decatur House in Washington.
"I don’t go where the politicians go," Matthews told me, though he is grateful when they show up, and he keeps track ("Teddy was at the Decatur House," he said, meaning Kennedy). As I began researching this article, Jeremy Gaines, an MSNBC spokesman, gave me the names of about a dozen people that Matthews recommended I speak to, all famous — everyone from Nancy Pelosi to Marvin Hamlisch. But gatekeepers for more than one of these people expressed confusion as to why Matthews would refer me to them. "Please keep us out of this," pleaded a spokesperson for one prominent politician whom Matthews had recommended via Gaines.
For someone so steeped in the ego-manglings of politics and television, Matthews can be spectacularly thin-skinned. He sulks at mild put-downs and lashes out at critics (though rarely holds grudges). At one point, I teased him gently about his tendency to repeat things — it was the item about how Arthur Schlesinger, Joan Didion and David McCullough all watched "Hardball." It seemed to deflate him. He sunk in his chair. "It’s tough, it’s a rough cut," Matthews said of criticism. "I’m not completely Nietzchean about this. That what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger? I’ve always wondered about that. I’m not sure that’s true at all."
When I asked his wife, Kathleen, how he takes criticism, she told me: "He hears it; he absorbs it. Then he comes home and wrestles with it."
The 2008 campaign has provided Matthews with much to wrestle with. He has been attacked, repeatedly, for his perceived pro-Obama/anti-Clinton perspective — a bias he disputes. He notes that he and the former first lady like to "kid around" when they see each other and that he did a memorably tough interview with an Obama surrogate, State Senator Kirk Watson of Texas, who failed — despite Matthews’s grilling — to identify a single legislative accomplishment by Obama. "That was an iconic moment," Matthews said of the Watson interview.
Still, it’s hard to watch Matthews and conclude that he has been anything less than enthralled by Obama and, at the very least, is sick of Clinton. The antipathy dates back some time. Just before the start of Clinton’s first campaign for the Senate in 2000, Matthews said: "Hillary Clinton bugs a lot of guys, I mean, really bugs people — like maybe me on occasion. . . . She drives some of us absolutely nuts." During this campaign he has repeatedly referred to her sense of entitlement and arrogance. Meanwhile, David Shuster, a correspondent for MSNBC who appears frequently on "Hardball," was suspended for two weeks earlier this year for asking whether the Clinton campaign had "pimped out" Chelsea Clinton by enlisting her to court celebrities and superdelegates.
By contrast, Matthews has called Obama "bigger than Kennedy" and compared the success of his campaign to "the New Testament." His reviews of Obama’s speeches have been comically effusive at times, as when he described "this thrill going up my leg" after an Obama victory speech. ("Steady," Olbermann cautioned him on the air.)
"I love Chris, but he definitely drank the Obama Kool-Aid," Ed Rendell, the Pennsylvania governor and a Clinton supporter, told me.
In a recent interview on "Morning Joe" with Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, who had just endorsed Obama, Matthews described the "stunning picture" of a Latino governor (Richardson) standing with an African-American candidate and how inspiring it was for so many voters. "That is where we should be putting our focus, not on the feelings of the Clintons, about what people owe them and their sense of entitlement," Matthews said.
Richardson tried to say something, but Matthews just kept going. "We’ve got to stop talking about this as if this were a sitcom," Matthews continued. "We had eight years of the sitcom. . . . It’s a sitcom, and it’s gotta end." He lamented that 4,000 people are dead in Iraq "because of decisions made by politicians like the Clintons."
Mika Brzezinski, a co-host of "Morning Joe," then asked Matthews whether he was endorsing Obama.
"Why would you say that?" Matthews said, looking dumbfounded.
It can be amusing if slightly painful to watch Matthews’s facial expressions and body language on the set of "Hardball" when others are talking; he will, at times, bounce in his seat like a Ritalin-deprived second-grader who is dying to give an answer but has been admonished too many times for interrupting. He appears to go through the same pained exercise in his own home. Indeed, as I learned at Sunday brunch there, the degree to which the cadences of the Matthews dining room mimic "Hardball" is striking.
Kathleen Matthews had invited me over. "The queen would love to receive you," Chris said on the phone by way of extending the invitation. Matthews’s effusiveness toward women certainly extends to his wife of nearly 28 years, a longtime local news anchor in Washington who now works in communications and public affairs for Marriott International. "Everyone who meets Kathy thinks she’s a monumental figure," Matthews promised.
The Matthewses have three children — two sons and a daughter — and Chris is quick to boast about all of them, often in terms that convey an acute case of status consciousness. "Caroline is at Penn, Thomas is an actor at N.Y.U. and Michael went to Brown," Matthews told me on multiple occasions. Kathleen "graduated from Stanford," he mentioned one day, adding that "she had a 3.7 there." That was 33 years ago.
Chris gave directions to his white-frame Victorian house in Chevy Chase, Md., built in 1885. "Right across from Tommy Boggs’s house," he said, referring to the Washington lobbyist, son of the former House majority leader. The Matthews house is sun-lit, art-filled and cozy, with three Mercedes of various sizes and degrees of wear in the driveway. I arrived at 11 a.m., just as Matthews was leaving.
"I promised a bunch of Koreans I’d get my picture taken with them, so that’s where I’m going," he explained. "I’ll be right back."
The morning had been a small fiasco at the Matthews home. Chris and Kathleen had overslept, and instead of waking at 10 a.m., as they typically do on Sundays — in time for "The Chris Matthews Show" — they woke at 10:30 (and Russert!), and then Chris had to run off to this photo thing he had forgotten about.
So Kathleen made lattes in the kitchen while Caroline — home on a break from Penn — sat at an island-table spread with Sunday newspapers. She is finishing her freshman year and active in the Obama campaign. Kathleen, meanwhile, contributed $2,200 to the Clinton campaign.
Chris returned after 20 minutes, and Kathleen served seafood pasta in the dining room. When he realized the pasta was whole wheat, Chris helped himself to seconds.
After we finished eating, I placed a tape recorder on the table, which would later yield many sequences of indecipherable cross talk, along with long, loud monologues from guess who. "We all talk about the Clintons," Matthews said at the conclusion of a diatribe about the national obsession with Bill and Hillary. "I have never been at a party where it doesn’t become a topic. Who are we gonna talk about? Bob Dole? John Kerry? Al Gore?"
Kathleen added, "Also, we’ve had so much time with them. We’ve watched them in this fishbowl."
Chris: "I find it very hard to do."
Kathleen: "With the Obamas, we can’t even speculate."
Chris: "I watched the D.L.C. convention in 1991."
Kathleen: "And even McCain."
Chris: "I sort of get him. We went out with the McCains for dinner one night."
Kathleen: "Chi-chi Vietnamese."
Chris: "Here’s the thing about the Clintons."
The conversation moved to what Matthews calls "the sexist thing," or what Media Matters calls Matthews’s "history of degrading comments about women, in which he focuses on the physical appearances of his female guests and of other women discussed on his program." This would include Matthews loudly admiring the conservative radio host Laura Ingraham ("You’re great looking, obviously — one of God’s gifts to men in this country"), Elizabeth Edwards ("You’ve got a great face"), Jane Fonda ("You also dazzle us with your beauty and all the good things"), CNBC’s Margaret Brennan ("You’re gorgeous") and Erin Burnett ("You’re beautiful. . . . You’re a knockout"), among others. The Burnett episode was especially remarked upon. In the video Matthews instructed Burnett to "get a little closer to the camera." As Burnett became confused, Matthews persisted: "Come on in closer. No, come in — come in further — come in closer. Really close." It was, at the minimum, uncomfortable to watch.
Matthews says the notion that he is sexist has been pushed unfairly by blogs, women’s groups and, to some degree, the Clinton campaign. His remark that Clinton benefitted because her husband "messed around" triggered much outrage from the Clinton team. Matthews eventually apologized in a rambling on-air explanation, but he hardly sounds contrite now. "I was tonally inaccurate but factually true," he told me. I had asked him earlier if he was forced into the apology. "Oh, yeah, of course I was forced into that," he said, laughing. "No, no, no . . . Phil [Griffin] asked me to do that."
Matthews vigorously denies the broader charge that he demeans women on the air. "I don’t think there’s any evidence of that at all," he said at brunch. "I’ve gone back and looked. Give me the evidence. No one can give it to me. I went through all my stuff. I can’t find it." I mentioned Erin Burnett, and the name landed like a brick on the dining-room table.
"Ask Kathy, she might have a view," Matthews said.
Kathy began to give her view, but Chris interrupted. "She was doing peek-a-boo style," he said of Burnett. "She was doing in and out of the camera, and I said, ’Can you get any closer to the camera?’ And she said, ’What are you kidding about — is there something wrong with the way I look?’ And I said, ’No, you’re a knockout.’ "
Anyway, as Kathleen was saying: "I think it’s pure Chris appreciating a good-looking woman. And from her standpoint it was embarrassing because she wasn’t sure what to do with it."
Her husband jumped in and added that before the Burnett interview, he had "made a decision to do a whimsical Friday-night show."
"I guess the bottom line is, What does it show?" Kathleen said. "Is it disrespect for women? Objectifying women?"
"It’s a show," Chris replied.
"Or does it show appreciation for a pretty woman?" Kathleen said. "I think that’s the question." It was unclear exactly where Kathleen stood on this question. "I think his greatest worry," Kathleen said, "is that I might watch it on TV and scream at him." It wasn’t clear in this case whether she did or not.
"It’s a show," Chris said again, interrupting. "It’s a show. That’s my basic response."
He bemoaned political correctness. "We’ll, we’re just going to have to survive this era," Matthews said, sighing.
He looked down at the tape recorder. "We’re taping all this, aren’t we? I’m giving you a lot of stuff here."
It had now been more than three hours at the Matthews home without a commercial. Chris drove me to a subway stop. "Don’t talk to anyone who hasn’t known me 30 years," he instructed, not for the first time. That, he said, will show readers that Chris Matthews hasn’t changed, that he has always been the way he is. The implication, also, is that it would be hard to change him now.
I visited Matthews at NBC’s Washington bureau on the night of the Mississippi primary. He would be broadcasting a special edition of "Hardball" after the returns came in. Since Mississippi was a smaller primary, none of the NBC first-team would be cluttering the set, and it would be Matthews’s show, with help from his regulars — Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post, Chuck Todd of NBC and Howard Fineman of Newsweek.
Matthews was scheduled to do a taped interview with Obama. When I arrived, he was sitting in his office with a bunch of "Hardball" staff members arrayed around his desk. Matthews can be temperamental and sometimes explosive, but his employees evince ease in his presence. They were thinking of questions for Matthews to ask Obama. Prof. Orlando Patterson of Harvard had written a column in that day’s New York Times suggesting that Hillary Clinton’s 3 a.m. phone-call ad was not meant to evoke fear of terrorism but rather crime. "Is this an ad about 9/11 or an ad about 911?" Matthews said. "Ha!" He loved this line. We would hear it again.
"Hey, you haven’t looked around in here, have you?" he asked, gesturing toward me. He was already up and leading a quickie tour. "Did you know that Holy Cross gave me a chair?" Matthews said. "I was excited. I thought it was going to be something like, the Distinguished Chris Matthews Chair of So and So at Holy Cross." But no, he said. He received an actual chair from the college, emblazoned with the school logo. The chair is now in the middle of the office. And, for what it’s worth, it’s lovely, made of solid wood. "But I was disappointed, I have to admit," Matthews said.
He taped the Obama interview, which went smoothly if uneventfully. "Hardball" began. During a cut-in, Dan Abrams, the host of the previous hour, mentioned that the Clinton campaign was going after delegates who were already committed to Obama. Matthews pounced: "They do that for the reason North Koreans dig tunnels underneath the D.M.Z. at the 30th parallel. They get people jittery on the other side. That’s why they do it. They can’t get through those tunnels. They can have the tunnels to scare people, but they ain’t going through the tunnels."
It was vintage Matthews, as was the scene while his interview with Obama played, without volume, on a monitor. Staring at the screen, Matthews squinted, cocked his head and leaned forward. "Have you noticed," he said to no one in particular, "that my head looks about four times as big as Obama’s?"
Later, I talked to Matthews about his TV franchise. He’s clearly proud of it, but he also seems restless. Friends who have known him a long time say he worries that "the suits" at NBC want him out. He has been openly contemplating "the second act" in a career that has already featured several.
"I have a lot of options," Matthews told me. "I’m a free man starting next June." There has been long-running speculation that Matthews could be a candidate to replace Bob Schieffer, whenever he retires, as the host of CBS’s Sunday morning show "Face the Nation."
The more intriguing notion is that Matthews could challenge Senator Arlen Specter, who is up for re-election in Pennsylvania in 2010. This has been rumored before, but Matthews has been particularly obsessed with Pennsylvania of late, devoting hours on and off the air to the state’s upcoming Democratic primary, staying in close contact with the state’s party apparatus. "I talked to Eddie Rendell today," Matthew told me on the phone a few weeks ago, urging me again to call the Pennsylvania governor.
My phone call with Matthews also yielded the following: His recent appearance on "Ellen" is getting "all kinds of pick-up." He had dinner the previous night with Nancy Reagan in Beverly Hills. The film rights for his book on Kennedy and Nixon were optioned. He is speaking at Harvard in May.
I asked him about the Senate rumors. He thinks Specter has hung on way too long, he said, but running would require Matthews to give up a career he loves. Still, "I get a great feeling when I go home," he told me. "Is Thomas Wolfe right? Can you go home again?
"Really, you should talk to Eddie Rendell."
TALES OF THE TAPE Links to videos of some of Chris Matthews’s most-talked-about on-air moments. nytimes.com/magazine
Mark Leibovich is a reporter in the Washington bureau of The Times. He last wrote for the magazine about Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
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