Feb 16, 2011 0
Greg Garcia’s first foray into poor, white American life, NBC’s My Name Is Earl, never quite broke free of the stereotypes it mocked, maybe because Earl’s mystical list said little about the human potential of those around him. Fox’s Raising Hope, Garcia’s second go, corrects Earl’s missteps by incarnating magic in the form of a baby, the universal lovable object. This baby is foisted on her 23-year-old father, Jimmy, when her mother is executed.
Jan 31, 2011 3
Pierce Hawthorne’s nominal allusion to the writer Nathaniel seems calculated as an ironic comment on his own rank immorality in the form of an anti-minority bias worn with shimmering scarlet pride. But Pierce’s racism is one unsavory aspect of his hopeful way of being human: inveterately deploying an insult and awaiting the closeness it will inevitably bring him with the insulted. Pierce’s racism is a racism of love.
Nov 11, 2008 0
Obama’s retrospectively vindicated opposition to dumb war in the face of supposedly airtight evidence for launching it has proven a victory not just for Obama, but for the legitimacy of ambiguity itself as a space for positive thinking in the making of serious decisions by individuals and societies. With the discrediting of certitude undergirded by the hyperspecific comes the complementary embrace of an ineluctably abstract, indefinable hope—a hope we have espoused, often reluctantly, because the sober and steady hand of the man who has become its global symbol checks its pesky quixotism.
