No You Can’t

Come on, you’ve invested so much in Zeba’s success already, you know you just have to see her win now. Hello Friends and Colleagues, I am thrilled to inform you that thanks to your support, I am a semifinalist in the Washington Post’s “America’s Next Great Pundit” competition. It’s a long way from being one of the initial ten contestants selected out of nearly 5000 entries to being in the Top Three and I could not have done it without your support. Now it’s crunch time. The two people with the highest number of online votes between Thursday, Nov 19th…

I love how he describes his job. It’s what reporters should be doing and so rarely do. Anderson Cooper confronts anti-Muslim candidate – War Room – Salon.com. During an exchange about whether Park51 is a “victory mosque,” a frustrated Cooper exclaims: “That’s like the lowest response I have ever heard from a candidate, I have got to tell you.”

This New York Time’s commentary ties Edward Said’s classic opus, Orientalism, to the game Prince of Persia. Then it stops. Good idea. Lousy implementation. “C” at best.   We do not see the rest of the world except as a mythologized “us.” To see the world as being composed of difference, means we have to acknowledge difference at home, and perhaps internalize the challenge to our uniqueness. It is far easier to control and encourage emulation of “us,” than to deal with difference. Orientalism, Prince of Persia