Archive for November 2008
Matapobre
My good friend Lille Bose posted a note on Facebook today. In it, she spoke of how her grandmother, presumably now a retiree living somewhere in Wisconsin, sneered at Barack Obama’s acceptance speech – because, or so the story goes, Barack Obama is a black man and people like her have a general distrust for people of color.
I had an interesting conversation with the “older” people who live next door – my mother and her current best friend, an aunt of hers who spends a few nights now and then coming over for a nice visit. This aunt is a widow who met her late husband (a German national) while working for the United Nations. Like most of my relatives who are now or at one point in their lives based in the United States, she is a fanatical supporter of the Republican Party. She does not fail to send to my mother, my sister, and anyone else in her Yahoo! contact list the latest dirt she finds on Democrats and their candidates, Obama not excluded. She is not alone in this endeavor. Most of my relatives there are similarly engaged in the McCain campaign.
Fortunately, my mother, being sensitive to my libertarian tendencies, has decided to bear the brunt of these information campaigns, which does not mean to say that she does not believe in them – the opposite cannot be closer to the truth – but she hesitates forwarding these messages to me knowing I do not hesitate to classify them as spam. Read the rest of this entry »
