beguine: pointe shoes & politics

because obama won, and then i bought pointe shoes, and these days i'm more politically informed than i've ever been in my life -- which is not saying much, but i'm trying -- i decided it was time to end the 5+ year ban i've had on blogging, and start my own repository of half-baked ideas to commemorate all these beginnings: the post-Bush era, my first steps en pointe, the very beginning of knowing how the world works.

it's part narcissism, but part optimism. some genuine things happened this past tuesday, amid all the political theater and performance: a whole lot of people turned away from one model of governance and towards another; a whole lot of people defied the story we'd been told about americans -- that we're anti-intellectual, racist, and fundamentally motivated by fear. while fears for our failing economy (and the end of capitalism) probably account for obama's wide margin of victory, each vote cast for obama was a rejection of the vulgar rhetoric of fear that characterized the mccain campaign's efforts to distract us from the coherence and pragmatism of obama's platform and principles. there's still a frightening and embarrassingly large community of american idiots who think obama is a muslim sociaist terrorist, and i hope that the turn this country takes towards behaving more honorably because of an obama presidency ends up being the biggest, bitter-est pill those bigoted foolios ever have to swallow.

which is not to say that we're on the road to becoming an ethical, social democracy. we're a corporatist superpower through and through, and the best we can hope for is some damage control in the short-term, and in the long-term, to model some better behavior for the large, geopolitical entities that've been making their ascendence in the world even as we've been in decline.

but i can't really say anything incredibly new, incisive or informed about the state of the world; Naomi Klein does it better, and reading The Shock Doctrine has inspired a paradigm shift in my thinking and being in the world.

ballet was the other inspiration for this paradigm shift. more on this, later.

Sources
text: Big Questions #11: Sweetness and Light, Anders Nilsen
music: "This is How We Walk on the Moon," Arthur Russell
film: The Times of Harvey Milk
food: Dagoba organic chocolate, "chai"