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Now, apparently, organized Labor is outside the realm of what is allowable on mainstream political shows. Even when the subject at hand is organized Labor.
Everyone knows who "Big Brother" is, of course, because we all had to read George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four at some point in our schooling. Big Brother is the fictional benevolent figurehead in Orwell's "negative Utopia" masterpiece, whose beaming visage is a front for a totalitarian police state which spies relentlessly upon its own citizenry. Television sets, in this future world, are both unavoidable and two-way -- broadcasting images of what you are doing in your own home to the government watchers. To some extent, Orwell's dark fantasy has become everyday life in some places (it's almost impossible to avoid being publicly filmed now in cities like London, for instance). But there's been a balancing revolution in surveillance as well -- which is more and more apparent in the recent news. I'm going to call this effect "Little Brother" -- citizens watching, filming, and reporting on governmental activities to a rapt worldwide audience. And we've already seen how powerful a tool this can be in the Middle East.
The revolutionary tidal wave (or, if you prefer, the "Tunisami") sweeping the Middle East and North Africa spreads ever wider, as in country after country young protesters take to the streets in an attempt to change their countries' governments. But don't expect an outcome equal to the (mostly) peaceful overthrows in Tunis and Egypt in every single country now affected by this "people power" movement. There are major differences from country to country, both in terms of the form of government (and the military), and in terms of the likelihood of a victorious outcome for the protesters.
The stunning news today of Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak stepping down has all but eclipsed the other political news of the week. Who would have thought, a month ago, that a government that had oppressed its own people for over three decades would fall simply because a bunch of people marched in the streets and refused to give up?
This doesn't mean blind obedience or unquestioned following of any leader. But it does mean "don't bump his elbow" deference to our elected leader when the country needs to speak with one voice.
Egypt, it seems, is failing to follow a convenient storyline for the American journalists to follow.
One wonders, in the future, what is going to happen when all the familiar colors have been used up by other countries. Will they begin a two-tone scheme (the Blue-Yellow Revolution), or go with ever-increasingly obscure colors (the Teal Revolution, the Fuchsia Revolution, the Ecru Revolution)?
But for now, let's take a quick look back at the week that was, and then spend the rest of the column examining the "narrative" of Obama's speech.
OK, it's going to a be a quick and disjointed column today, because I have to get tomorrow's Friday column done early tonight. So we return to the "three-dot column" format pioneered by the intrepid Herb Caen of San Francisco newspaper fame (who also famously coined the term "beatnik," by the way...). Today, we've got two Sputnik footnotes, a Sarah Palin chuckle, and a quick note on Obama's "ask the president a question on YouTube" session. Without further ado...
The day after President Obama's big yearly speech to Congress and the American people, most pundits and talking-head types in the media are vying to outdo each other on stating "what it all means" or similar high-flown overanalysis. What many of them seem to have missed, however, is the fact that Obama used his speech to introduce a few topics into the political debate. Some of these topics have been around for a while, championed by various people and groups, but what seems newsworthy to me is the fact that Obama included them in his list of proposals for the future.