The myth that America has somehow become post-racial with the election of Barack Obama to the presidency was most succinctly nailed by the Rev. Eugene Rivers, in a fire and brimstone address at the regional high school on Wednesday.
“There is one black man in the White House and a million black men in prison,” he thundered.
Don’t we all feel an extra measure of sympathy for that category of victims of Bernie Madoff’s vast fraudulent investment scheme, the ones whose names were tagged with the descriptor philanthropist?
Well, at least in some cases, we should not. Some of them were far from being hapless victims. Some made, and then hid, millions, or in at least one case, billions of dollars, says Lucinda Franks, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning investigative journalist.
Ideas germinate in funny places. With Lisa Foster, it happened in line at a supermarket in Melbourne, Australia, in early 2005 when the checkout operator asked her if she wanted a bag for her purchases.
“The woman in front of me had these big green bags with all her stuff in them,” she recalled. “And the woman behind had them. And they were both looking at me and the cashier was looking at me and clearly the answer should have been: ‘I’ve brought my own bags.’ ”
Nobel prize-winning economist Robert Solow had the overflow crowd roaring with laughter from the very start of his introduction of Henry Louis Gates Jr. at the Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival on Sunday.
“It’s not often,” he deadpanned, “that you get the chance to introduce a deserving but obscure scholar . . . .”
And people say Americans don’t understand irony.
An ultrasound examination of a woman in the first three months of pregnancy costs about eight times as much at the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital as at nearby hospitals on the mainland.
Figures collated by the state on insurance payments for medical procedures show the Vineyard hospital to be vastly more expensive for outpatient services than the median across the state. In most cases the cost here is double, or more.
Everyone loves a redemption story, but there is reason to believe Americans love them more than most other people.
One of the several notable ways that Americans are significantly different from people in other advanced countries, international polling has shown, is that they are far more likely to believe that individuals themselves, not the broader forces in society, determine their success in life.
Succeed or fail — it’s down to your personal mettle. It’s part and parcel of American individualism.
