The Gulag Archipelago no more

A place of slavery, degradation and death no more, the Siberia of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's rendition is but a shadow of the past.

Today, the Siberian landmass comprising Russia's Asian hinterland, and the size of the U.S.A. and India put together, is coveted by China.   

Siberia is oil and mineral rich, and very under populated for its size, while China is overpopulated, and being the world's factory, as it were, needs raw materials available aplenty in neighboring Siberia.

Most importantly, the border between the Sino-Russian border that allocates Siberia to Russia, was arbitrarily drawn during the Peking Convention of 1860 when China was significantly weakened by the Second Opium War.

Borders, as put eloquently by Frank Jacobs, are like love and are real only both sides believe in it. China's belief in the immanence of the border is wavering as its fortunes in geopolitics has been tremendously reversed since 1860.

Maps of the world were largely drawn by the Western powers; they are up for redrawing. China could very well bugger Russia with the logic of the same pointy stick that Russia has buggered Crimea with.

A world of no more world wars

My immersion in the study of globalization, a vague term that as Thomas Friedman had said some time ago, can be used as a "theory of everything," has yielded at least one certainty: There is little likelihood of a Third World War, in the shadows of a First and a Second, in a globalized world, even if the reason is as simple as greater global desire for cooperation and peace.

Thus the Russian engineering of Crimea's secession from Ukraine's and Ukraine's resentment of Russia's of a 20th century style imperial muscle-flexing, isn't going to lead to a consortium of global powers starting a Third World War against Russia.

The above would have been possible in the 20th century. Not any more as veteran journalist, Roger Cohen observes:

It could not happen. Of course, it could not happen. The institutions and alliances of a connected world ensure the worst cannot happen again. The price would be too high, no less than nuclear annihilation. Civilization is strong, humanity wise, safeguards secure.

Cohen writes of the anger of an anonymous 19 year old Ukranian farm boy, who feels the same way about Russian imperialism today as the young Gavrillo Princip, the 19 year old Bosnian Serb Nationalist whose assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo triggered off the First World War.

Today's angry teenagers would rather flock to a radical student circle and communicate their disenchantment with the political system through Social Media, than commit an act of violence to start a war.

In a globalized world everybody wants peace. Violence has dwindled from a public affair to being limited to privatized zones within smaller nations.

Better to be a riotous pussy than a monologuing vagina

The absolutely witty and intelligent and very brave, Russian renegade rock band, Pussy Riots on The Stephen Colbert show:

The Colbert Report and Pussy Riots Part 1

The Colbert Report Part 2

Angry white men and angry brown men

Two images expressing identical emotions--of anger and disempowerment. However, one expression of violence is outward, as the hand grasping the key chain with a cross-like emblem, suggests, while the other is internalized.

The fist, a synecdoche of the angry male in a new book called Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era, lashes out.

The bearded man in flames, on the other hand, looks inward. The second image represents a man burning up in totality. There is no symbolism here, but a blatant rendition of the fictional Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian man, whose death by self-immolation triggered off the Arab spring in 2010. Bouazizi is the principle character in Tahar Ben Jelloun's New Yorker fiction, By Fire (September 9, 2013). 

In Angry White Men, Michael Kimmel, a Sociology Professor at the State University of New York at Stonybrook, travels the nation and writes of working class white men of America who comprise an emerging class of disenfranchised males. They have lost their jobs, resist integrating into the new economy, have lost families and custody of their children, have impregnated girlfriends, whom they have then cast away as "sluts", and in general feel "betrayed by the country they love, discarded like trash on the side of the information superhighway."

Kimmel categorizes them as members of various organizations of "emasculated" (at the level of feeling) white males, like the KKK, the fringe NRA, The Father's Rights Movement (an offshoot of the Men's Right Movement). 

The men are justified in being angry, according to Kimmel, but they are unable to target the right sources that are responsible for their destitution and disempowerment in the first place--the corporate overlords, who have shipped their "masculine", i.e. manufacturing jobs overseas. The angry white men, rage, instead against women for allegedly "stealing American manhood." The angry white men, pissed upon and passed over by the current American economy, batter wives, blame ex-wives, subject girlfriends to domestic violence. 

There are no collective men in Ben Jalloun's story, but the voice of the main character, an unemployed youth in an unnamed Arab nation, could be said to be a representative voice of rising anger against the state. The story begins on a note of grim despair, with the young man returning home, alone and worried, after having buried his father at a cemetery. The son is struck less by grief than by the impending family obligation that as the oldest son of the family, he now has to fulfill.

The man is a college graduate with a degree in history. He is jobless and identified by the state as either a communist or an Islamist. The young man tries making a living as a fruit vendor, but he is persecuted by the police.

We get a hint that the polity of the nation is about to come apart, the youth are raging against the ruling class that is disconnected from the masses.

Anger is ubiquitous in this society. However, people seem to know who precisely are responsible for this state of affairs--the ruling class and their cronies. At one point in the story, the young man, kicked around by the police wants to speak to the town's Mayor. The Mayor refuses to talk to him. In a scene, the young man, lying prone on the ground because of a police attack on him, wishes he had a gun. If he had a gun, he would smash each and every person in the police department, he thinks. He would smash the government, he thinks. But he doesn't have a gun. 

The thought of the disempowered and the humiliated inevitably turn to violence, whether it be in America or in an Arab nation. But the important question is who should the gun be turned against. The guns of anger among the white males seems to be turned against the wrong target, while the anger among the folks in the story, By Fire, is pinpointed against the state.

In Angry White Men, Kimmel suggests that the average white American male's anger is the anger of a demographic that had taken its privilege for granted--the white male has occupied a position of social power by virtue of being white for years. Manufacturing has been a primary catalyst for the ascendancy of the white male in America, till the tides began to turn and manufacturing got booted out of the nation.

It's not a weakening of their gender-power that the angry white male should bemoan, says Kimmel, but the loss of the white male's class status. Women or "feminazism" hasn't triggered the average white American male's demotion from middle to fringe class; the corporations have.

The average white American man is not encouraged to immolate themselves to make a point, but in the book they are asked to be a little more discerning in identifying their enemies.

It's easy to beat up on the wife, who has suffered the same loss of class status, fallen into poverty perhaps, as her man. But it's hard to beat up on the system, because to beat up on the system would mean being unpatriotic or turning into the dreaded "Communist" which is the worst thing imaginable for a majority of the "plain" American Joes.

Does real patriotism lie in treating capitalism and its new form of ruthless profit-mongering as sacrosanct, or does real patriotism lie in rescuing the nation from the grip of such capitalism?

At the end of By Fire, the young man sets himself ablaze in front of the Mayor's office. There is a national uprising and the President flees the country. One nation, howsoever hobblingly, is on its path to freedom or a sliver of it.

Beggar farm

Filmmaker Suman Mukherjee's new political and social satire, Kangal Malsat, meaning "War Cry of the Beggars", could very well be seen as an Indian version of George Orwell's political allegory Animal Farm.

The story of Kangal Malsat: In the derelict shanties and dark alleys of Calcutta live two warring groups of the nether world. The Fyataroos have the gift of flying and the Choktars practice black magic. Suddenly, the rival groups are joined together in alliance by an ageless duo - a primordial talking crow and Begum Johnson who consorted with Job Charnock and Warren Hastings. Masterminded by the two ancient progenitors of the city and led by the magically endowed rebels, an army of tramps and vagrants launch an uprising against the Communist government of West Bengal. As skulls dance in crematoria, flying discs whiz through the sky, and a portrait of Stalin angrily admonishes the Chief Minister, the Communist government falls. The political transition, however, sees many of the rebels being rewarded with awards and positions in the new government. 

This unrelenting and bitterly sarcastic political film, based on a novel by Nabarun Bhattacharya, landed director Suman Mukhopadhyay in some trouble with the censors.

Here is a trailer of the film:

Hail to thee monarch Bloomberg, mere mayor thou never wert

I learnt this from reading books on English history: Whenever a particular monarch ruled in England for a long period of time, ushering in relative peace and stability, and subjects got used to the tempo of the prevailing reign, a kind of anxiety set in toward the period's "ending."

Thus a sort of darkness seeped into the national psyche (if there is such a psyche) when the era of the first Elizabeth rolled in; likewise, the long reign of Queen Victoria generated a fear of uncertainty lest she died in the 19th century.

Then there are those longish reigns that people can't wait to see the end of, because in many ways such reigns have been anti-people and the leader has been more disliked than liked.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the leader of one of the globe's most complex urban habitats--New York City--has been disliked by many for his monologic brand of leadership--one in which the leader couldn't care less about having having dialogues with others before making a decision--but his reign of 12 years has been one for the books: Bloomberg somehow transcends judging a political leadership on mere economic and other material grounds. The city has got to be a more economically-stabler entity, and the crime rate is phenomenally negligible, but what makes Bloomberg stands out is his tremendous aura.

As Frank Bruni writes, in the context of the forthcoming Mayoral elections, Bloomberg's stature makes every other candidate look small, crass selfish and even buffoonish (like Anthony Weiner).

Bloomberg has managed to emerge as noble:

He’s just brought us bikes. He’s determined to bring us composting. He means to vanquish smoking, he means to vanquish obesity and he’s intent on protecting us from the ever stormier seas, after which he means to vanquish global warming itself.

Michael Bloomberg, in other words, has become a light in and of itself. So much of a light is he on his own terms, that he tried to persuade Hilary Clinton to run for the Mayorship in 2014. The light that he is, he gave a supremely down-to-earth and yet provocative commencement speech at Stanford University. Compared to what he said, the one's delivered by Oprah, Julie Andrews and others, excluding perhaps, Michele Obama, sounded like baubles.

Here is the speech:

What's with this bottle and water metaphor?

I'm used to the saying that the last straw breaks the camel's back. Translated into the lexicon of political protest, it could mean that when oppression reaches a tipping point, even a tiny oppressive gesture can make the "camel" (/people) revolt.

As we know by now, large segments of Turkey's urban population are turning against the regime of Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Erdogan has gone dictatorial for a long time, but his recent attempt to usurp Taksim Square, Istanbul's equivalent of London's Hyde Park, or New York City's Central Park (though not half as pretty as either of these), in order to build some government-mandated structures in it, triggered off mass-protests.

However, the protesters camped in Taksim aren't using the last-straw-breaks-the-camel's-back metaphor to describe what's brought on these mass-uprisings.

They are using bottles, glasses and water. One young man says that Erdogan's latest step was like the last drop of water that a glass can no longer accommodate. Turkish populace is envisioned as a glass and the stream of oppressive measures have filled it to the brim, thus the latest drop has spilled over into chaos. Another man said that Turkey is like the bottle with the narrow neck and beyond a certain height of the bottle's neck the water being poured splashes out.

I just couldn't visualize what these young men said.  New uprisings spring new metaphors, is my guess.

2013: A Real Space Odyssey

"Second Life" in Phnom Penh, Cambodia

We all know what was done to the swastika--the Hindu sacred symbol--when it was appropriated by the Nazis.

The symbol fell from divine grace and became a byword for genocide and evil.

Not all words and symbols suffer the same disgrace, but they do, in ways, small and big, risk altering into their "other" when hauled out of their originating contexts and put into a radically different one.

Italian artist Filippo Minelli recontextualizes names of Social Network giants like Flickr, MySpace, and YouTube, by ripping them out of their familiar home of the browser and re-painting them on the walls of slums in Mali, Cambodia or Vietnam. 

His goal is not to strip these words, that are gateways into social networks that people enter to enjoy secure interaction and communication with online users across the globe, of their dignity, but to see if they undergo significant meaning-alteration when re-planted in real space and real time. Minelli is especially interested in putting the words in those spatial and temporal realms that are the "detritus" rather than the fragrant flowers of a technology-dominated capitalism. 

In a way, the slums of the world are the absolute "others" of the secure and organized virtual spaces of the online world. Imagine painting the word "Second Life" on the walls of a decrepit and dingy wall of a slum, where not only is another "life" a luxury and a sacrilege to contemplate, but also dangerously redolent of drug-addled escapism from the misery of real time indigence. Remember, the trainspotters in Danny Boyle's Trainspotting? The second lives of these Irish urchin addicts were cocaine trips into oblivion. 

Minelli says his intention behind transplanting social network words from their virtual cocoons into the real world of slums is "to point out the gap between the reality we still live in and the ephemeral world of technologies."

Here is an excellent guide to what might be philosophically at stake in Minelli's work.

Where, I wonder can the word Facebook be re-painted? 

Rhetorical analysis

Part of my job in the classroom is to teach something called "rhetorical analysis."

Simply put, it's a task where the reader gets busy tearing apart an argument she doesn't like. It's the underlying ideology that is torn asunder, however the ideology is so enmeshed with the rhetoric that to get to one, it's important to start with the other.

Stanley Fish shows us how to do a rhetorical analyses of everything, ranging from a political speech, to Sarah Palin's "rogue" memoirs to the rhetoric of the Hunger Games, in his NYT "Opinionator" column.

But I find Fish's analyses to be a bit esoteric, so when I came upon Matt Taibbi's take on David Brooks' "boiler-plate jihad" against the Gay-marriage lobby's recent appeal to the Supreme Court to make a decision on legalizing same-sex, I jumped at it as a good example of rhetorical analysis.

I think Taibbi is particularly brilliant in getting to the heart of the matter in Brooks' rant against the need to legalize same-sex marriage. It's that Brooks' sees marriage as a "constraining" institution, which entails the loss of certain fundamental freedoms that individuals enjoy. He redefines marriage giving it a bit of a narrow scope. I've read opinion upon opinion meted out by this most dourest of conservatives on how marriage is not simply an officializing of a bond between two people who want to spend the rest of their lives together, but also some kind of an "institution" that requires the individual to compromise on unfettered individualism and settle for shared sacrifices. Brooks' does reduce marriage into a non-romantic ideal whose most important function--that's it, a "function" that makes marriage sound mechanistic--is to shore up communal living.

Unmarxing Marx

A new book on Karl Marx, Marx, A Nineteenth Century Life, is out and it does well to present Marx as a "figure of the past," a real person, with real human instincts, rather than as Marx the eternal "prophet of the future."

Jonathan Sperber, an University of Missouri scholar, has done well to rescue Marx from the cobweb of iconism. 

An excerpt from a review of the book:

[...] It comes as a shock to realize that the ultimate leftist, the father of Communism itself, fits a recognizable pattern. It’s like discovering that Jesus Christ regularly organized bake sales at his local church. So inflated and elevated is the global image of Marx, whether revered as a revolutionary icon or reviled as the wellspring of Soviet totalitarianism, that it’s unsettling to encounter a genuine human being, a character one might come across today. If the Marx described by Sperber, a professor at the University of Missouri specializing in European history, were around in 2013, he would be a compulsive blogger, and picking Twitter fights with Andrew Sullivan and Naomi Klein.

Rise and fall

HBO will be airing an interesting documentary today, March 28, 2013: Emmy award winning Alexandra Pelosi's (Nancy Pelosi's daughter) Fall to Grace.

Pelosi's subject is James McGreevey, the ex-governor of New Jersey, who went through a rough and public divorce from his wife after he was charged with soliciting gay sex from an aide. Through all the rough and tumble of this very public process of exposure and perhaps a bit of a crucifixion on the side, McGreevey was re introduced to the world as a closeted gay male.

Today, McGreevey lives in Plainsfield, New Jersey, with his Australian mate Mark O'Donnell and is an Episcopalian with a degree in Divinity (he received that in his early 50's) and a career in social service:

As a recovery specialist who preaches the Gospel, Mr. McGreevey spends much of his time in the Hudson County Correctional Center in Kearny, N.J., working with women fighting addiction through the nonprofit organization Integrity House. His message: No matter how far you’ve fallen, redemption is within reach.

Pelosi claims she is interested in broken souls and deemed McGreevey to be one. She likes to look inside the lives of those who have fallen after having been in the limelight for a while. 

Indeed, as Pelosi says in her insightful interview, the fall of men and women are far worthier of attention than are the stories of their "rise." The "rise" stories are often formulaic and banal and they are also, with the benefit of hindsight, re constructed to make them inspirational.

The fall stories, on the other hand, are more human.

The title of the HBO documentary on McGreevey has a turn into a parable as well: For those who've read Leonard Kriegel's touching essay, "Falling into Life," will see a "fall" as redemption, or a freedom from certain invisible yet adamantine shackles that hold people back from experiencing their "real" lives--the one's reserved for them to achieve their full human potential.

Clearly, McGreevey's fall isn't the typical fall from the wheel of fortune, but a fall into what was reserved for him as a real and rightful place in this world--a gay man with a deep conscience and desire for social service.

Be creative and collaborate...and be transparent

I enjoy reading Evgeny Morozov's guest column on the dark side of technophilia.

This weeks column brings to mind something I've been thinking of for a long time--the pervasive use of words with little meaning.

"Creativity" and "collaboration" are two such words that annoy me when used in a mindless way (and used in mindless ways they are).

In the context of technology, Morozov takes on the word "openness." Open, he says, is now a word that has a "lot of sex appeal," yet "very little analytical content." 

Openness is the latest opiate of the (i-pad totting) masses [...] Certified as “open,” the most heinous and suspicious ideas suddenly become acceptable. Even the Church of Scientology boasts of its “commitment to open communication. [...] Openness is today a powerful cult, a religion with its own dogmas. 

Then again,

For many institutions, “open” has become the new “green.” And in the same way that companies will “greenwash” their initiatives by invoking eco-friendly window dressing to hide less-palatable practices, there has also emerged a term to describe similar efforts to read “openness” into situations and environments where it doesn’t exist: “openwashing.”

I feel that like the "openness," "creativity" and "collaboration" have become powerful cults with their own set of dogmas. Be "creative" or perish, yet nobody can with pinpoint precision tell what constitutes creativity and what doesn't.

Subwordsion

I recall reading something on censorship and artistic expression by J.M. Coetzee. He was using a poem where an African National Congress member couldn't directly report on the death from torture, suffered by a fellow ANC activist, during South Africa's regime of Apartheid. 

Ingeniously, he composed a poem on how the prisoner, repeatedly slipped and fell on a bar of soap, till he fell and broke into smithereens, inside his prison cell.

Words, Coetzee says, can help bypass censorship and yet evoke the truth that the writer wishes to convey.

Popular Chinese novelist, Yu Hua, uses a similar linguistic tactic in China in Ten Words, his nonfiction accounting of modern day China.

The ten words are as follows: people, leader, reading, writing, revolution,disparity, grassroots, copycat, bamboozle and Lu Xun (an influential early 20th-century writer). None of these words are banned in China, but they are used subversively by the writer. 

Here is an instance of that indirect journey of subversion that a word like "people" makes in Hua's book: It's a positive word used by the Chinese state very frequently to suggest complete democracy and "people's power." Hua, co opts the word from the bureaucratic lexicon and creates an occasion to discuss the Tienanmen Square incident of June 4, 1989, when the Chinese army opened fire on unarmed pro-democracy demonstrators.

Birth of a nation

The title of the NYT video caught my attention because of the nature of the activity indicated by it.

Can a nation be literally "built" from grounds up? 

The "nation" in question here is South Sudan, which, in 2011 seceded from North Sudan and has since been inducted into the hall of nations as the globe's 191st country. 

The contents of the video suggest yet another activity, that of rearing, because a caption describes South Sudan as the world's "newest" country, thereby creating the image of a newborn in my mind. I'm thinking maybe the dominantly white folks (sounded like a bunch of Americans and Europeans to me) who sit around tables inside rooms that look like they've been hijacked from a P.S. in New York City, are discussing the challenges of raising South Sudan properly. What if the "baby" grows up to be an unruly "adult" and create regional mayhem.

(The white folks, by the way, are United Nations officials).

There is a moment toward the end of the video, when a UN representative apprises the group of an infringement by the nascent nation: It is said that the president of South Sudan has just received a call from Barak Obama because the South Sudanese army had tried to invade its Northern counterpart. Obama, we assume, has scolded the South Sudanese for violating the terms of agreement.

As I watched the video, I was impressed by contrasting attitudes of the UN officials discussing, very bureaucratically, the building of South Sudan, and of the Sudanese locals who walk on foot, explaining to the South Sudanese citizens the meaning of the nation and what citizenship rights, rituals and responsibilities are to be shouldered by them.

The South Sudanese are also asked about their feelings.

While the seemingly wealthier and more educated, and thus English-speaking, Sudanese are shown to celebrate abstract values like patriotism and the symbolical richness of the flag (a guy wraps the flag around his portly body), the poorer speak of food, land and livelihood. The latter can't be done without, while patriotism is of secondary significance.

I was touched by the woman who, upon being asked, how she "feels" about coming back to her "homeland" (after remaining in exile), says that in the undivided Sudan she had land, cattle and a house, but in the "new" nation she has nothing. So much for patriotism and belonging in the abstract!

I am reminded of the wholly abstract concept of the nation as propounded by sociologist Benedict Anderson in his 1991 book Imagined Communities. Anderson had contended that a nation transcends being merely a geographical and physical entity; it is imagined into being by those who live in it.

The million dollar question is whether the war-torn, poor and psychically-ravaged-by years of civil war- citizens of this newly birthed nation will have the mental luxury to exert their imaginations thus.

Or, will South Sudan, whose capital city has tentatively been chosen--Juba--effloresce into a full-fledged nation in the imagination of its residents?

Characterize this

When defense secretary Leon Panetta said he didn't want to "characterize" the electronic communication between Florida socialite Jill Kelly and General Allen, what did he mean?

He added that he "didn't want to do anything," implying thereby that an act of characterizing would be tantamount to doing something.

Doing what?

In a parlance of writing, at least in the parlance that I am familiar with, to "characterize" is to label, or to give something a specific name and ergo an unique identity. Thus to "characterize" would be an active verb in the realm of writing.

I remember asking students in my creative non-fiction class to "characterize" the particular quality of beauty or tragedy (among others) they see in something.

For instance, we would discuss the classic photograph of Marilyn Monroe--the one where she is giving off a full-lipped smile--and students would be encouraged to claim ownership of the beauty that they see and understand in the image through an adjective: how is the image beautiful? Characterize!

No sooner than the active verb of characterizing was released into the classroom, students would generally feel at a loss about what was being asked of them.

But out of the fog would emerge something interesting.

Somebody would squeak out "tragic." That would be a characterizing word indeed, I would assure them. We would go on from there into more specific ways of characterizing the quality of Monroe's "beauty." 

A fab example of a characterizing word is "hard." In her pithy essay on artist Georgia O'Keefe, Joan Didion, nails the quality of the appeal of O'Keefe's painting as "hard." there is a certain "hardness" about her work, claims Didion. 

To "characterize" something, then is to commit oneself to a very specific interpretation in an unambiguous (though complex) way.

When Panetta refused to "characterize" the communication under investigation (as "sexually explicit"--the media's characterizing word of choice), he refused a commitment.

How predictably political of him.   

American democracy

When Alexis De Tocqueville praised American democracy in the 19th century, little did he anticipate the very same democracy would morph into a gallimaufry.

Barak Obama, the storyteller

Ron Suskind's analysis of how re-elected President Obama can tell a "story" to Americans that will inspire them with confidence, intersects with important lessons about the art of storytelling itself.

Stories that "sell" these days are told in totally non-traditional ways. In other words, mode, style, form, all have to adapt and adjust to the continually changing contours of that ever-morphing beast called "audience."

Suskind sheds a bit of light on the death of the third-person, all-seeing, all-knowing, omniscient narrator (reminds me of the late Victorian novelists).

When Obama wrote his compelling autobiography at age 33, he was the classic omniscient narrator, omniscient to the extent of re-inventing the truths of his life to suit the needs of a personal narrative that would catapult him into the arc of a presidency.

But after he actually became the president, Obama could ill-afford to play a role the omniscient narrator part of him had helped create. He was at a loss at how to now play the role that others--i.e. the public--"wrote" for him through their yearnings, wants and impositions.

Now, it's time for the omniscient storyteller to become a character himself: To stop writing about "history" and become a shaper of it.

Gandhi once said that real change happens when people become change itself; echoing that call, Suskind asks Obama to be more porous to spontaneity, improvise more, be less calculating, be more receptive to lightning reactions:

Don't tell the story, be the story.

In a writer's words, "show, don't tell." 

The electoral map

The 2012 U.S. Presidential election map is easier, way easier, to read than New York City's subway map.

Nothing labyrinthine about it.

Climate Change

Climate change is to the Republican base what leprosy once was to healthy humans — untouchable and unmentionable. Their party is financed by people whose fortunes are dependent upon denying that humans have caused the earth’s weather patterns to change for the worse.

Timothy Egan

Reasons why Obama should win...

The 2012 Presidential elections: 

[...] because he’s a seriously intelligent, thoughtful leader more in tune and in touch with Americans’ lives than his sheltered opponent is. He still has poetry in him, and he still has fight. But this campaign has illuminated nothing so brightly as the limits of his magic, along with shortcomings that he would carry with him into a second term (should he get one) and would be wise to address.

Frank Bruni, NYT