“I was born in 1941. That was the year they bombed Pearl Harbor. I’ve been living in darkness ever since. It looks like things are going to change now.”

Article here.

Yeah, we made a lot of noise when the Phillies won but last night was unbelievable. Folks banging pots and pans, folks singing, folks holding their car horns while driving about.

It continued until after 2 AM.

There is a new America every morning when we wake up. It is upon us whether we will it or not. The new America is the sum of many small changes — a new subdivision here, a new school there, a new industry where there had been swampland — changes that add up to a broad transformation of our lives. Our task is to guide these changes. For, though change is inevitable, change for the better is a full-time job.

–Adlai E. Stevenson II, speech delivered in Miami, Florida, September 8, 1956.

From Scott Horton’s exceptional blog.

Casting Daddy’s ballot, 9:05 AM, November 4, 2008, St. Frances De Sales church basement:

Bob Dylan’s reply, ca. 1967, to reporter Michael Iachetta:

“What I’ve been doin’ mostly is seein’ only a few close friends, readin’ little about the outside world, porin’ over books you never heard of, thinkin’ about where I’m goin’, and why am I runnin’, and am I mixed up too much, and what am I knowin’, and what am I givin’, and what am I takin’. And mainly what I’ve been doin’ is workin’ on gettin’ better and makin’ better music, which is what my life is all about.”

cited in Anthony Scaduto, Dylan: An Intimate Biography, (NY: Signet Classics, 1971), 285.

So Ed Rendell and Michael Nutter have already called this week…that’s cool.

But Jimmy Rollins just called to invite me to hear Joe Biden speak tomorrow.

That’s more like it.

Via Gail Collins:

I believe we have met them before. They are the men and women who get up at a town hall meeting after the candidate had just made a 20-minute opening speech about his/her plans for health care reform, and say: “What I want to know is, what are you going to do about medical costs?”

There’s a great series of shorts essays here that describe the approaching election.

Ronald Dworkin makes this point about Barack Obama:

He has a striking, deep intelligence, and a gift for combining clarity and strong feeling in his writing and speeches; and he uses these qualities to expose and explain complexity rather than bury it under slogans. It is said that he lacks experience. On the contrary, he alone among prominent politicians has the experience that counts most in a threatening and densely interdependent world: the crucial experience of empathy. He has lived, and been poor, in both domestic and foreign worlds that few national politicians can even imagine.

From Sherman Alexie’s 2007 novel; here’s two awkward, troubled kids talking to each other:

“What’s your point ?” Gordy asked.

“I take them seriously. I use them to understand the world. I use them to make fun of the world. To make fun of people. And sometimes I draw people because they’re my friends and family. And I want to honor them.”

“So you take your cartoons as seriously as you take books?”

“Yeah, I do, ” I said, “that’s kind of pathetic, isn’t it?”

“No, not at all, ” Gordy said. “If you’re good at it, and you love it, and it helps you navigate the river of the world, then it can’t be wrong.”

Wow, this dude was a poet.

Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2007).

“When the school introduces and trains each child of society into membership within such a little community, saturating him with the spirit of service, and providing him with the instruments of effective self-direction, we shall have the deepest and best guarantee of a larger society which is worthy, lovely, and harmonious.”

John Dewey, The School and Society (1899) in John Dewey, The Middle Works, 1:19-20.