A master-class in memorable

Greetings, this news week of soul-level object lessons — all history-bending, at lightning speed, in real time.

That’s how it’s likely to be for the 99 remaining days until the November 5 election.

Today’s title is a bit of a chapter heading, for both this period and for the more reflective post-election analysis from newShrink perspectives to follow.

Looking toward that time, if you remember and write down dreams about news events, particularly elections, I would appreciate hearing or having you send them to me. The focus here isn’t personal, but on what of our collective situation is showing up in people’s dreams, and how. It’s part of a process called social dreaming. (And of course no names or personal content information is shared without your permission.) After the election I may start a dream group in person, virtually or both. Do let me know if you’re interested in that, too.)

And this is somewhat a commemorative edition, given the historic scope, speed and dimensions of events and particularly the key public figures.

At center, and first, of course, is the President.

For best overall recap, day to day analysis and links this week I highly recommend reading most or all posts from both www.RobertHubbell.substack.com and www.HeatherCoxRichardson.substack.com. Hubbell’s Today’s Edition July 26 in particular has remarkably varied and thorough coverage of disparate aspects of the unfolding Harris campaign, her strong and nuanced role in Netanayahu’s visit and more.

Biden makes stunning decision to pull out of 2024 race (Washington Post)

The president’s decision plunges the Democratic Party into an unprecedented scramble to choose a new nominee at the 11th hour.

After the Sunday afternoon announcements via social media, the President until Tuesday continued to isolate while recovering from COVID. He called in to participate warmly in Kamala Harris’ first visit at campaign headquarters as the presidential candidate on Monday afternoon.

Historian, professor and author Jon Meacham, who’s occasionally worked with Biden on his speeches, provided some of the first commentary on the decision. Meacham’s thoughts were as usual insightful and lyrically delivered. (In his voice on video versions, hearing the tax code read aloud would sound beautiful.)

Joe Biden, My Friend and an American Hero (The New York Times)

Evan Osnos, author of several Biden biographies, shares his long and close study of the President and the man.

Joe Biden’s Act of Selflessness (The New Yorker)

Throughout his political career, the President has turned pain into purpose. Now he must do it again.

From columnist and Duke University public-policy professor Frank Bruni:

What Joe Biden Just Did Is Utterly Extraordinary (NYT)

• From Heather Cox Richardson, July 24, 2024

Tonight, President Joe Biden explained to the American people why he decided to refuse the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination and hand the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris. 

Speaking from the Oval Office from his seat behind the Resolute Desk, a gift from Queen Victoria to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880, Biden recalled the nation’s history. He invoked Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence; George Washington, who “showed us presidents are not kings”; Abraham Lincoln, who “implored us to reject malice”; and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who “inspired us to reject fear.”

And then he turned to himself. “I revere this office, but I love my country more,” he said. “It’s been the honor of my life to serve as your president.” But, he said, the defense of democracy is more important than any title, and democracy is “larger than any one of us.” We must unite to protect it…

Here is the video of the full speech on Wednesday night:

President Joe Biden Delivers Oval Office Address After Ending His Bid for Re-Election (You Tube.)

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I recommend the entire video below, especially if you have read or seen little or nothing of Kamala Harris, her husband Doug Emhoff, or any of their story. It’s a more casual situation and setting than most of her speeches. Combined these videos and appearances this week display her remarkable range of fierce intellect and discipline, warm empathy, firmness where necessary (for example, the Netanayahu meeting and statement from her on Thursday). Her spontaneous humor — and yes, distinctive laugh — are to me among her big strengths.

In this video, both the first and main introduction and Harris clearly frame the candidate’s achievements, priority goals and particularly her future focus for America themed tightly around freedom: Kamala Harris addresses teachers union at Houston convention.

Harris Rallies Exuberant Democrats in Wisconsin: ‘The Baton Is in Our Hands’ (NYT)

Harris, her background, accomplishments and vision for the country are to a great extent undiscovered — as a number of focus group interviews with undecided voters have described early in this week’s massive campaign shift. Here’s a description from a journalist who has observed, experienced and then double-checked what she knows and thinks about the Vice President and candidate.

I Was a Kamala Harris Skeptic. Here’s How I Got Coconut-Pilled. (New York Times)

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It’s now a week since Biden’s first announcement last Sunday afternoon. Since the first of two scheduled campaign debates between President Biden and candidate Trump, it’s been a month — quite a month...

The very idea of “the call” has taken new shape and gone viral in just a week. The virtual Zoom calls to galvanize volunteers and fundraise began last Sunday night. That’s thanks to the long mastery, practice and massive organizing skills, experience and execution by thousands of Black women.

Calling ALL Women — And now one for you too, White Dudes:

The Thursday night White Women call was powerful, emotional at times in ways I hadn’t expected. The range of speakers with their own stories, information and spurs to action was informative and moving. Being part of the surging fund totals was a spur to do more. Most compelling for me, this was the largest gathering of white women — granted, most of us invisibly virtual — in a setting where owning our white privilege was straightforward, matter-of-fact and a given. I will likely be haunted forever by the basic numbers: That white women voted for Trump in 2016, 47% to 45% over Hillary Clinton, an enormously qualified woman. And in 2020 it was worse — 53% of white women voted for Trump. So many of the rights, comforts, family and children-friendly programs, choices and privileges we have been lucky to take for granted, have been hard-fought for, with greater costs of failure, by Black women and other women of color.

More calls are coming, and I highly recommend attending one on your phone, laptop or tablet.

Especially if you’ve never done this before, even better if you are still numb, neutral or just unfamiliar, uninformed about Harris or unmotivated in general.

Calling ALL Women:

The Women for Harris National Organizing Call — coordinating/combining the White and Black women groups — is tomorrow, Monday, July 29 at pm Eastern.

Sign up here: National Organizing Call.

and

Calling ALL White Dudes:

Sign up here for the White Dudes for Harris Call, also Monday, July 29, at 8 pm Eastern.

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Above photos capture a few headlines noting the astonishing campaign progress and record-shattering fundraising during the week. Additionally and not depicted here have been:Thousands of newly energized volunteers; record-shattering fundraising; endorsements of Harris by multiple major labor unions, public school teachers, 40 former justice department officials, former presidents and first ladies Barack and Michelle Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton, all senior leaders of her party among many others.

Not surprisingly to anyone, beyond the challenges of intense campaigning about the issues and vision there’s been immediate ugliness, too.

Harris’s campaign will have to contend with DEI, culture war attacks (WAPO)

Many of the racial [and gendered] attacks on Kamala Harris are tied to the broader culture war over corporate diversity and affirmative action programs.

By about midday Tuesday there was so much spewing of nastiness in very public settings, on camera and in official halls of government that forms of memes like this one were ubiquitous. I re-posted it on Facebook after watching an appalling series of network TV news interviews in the halls of Congress, where its male and female elected members disparaged the Vice President in absurdly false ways.

Soon after that, I was vividly reminded of how very much the catch-all pejorative use of the intrinsically positive “DEI” is applied by men to disparage women. Yet too often — and unclaimed — it also evokes and enables misogynistic attacks by women against other women. On another related news report, former Fox Channel broadcaster Megyn Kelly actually, aloud on the air in 2024, accused our — by-any-standard highly educated, accomplished, multiple-times-elected — female Vice President of having slept her way to the top.

(It boggles the mind to imagine just how one would have to go about doing this, in order to get elected multiple times to statewide offices in the nation’s largest-populated state, the world’s fifth-largest economy.) Kelly even mentions by name a by-no-means-secret dating relationship Harris had some three decades ago. According to the volumes of vetted bio on Harris by now, this was with a successful, divorced, fellow lawyer during her early, single years as a CA state-attorney’s office lawyer. The relationship ended several years before she ran for her first office, and won. Even if it hadn’t, just like successful, accomplished, well-educated men, high-achiever women have social-, personal-, love-lives and all kinds and variations of families.

Here’s what I re-posted with the meme:

In case you’ve been busy and haven’t noticed, Speaker of the House of Representatives Johnson —  for some reason early this week — felt the need to issue a public on-camera behavioral caution to your elected members of Congress. He admonished them to refrain from making racist and misogynistic references to your nation’s elected Vice President and presumptive candidate for its highest office. 

The fact that this was necessary is a very big clue that you have elected racist, misogynist women and men to represent you.

It is a call and reminder from this very polite, self-identified devout evangelical Christian Speaker, for a return to making racism and misogyny polite again. 

The real version just doesn’t form a catchy acronym that fits on a cap.

Columnist Issac Bailey captures many of the salient points on this issue in The Charlotte Observer: Kamala Harris is no DEI hire. She earned this moment.

Thankfully, well before midweek Team Harris seems to have sprouted its own jujitsu-superpower — humor that’s quick, creative and gets better and better the more that’s thrown at it.

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Inside the online army supercharging Kamala Harris’ campaign (Washington Post)

A grassroots network of TikTok creators, energized by the new likely Democratic nominee, are using their skill at playful video collages to build Harris a viral political powerhouse from scratch.

Just a sampling from the meme-time:

Then there’s this…

The NYT lede below inaccurately makes cooking sound like a campaign- or political- affectation. But spontaneous stories about Harris’ long widely known passion and skills with cooking show up from her decdes-ago college friends to journalists and fellow members of the Senate to whom Harris gave cooking instructions via Zoom. Reportedly cooking is Harris’ favorite de-stressor, and she’s good at varying cuisines including each of her parents’ Caribbean and Indian influences.

When It Comes to Food and Politics, Kamala Harris Is Riffing on the Recipe (NYT)

From giving turkey-roasting advice to making dosa with Mindy Kaling, Ms. Harris has leaned into cooking in a way no other candidate has.

Harris has been a very involved stepmother, and the ex-wife of her husband Doug has endorsed her publicly this week — not just for president. To them she is “Momala”, fellow mother with their now young adult children, a valued part of the family. This came in response to VP candidate J.D. Vance’s widely public, wildly unpopular, disparaging of Harris and “women like her” as “miserable childless cat ladies” who are anti-family etc. etc.

And, meet him:

What to Know About Kamala Harris’s Husband, Doug Emhoff (NYT)

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Now to update on that strangest of equations a couple of weeks (and lifetimes) ago…

mahjongg + the RNC???

In brief catch-up more personally, my solo week in Asheville was mixed and frequently storm-soaked. As described in previous editions, this was to try a just-for-fun Beginner Mahjongg class at UNC-A’s excellent OLLI College for Seniors.

I still really like OLLI, and did begin to get the hang of mahjongg; the only total novice in my foursome, was actually first to win (“to mahjongg”) on the third day (photo at top left.) Then somehow did it again the next day, too!

Both were beginner’s-luck flukes. The game’s multiple, complex ways of structuring a winning rack of tiles (like a hand in cards) are enormous. So there’s a lot of strategy involved (which I like.)

There’s also a whole lot of pure luck-of-the-draw (which I don’t like as much). There’s also a whole lot of helplessly being at at the mercy of what tiles are drawn, but with no way to retrieve what’s visible on the table as previously discarded. As players get better and better at knowing optional hands and strategy, this is surely less frustrating and tedious with games much quicker.

In this I realized I prefer bridge with an uncomplicated deck of cards, though haven’t played in years. It’s more strategic, less luck involved, and playing a hand moves quickly with more frequent re-deals. (I did discover that both games played online might be fun when in-person isn’t practical.)

Mainly, though, think I just prefer strategy, connecting-dots and problem solving that’s real, not just a game! Which brings me to this…

That week was also the Republican National Convention, and other than some fun time with friends in AVL, my intention was to do minimal news.

However: On my very first hand, the very first day of mahjongg it was literally spelled-out how difficult that is for me.

Pictured above at right and bottom left, the “four winds” tiles have the Chinese character plus the first letter of each wind, North, East, West, South.

My first racked tiles came up in that precise order, spelling “NEWS!” These were the first mahjongg tiles I’ve ever seen, and I didn’t yet even know what the letters or figures stood for.

So yes, of course I had to watch a little of the convention, though could stand only short intervals. Managed it with the TV on mute and iPad streaming a favorite Danish TV series. It has subtitles, which kept me from looking too long or closely at the TV news chyron when not actually listening to convention speakers.

When I did look up, I found it unnerving to watch the crowd closeups of transfixed faces, even sort of ecstatic tears, for too long. There were so many hyper-plumped, ultra-shiny lips on women of all ages. When exaggerated these can so distort faces that they look manikin-like, not quite human or fully moveable.

Then, at times it was even weirder with the volume up. I actually sat through the entire 90-something minute Trump speech.

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A closing note is thanks to this re-share (at left) from Fb friend Dave Gephart, my fellow East Meck HS and UNC Tar Heel alum. Then there’s my very personal take:

At right are front and back of my “don’t forget to vote” postcard — handwritten and addressed from my 8-year old Grand Miz E, with help of her dynamo role model/other Grammy. These two were already at work on this and sent mine around mid-June, before Father’s Day in our fam and household.

Both of Miz E’s other grandparents, in their decades in Presbyterian senior pastorates and other ministry, have worked tirelessly at the intersection of social, racial and economic justice, inclusion. All is in the context of profound personal faith that deeply honors that of others.

The above is just a little slice of how it feels when you’re one of those J.D. Vance-described “miserable ladies” like me — only a 35-year stepmother (and a Tishie), which of course “don’t count.”. I no longer even have a cat, or plan to get one.

(Not so “miserable.” Actually pretty grateful.)

And, that is all I have! The next few weeks have lots of AVL back-and-forth with Grand Miz-E summertime stuff. Talk to you soon, as it’s possible.

🦋💙 tish

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… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”

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