I was watching Chris Rock's "Kill The Messenger" HBO special from the fall of 2008, and was struck by just how outrageously emotion-driven everyone's reactions were to just the mention of people's names. Just hearing the name "Bush" made his audience yell violently, and when he mentioned Obama, his audience screamed with delight. I hadn't realized how dramatically the culture had changed in the past year. Even Rock's more rational point - that when white voters voted for Obama, they were viewed as people voting on the issues, whereas black people were seen as voting for him because he was black - was drowned out in a sea of people whooping and yelling throughout the bit.
You know how everyone espoused one view post-9/11, then jumped off the wagon over the course of the year and pretended they'd always had that viewpoint? "I can't see how Bush could justify such an invasion of Afganistan just because all these Toby Keith patriots got so out of hand." We're seeing the same thing again - people will keep mentioning the "reservations" they always had about President Obama, forgetting the way they stood and fist-pumped and screamed at them mere mention of his name.
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I was watching Chris Rock's "Kill The Messenger" HBO special from the fall of 2008, and was struck by just how outrageously emotion-driven everyone's reactions were to just the mention of people's names. Just hearing the name "Bush" made his audience yell violently, and when he mentioned Obama, his audience screamed with delight. I hadn't realized how dramatically the culture had changed in the past year. Even Rock's more rational point - that when white voters voted for Obama, they were viewed as people voting on the issues, whereas black people were seen as voting for him because he was black - was drowned out in a sea of people whooping and yelling throughout the bit.
You know how everyone espoused one view post-9/11, then jumped off the wagon over the course of the year and pretended they'd always had that viewpoint? "I can't see how Bush could justify such an invasion of Afganistan just because all these Toby Keith patriots got so out of hand." We're seeing the same thing again - people will keep mentioning the "reservations" they always had about President Obama, forgetting the way they stood and fist-pumped and screamed at them mere mention of his name.
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