American Bandwidth
Weblogs & Essays
by
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We've known this was coming for ten weeks now, and still, when it happened, the capacity for surprise and wonder and tears was very much intact. Today was one of those signal American moments, maybe The Signal American Moment: remarkable not because we recognized it, but precisely because we never have before. This is the terra incognita our nation was meant to be. This is, now, finally, the America that America has been waiting for.
When Barack Hussein Obama took the oath of office as the 44th president of the United States of America, the nation shifted in its foundation; its spiritual longitude, its emotional latitude were in a different place than the day before. Even as he took an oath that confirmed the vitality of some of our bedrock American certainties, his very presence as president called other sure things into question. The country thought it had the racial arithmetic, the calculus of individual achievement, all figured out. And now this.
And for African Americans, the descendants of the slaves who built the house he will now occupy for the next four years, today represents a psychic dividing line, a clear line of demarcation between one world view and another. The late Arthur C. Clarke might have envisioned something like this for a science-fiction novel: a day on which the future announces itself in breathtaking fashion; a world in which people long accustomed to being warmed and nourished by one sun woke up one morning to find, inexplicably, a second sun in the sky.
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About the Book
America between the 2004 election and the first 100 days of the Obama administration – its knights and knuckleheads, its fears and joys, its new ironies and old habits, its capacity for change and transition – is topic A in this collection of essays and blog posts from a longtime observer of American life, politics and popular culture. A veteran reporter, essayist and critic, Michael E. Ross brings an incisive eye to presidential politics, press ethics and accountability, television news, activism in pop culture, the impact of Hurricane Katrina, the war in Iraq and other issues. In an often funny, always insightful collection of recent writing, the author offers takes on George Bush, Barack Obama, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Michael Richards, Apple, Rupert Murdoch, FEMA, Mitt Romney, the GEICO cavemen, Michael Jackson and others in the national life. Valedictories for James Brown, August Wilson, Hunter Thompson, Norman Mailer, Coretta Scott King, Gerald Ford, Norman Whitfield, Tim Russert and Michael Jackson are spirited salutes to indispensable voices in the public discourse. Throughout, he explores with honesty, empathy and a jagged wit the ways we transform the nation and the ways the nation transforms us. The American bandwidth is wider than it’s ever been before. This is part of how that happened.
About the Author
Michael E. Ross writes frequently on the arts, race matters, politics and American culture. He was born in Washington, D.C. and has lived in Germany, Chicago, Colorado, northern California, New York City and Washington state. A graduate of the University of Colorado, with a bachelor’s degree in journalism, he has been a reporter, critic and editor at various news outlets, including The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News and msnbc.com; and an adjunct professor at the Columbia University School of Journalism. His reviews, fiction, essays and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, The Times Book Review, Essence, Wired, Emerge, Mother Jones, Entertainment Weekly, the San Jose Mercury News, Konch, Salon, the San Francisco Chronicle, Quarterly Black Review, The Loop21, PopMatters,The Root and other publications. Author of the novel Flagpole Days (2003) and the essay collection Interesting Times (2004), he contributed to the anthologies MultiAmerica (1997), edited by Ishmael Reed; and Soul Food (2000), edited by Eric Copage. He blogs frequently at Culchavox, and lives in Seattle.