Commentary & Opinion

This presidential campaign season is a time for clarification. If campaigns have any value over and above the megaphone effect of why one candidate is more desirable than the other, it is the chance to use a campaign as an educational forum. From my perspective, even silence or ambiguity can be revealing. In this season, President Obama has indicated the threat and direction of American foreign policy through ellipses.

Both candidates say they want to pull us out of the recession and put people back to work – to create jobs. Jobs, jobs, jobs, the election seems to be about jobs.

As we all know, the fate of the federal health care reform law is to be decided by voters this November.  There are those running against the law that argue that they want to “repeal and replace” the law. 

However, there has been no alternative offered by opponents – just vague promises, partial pledges and grotesque distortions of the federal law itself.

In the heat of the political season, it’s important to take a closer look at opponents’ promises.

The poet Frank Bidart’s “Inauguration Day,” composed for President Barak Obama’s first Inaugural, began with these lines: “Staring out across America I see, since Lincoln, gunmen nursing fantasies of purity betrayed, dreaming to restore the glories of their blood and state.”  These words projected a hope of return to earlier times of repression and the glory of purity restored.  It’s a hope that obviously lingers for some.

On rare occasion do I see a film that so challenges me, that has so much going on in it, that I come out of the theater thinking, “I must give this movie a second look.” One such film is CLOUD ATLAS, which I saw at the Toronto Film Festival back in September and which I will re-see upon its theatrical release.