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Thanks, Obama

Thanks, Obama

I’ve had a complicated relationship with the 44th Commander in Chief.

For starters, I helped get him elected. I served on the New Media Team as a volunteer for his first presidential campaign in 2008. I got to work with some incredible people: Chris HughesArun ChaudharyDan Siroker, Michael Slaby, Gray Brooks, and many more, all of whom went on to do extraordinary things.

I was in Denver for the 2008 convention where, though not able to score an invite to the floor, I was able to witness an America divided by the hot button issues of the day, some of which are still with us: same-sex marriage, abortion, the war in Iraq, and immigration. I watched the DNC convention speeches with anticipation and excitement for the next eight years, fully swept up in the anti-Bush furor and pro-Obama fervor of the time.

Despite some misgivings, I was all in on Obama. I thought his vision was the right thing for the country at the time. I thought his story, and especially his race, were poignant symbols of the progress America had made. He didn’t need to play the ‘race card’ because his candidacy was the ultimate race card. He proved to America that leadership, eloquence, savvy and hard work transcend race and class. He was also the ultimate foil to eight years of George W. Bush: the president that America loved to hate. Bush was born rich and coasted to the presidency. Obama was born poor and worked his way into it. Bush was a clumsy orator. Obama’s words soared. Bush was the voice of the special interests and the past. Obama was the voice of the disenfranchised and the future.

When we pulled the lever for Obama we believed we were making the world a better place. For a brief moment in history, Obama made us believe that Hope and Change were achievable political values. When we gathered in Grant Park in Chicago on Election Day, the minute the California polls closed and CNN flashed its projection, the crowd was so swept up in the profundity of that history-shaking moment that time seemed to freeze. I hugged a stranger that night and we cried.

As Obama would say on his way out of office eight years later, reality has a way of asserting itself. There really was no post-racial America, no progressive wave, no hope, and no change. America hated Bush enough to elect the most liberal candidate in history, and America corrected itself two years later when the Republicans took back the House of Representatives. The post-Obama swing has arguably continued into the 2016 election, bringing us the biggest wildcard in American history.

Even so, for the first couple years, I had more or less a positive feeling about Obama’s policies, and politics, until 2011 or so when my economic and political thinking took a hard libertarian tack and I found myself alienated towards my former political idol and the Democratic Party I thought reflected progress. The economy didn’t magically get better; healthcare wasn’t magically solved. I went through a personal journey that paralleled, perhaps, that of many in my generation: disillusionment, alienation, resentment, political realignment. I was probably one of many who watched with excitement and anticipation in 2009 when Congress voted on ACA, hoping that it would pass, and three years later nearly lost my mind when the Supreme Court refused to rule it unconstitutional.

Obama was still the president, but for me, for years he represented the worst of American politics. In my view, he was the face of the arrogance of Washington DC. His rhetoric that I had once praised as transcendent became bitter and divisive. He condescended to the masses with placations and platitudes and they bought it hook, line and sinker. I pulled the lever for Gary Johnson in 2012 and never regretted it.

Then, strangely enough, in 2013, my relationship to Barack Obama changed again. Living in the liberal capital of San Francisco, despite our political differences I happily partnered up with Max Slavkin and Aaron Perry-Zucker of the Creative Action Network, whose first product was a folio of pro-Obama propaganda (or as we called it, art). As their first CTO, I spent the next year creating an ecommerce and art submission platform to sell a litany of poster campaigns geared towards progressive causes with impactful results, including See America which now has a great book selling in the national parks. In San Francisco, I found myself pulled back into the progressive network of creatives and intellectuals I had spent the previous two years trying to avoid. I came to see that, despite our disagreements on many issues, their hard work to make the world a better place was admirable, and many of them continue to be close friends.

All the while, Barack Obama was my president, and the distance between us started to shrink. Second term Obama was my flavor much more than first term Obama. I admired his work on criminal justice reform. I was extremely supportive of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and watched with dismay as that fell apart. His actions on Cuba and Iran were exciting. I even cheered Kerry’s recent foray into the thorny Israeli settlement issue. I celebrated when Obama ‘evolved’ on same-sex marriage, and celebrated more so in San Francisco the week the Supreme Court ruled it constitutional. Obama wasn’t perfect by any means, especially when it came to his expansion of drone strikes, surveillance power, executive privilege, his handling of Syria, and more. But over the last three years I have developed a newfound begrudging respect for the community organizer from Illinois.

Did Obama leave me, or did I leave Obama? And once separated, did he come back to me or did I come back to him? Did he become more centrist, more pragmatic in recent years? Or did we evolve towards each other, like a divided America dancing in disagreement towards a common truth? I know that my progressive friends feel somewhat betrayed by the Obama presidency, for the same reason that my conservative friends have felt warmer towards him in recent years. Maybe we all are changing in ways we wouldn’t like to admit. Or maybe Obama, the great pragmatist, has had his finger on the pulse of our generation in a way no one ever has.

Like all presidents, he leaves office with a mixed legacy. But for me, Obama was simply my president, for better or for worse. Like postwar Eisenhower, he is the president historians will feature when they turn the page into the 21st century. I think John McCain would have made a fine president, as would have Mitt Romney. But despite all my distrust of #44 and my concerns about his achievements, I have grown accustomed to That One and will be sad to see him go. Because, for better or for worse, America is turning the page again, and though we don’t know what the next chapter will bring, this one wasn’t all that bad.

In many ways, it is impossible for me to disentangle the history of Obama with my own history. It’s impossible not to think about the most powerful person in the world–someone who is always in your living room and on your computer screen–as part of your life. And like any other relationship, mine with Obama has had its ups and downs, and must now sadly come to an end. Not sadly because change, or even Trump, are inherently bad, sadly because Obama is the president I have gotten to know through the years and now he’s about to ride off into the sunset.

So, it is with only a tinge of irony that I close this obituary of my relationship with Barack Obama, happy to see the country still standing, hopeful for the next four years, and appreciative of the accomplishments of this undeniably impressive politician and man.

Thanks, Obama.


January 12, 20171 commentRead More
“Check Your Privilege” is Actually Just a Lousy Argument

“Check Your Privilege” is Actually Just a Lousy Argument













May 5, 2014Comments are DisabledRead More
We are Obsessed with Race, Not Racism

We are Obsessed with Race, Not Racism

Our obsession with race has surpassed and perhaps even magnified our problems with racism in America.

Let me explain what I mean. Since I’m white, I can’t speak to the personal experience of racism, and I wouldn’t try to do so. As an American, I am part of a society that has made identity politics a most incessant and obnoxious trope, and I have observed that the more opposed to this drivel people get, the more the boundaries of politically acceptable discourse solidify to exclude them (or should I say, us). There are things that just can’t be said anymore, things that we need people to say because without dissent, race politics becomes an orthodoxy, and orthodoxies are dangerous. That said, I have travelled to a very many places and interacted with a great deal of people of all backgrounds, ideas and identities. Almost every person I have met has been full of opinions about racism, despite the fact that few of them are people whom I would consider to be racist themselves. And I’m beginning to wonder if our obsession with race has reached a boiling point and we might need to rethink how we approach issues of race in this country before it boils over and causes some real problems.

For reference, I always look to South Africa, where I studied abroad, and to the particularly virulent, open racism that persists there 20 years after apartheid. In South Africa, everybody talks about race, all the time. It’s talked about with an openness and frankness that is surprising to an untrained American ear. I think we can learn a lot from South Africans in how they openly confront their racist past and spend every waking minute talking about it–as a result, there are no secrets, no closet racists, no sinister feeling of power behind a veil of magnanimity. In South Africa, racists white, black and coloured proudly declare their racism. It truly lays bear the shocking reality of racism; that it exists in droves, that it is self-perpetuating, that it results in bad justice, erosion of social cohesion, etc–these are things we know. But because South Africans talk about it so much, because they confront it and it is politically acceptable for public figures to say some of the most shockingly racist things, I found it oddly refreshing and somewhat hopeful. That maybe there is a post-racial future in South Africa after all.

But it is hard not to contrast the South African free discourse over race with our much more regimented, yet simultaneously boiling, discourse in America. We have confined ourselves to a very narrow and troubling politically correct discourse where the only thing it is permissible to talk about is how bad racism is and how racist white people are, and it has become completely impermissible to talk about the identity politics and tokenism which have resulted from this myopic obsession. As a result, the conversation about race and racism in America is troublingly one-sided. When I am engaged in a discussion about race, it is almost always about racism, the ism being the domain of racists and a racist society (depending on your worldview, this defines a relatively narrow or a very broad band of Americans). But in all this talk about racism, we are engaging in a more important discourse, a discourse on and around capital-R Race. The difference is that while “racism” can be easily used to segment the undesirables in our midst, race is considered not only an important preoccupation but a necessary one in order to combat racism, and thus race, not racism, is what enters the national consciousness and infects our discourse. In short, we no longer are obsessed with racists, we are obsessed with race.

What form does this obsession with race take in our society? We are racial compartmentalizers. We count minorities in positions of power and obsess over racial balance. We talk about racial “firsts” (first African-American so-and-so). We still can’t decide on a good definition of Hispanic. We try to “fix” racism with countless race-specific philanthropies and entitlements. When we encounter people or public figures that challenge our assumptions about race, the we get cognitive dissonance and the discourse gets wrapped up in it. Black men like Herman Cain and Michael Steele were commonly derided as Uncle Toms during their pinnacles of influence. (This isn’t just a racial problem–we even blame women like Marissa Mayer and Sheryl Sandberg for not being feminist enough, which is eerily similar to the time when Sarah Palin was being attacked by the feminist movement who apparently wanted a woman in power but only a certain kind of woman.) This systemic compartmentalization is rampant. We castigate white people with success for ignoring and/or not admitting their privilege. We castigate “minorities” (I hate that word) with success for not doing more to help other minorities. In the latter case, it is very discomfiting to see the expectations of people when it comes to diversity unhinged on those who are providing solutions.

If there’s ever a better exemplar of the problem of race in America, it’s President Barack Obama. Obama is our first black president, but he’s actually half black. It’s interesting how his mixed racial heritage rarely gets as much attention as his blackness. It’s as if there’s an unspoken rule that being biracial is too confusing for a racial narrative. He must be black, or maybe conservatives wouldn’t hate him as much, and he wouldn’t be different than every president that came before. But he’s also a possessor of a litany of American privileges that we usually associate with whiteness. He was raised in a white household by his white grandparents. He went to white colleges. How do we as Americans square that circle? Do we dare create a definition that challenges our inborn assumptions of race, or do we call him black and leave it at that? And if we have decided that a half-black man is either all black or all white, what sort of example is that supposed to set to mixed race children growing up in America, that they have to choose one or the other in order to have a place? Of course, if we make too much of a deal of his white heritage, we have also failed black kids in telling them that you can be successful if you’re black, but only if you’re actually white.

Our race discourse is about constantly deconstructing and reconstructing our racial narratives in order to make the most sense about ourselves. We all think about these things, even if we don’t talk about it. We are conditioned from an early age to internalize notions of race and culture, to be aware of racism, to know our racist history, to understand it. We embrace “diversity” and engage in an uncomfortable amount of social engineering in order to achieve some utopian post-racial future. At the same time, we are conditioned to only speak about race in euphemisms, to avoid offending (which often means avoid discussing) and to tread lightly in the public sphere on the subject. We also are very happy to shut down discussion of race, especially by white people–an uncomfortable ad hominem lobbed at white people who dare to criticize identity politics in America.

A bigger challenge to egalitarianism is that we can’t be satisfied as Americans all seeking for our piece of the American Dream. We can only be satisfied if every person fits neatly into a box on a census form and into a race coalition with its own community spokespeople. We need to conflate race and class, because the alternative is too unsettling. This is a problem because using “white” as a synonym for privilege ignores a very important factor of what constitutes racial “normality” in a society. It is fair to say that white people have a privilege in a white society. It is more accurate to say that X people have a privilege in an X society. Whatever X is in America, it isn’t strictly white. There’s a combination of looks, language, culture and history involved in X. There are plenty of white people with southern drawls who couldn’t land a job on Wall Street even if they had straight A’s. Our culture doesn’t work like that. There are also plenty of black kids growing up in Fairfield County, CT who often act, talk, and subsequently succeed like any white kid growing up in the same circumstance. Incidentally, they are often accused of “acting white.” This is part of the problem: that we use such terminology speaks to a very sad conflation between race and class in contrast to America’s multiracial, diverse reality.

X isn’t necessarily the same thing as white, and indeed, if we want there to be any progress on the racial front, we have to insist that X shouldn’t be white and it is possible, and desirable, to deconstruct the “white privilege” paradigm. This isn’t unthinkable. The definition of “white” itself has changed in history. One of the more interesting books I read last year, Nell Irwin Painter’s The History of White People, tells a fascinating story of how “white” has come to express different ethnic makeups in America. In the last 200 years alone, white has excluded, and then included in turn, people of German, Scandinavian and Irish origin. Imagine that in the late 19th century there was an entire contingent of scientists who didn’t consider Nordic people to be white enough!

I would have to mention Michel Foucault at this point because the parallels of racial discourse in today’s America to sexual discourse in yesterday’s England are too obvious not to bring up. Foucault observes that the people whom we regard to be the most uptight about sexuality were the most obsessed with it. People who spent every waking minute restricting new sexualities and perversities and in doing so opened up sexuality to a whole new universe of intrigue in science, the law, and medicine, in what he calls the Perverse Implantation. Rather than sexuality becoming more subdued, it became more accessible, with the prudish Victorian discourse on sex merely a catalyst for an unprecedented interest in sex, and indeed, it is often misunderstood to have been prudish in the first place.

We have a similar situation in America with race: we spend every waking minute thinking about it and in doing so create more obsession. We can’t get enough of race. Instead of pushing past racism, we are recycling racism into a new paradigm in which all facets of the racial puzzle are reconstructed, pushed into avenues of politics, art, science, the humanities, and thus continually re-examined, obsessed over. Call in the Racial Implantation. Instead of defeating racism, we are creating a new class of racists who, like the racists of old, believe their solutions to the race problem are progressive. They also tend to be inside an echo chamber where challenges to their outlook are deflected, often, ironically enough, with charges of racism.

Given these issues of race in our discourse, racism itself isn’t surprising. I would be surprised to find myself in any modern society today without racism. It either is an extremely natural human instinct in complex societies, or it is going to be a very bad habit to break. I think everyone will disagree on the best “solution” to racism, the discussion of which I think may be part of the problem, but c’est la vie. You can’t argue with the facts: America has racists, and whites sit at the top of the racial hierarchy. This makes a lot of people uncomfortable, including whites. White people, like myself, find it difficult to square their belief in an egalitarian society with the racial realities of our still predominantly white society. And that’s something that we can and should address, and there are plenty of ideas on how to do so. But the first step to solving a problem is recognizing a problem. And the problem, I believe, needs to include our obsession with race. We need to realize that our race discourse has added to, and perhaps even compounded the racism problem. I would like to see racism become just one part of a larger discourse where we look at ourselves first and foremost as perpetrators of a perverse race logic. Only then can we really begin to address the dreams of a post-racial future.

Thanks to Danilo Campos and Frances Low for reading drafts of this.

May 18, 2013Comments are DisabledRead More
First they came for the terrorists…

First they came for the terrorists…

The president starts spying on American citizens. Then he starts indefinitely detaining them. Then he starts exiling them. Then he starts executing them. All without due process. All without a speedy trial or a trial by jury, some without any evidence whatsoever. And all while people in the same party as the president defend his actions on the grounds of national security. Then the parties flip and the previous defenders of the administration start to show “concern” and its attackers become defenders.

It would read like a bad farce, but it’s true. And it is true not because we weren’t aware of what was happening, but because we didn’t care enough to do anything to stop it. “They’re all terrorists,” we tell ourselves. “The government wouldn’t go after them unless they had reason to believe they did something wrong.”

Something is definitely wrong when Pakistanis are rightfully protesting our government's actions whilst we remain disturbingly silent. Something is definitely wrong when Pakistanis are rightfully protesting our government’s actions whilst we remain disturbingly silent.Never mind that the Justice Department memo “justifying” the execution of American citizens abroad came out barely three weeks after the suicide of Aaron Swartz brought national attention to prosecutorial overreach on computer crimes, going after kids with hard jail time for exploration of computer systems no more harmfully than playing ding dong ditch.

Never mind that this is the same week that the two out of three branches of government are aggressively pushing to take guns away from law abiding citizens (even though the same government has no problem sending billions of dollars in unrestricted weapons to Israel and Egypt).

Never mind that the administration, with cover from the Supreme Court, has forced people to buy health insurance from megacorporations, while those same corporations now mysteriously have more power than they had when Obamacare was passed. And, not coincidentally, health insurance premiums are rising, not that we couldn’t see it coming.

Never mind that the executive branch continues to raid marijuana dispensaries that are operating legally under state law, and the most openly drug using president in history is secretly jailing thousands of nonviolent drug users like himself.

I fear that the greatest threat to liberty is not our government, but ourselves. That we would be so complacent in this farce as one by one our rights are trampled upon. That we would continue to defend our ideas as constitutional and the others’ as unconstitutional, when in reality we seem content to pick and choose the parts of the constitution we agree with and discard the rest. “Let’s give up on the constitution,” said one prominent constitutional law professor in December. How soon before more people believe that? How soon before government’s legitimacy crisis comes to a head?

It ends now. I’ll be calling my congresspeople today on the drone strikes issue. Please join me in doing the same.

February 6, 2013Comments are DisabledRead More
Brian is in the Kitchen

Brian is in the Kitchen

It was Thursday night and I found myself in the seizième arrondissement taking a video of my French friends taking a shot of Unicum for the first time.  Their faces were distorted in pain, a look that any Unicum pusher knows so well and delights in.  After our Unicum, we found ourselves at a bar at Trocadéro.  We closed down the bar and had to relinquish our seats so they could be stacked and stored as we finished our drinks.  Afterwards we all crashed, myself most of all after a long travel day.  And so began my long weekend that was all too short in my second favorite city in the world.

Paris for all its faults is a jewel of architecture, history and culture, and there is no better reminder of this than the endless flow of tourists who clog every nook and cranny of city during summers, pouring out of Notre Dame and the Louvre and cramming the metros with their camera lenses fixed skywards and their feet tripping on the legs of cafe tables.  But there are also the timeless Parisien scenes: the booksellers on the Seine, the waiters with immaculate black and white uniforms conjuring platters of foie gras and croque monsieur like magicians, the street performers, the omnipresent accordion sound drifting in the air.

Friday my host, Jonathan, went to work so I went to the left bank, to Shakespeare and Company.  It is not the same Shakespeare and Company Hemingway fondly remembered in A Moveable Feast, but it is at least half a century old and filled with books and tourists to read the books.  The reading room upstairs was nearly empty when I went upstairs and finished A Moveable Feast looking out on Notre Dame across the river.  It became the fifth Hemingway I have read, making Hemingway one of my most frequented authors.  I picked up a copy of Green Hills of Africa while there, and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by Joyce.  It seemed appropriate to purchase the books at their authors’ inspirational nexus.  Friday night I met up with Jonathan and he took me to shabbat dinner with his cousin and his girlfriend and two other friends.  Aside from the opening kiddush, the dinner was like any other and flowed with wine and rapid conversation.  Malheureusement my French competency is not what it might be and I found it very difficult to participate at speed with my hosts, who were gracious enough to include me in English several times in the conversation.  I found that it was much easier for me to understand the flow of conversation than to speak, and although many things slipped past me–notably all the joke punchlines–I was able to understand the humor of dialogue and participate as such.  Jonathan and I had discussed my libertarianism earlier that day, and he brought it up at the dinner table which led to a short interchange about the relative merits of American-style individualism and French-style communitarianism.  Jonathan and his friends are in the upper strata, more or less, of French society, so it was interesting to hear their take on French society and what they expected from the future.  Jonathan’s cousin and his girlfriend are moving to Singapore, and Jonathan will be trying to move to the US as soon as possible.  Critics of American exceptionalism will often point out how much better various indicators are in other countries in the world, especially Europe, but I found it revealing how desperately these young people in this particular class are trying to flee France, a country that, after all, has been very good to them and their families.  I heard many times how America was the greatest country in the world.  I also found it interesting one passionate defense of French socialism by a guest at the table, in light of the fact that most of the people she knows are trying to flee French socialism as soon as possible–and the new 75% tax imposed by François Hollande doesn’t help the situation.  At one point the subject of pig latin came up and I became the de facto educator of pig latin at the table.  My French friends had never heard of pig latin before, and were quite amused in their attempts to speak it despite their many errors.  Michael, our host, had particular trouble translating the “ay” sound, instead using “ah,” much to the amusement of his girlfriend.  One thing I noticed, being a passive observer of dinner conversation without the ability to participate, was the flow of conversation topics.  As the proverbial fly on the wall I was able to follow the conversation from elephants to caves to attics to rumors to politics to airplanes to consulting to business to chocolate and that was 4 hours.  I found the simultaneous attempt to follow the conversation and understand French and drink wine to be quite exhausting, but worth the experience.  It has only motivated me more to learn French much much better, a promise I made to Jonathan and I intend to keep.  Friday night we crashed and slept in the next day.

Saturday Jonathan and I met up with Michael for petit déjeuner where we had croissants and hot chocolate and toast with honey and orange juice.  Michael unfortunately is recovering from a fractured shin, so he is on crutches and our walking range was limited.  We drove into the city and parked on Île de la Cité.  As we got out of the car, someone across the Seine decided to dive in for an afternoon swim.  He paddled around in the river for a couple minutes before a patrol boat fished him out.  We crossed the bridge and descended upon Paris Plage, a new initiative whereby a “beach” has been built on the formerly paved bank of the Seine.  This beach is one lane of traffic wide and is basically a sand pit.  Many children play with sand pails and parents bring beach chairs, but this is not a beach.  I learn that Paris Plage was met with derision as a project, both for its cost and its disruption of summer traffic, which we got a taste of on our drive down the right bank.  It seems pretty silly in retrospect, but I suppose enough people are enjoying themselves on this “beach” to make it worthwhile.  The bank of the Seine also hosted a disappointingly awful dance trio who inexplicably drew a huge crowd.  After our brief excursion to the beach, we went back to the seizième and got sushi takeout for a picnic.  We picked up Michael’s and Jonathan’s girlfriends and all ended up at the park with our sushi and fruit picnic.  More French was spoken.  More English was spoken with me than before.  Wine was flowing.  After the picnic we went to the cinema on Champs-Élysées and saw Starbuck, a Quebecois movie about a sperm donor who, 20 years later, finds out he has 500 children that want to meet him.  It was an endearing movie but not that good.  It was in Quebecois French without subtitles.  I understood most of it.  After the movie we relaxed at home for a bit before going out for a party.  The party was good.  I learned that in France, many people learn English using textbooks starring a character named Brian.  The question is posed to the students, “Where is Brian?” to which the students respond, “Brian is in the kitchen.”  It thus became imperative to take a picture of Brian in the kitchen.  We did.  The party lasted until 5am.  I had a train to catch at 9am.  I crashed.  The French stayed out for two more hours.

Paris was cathartic for me.  This was my sixth time in the city.  No reason to do all the tourist stuff, although when I arrived I did walk for two hours from Châtelet to Rue de Belles Feuilles while on a conference call with Ustream, which my phone bill will be none too happy about.  But on the walk I passed by the Louvre, across the Pont des Arts, down Saint-Germain, across Les Invalides, to the Champ de Mars and around the Eiffel Tower to Trocadéro, and the next day I walked from Rivoli across Île de la Cité and Notre Dame to Shakespeare and Company, through the Latin Quarter to Pantheon and Jardin Luxembourg, and finally to Odéon and Place Saint-Michel.  So you could say I did most of the things tourists would do, although at this point I can do it without a map and I have a sense of ownership over my route.  Paris is my city, or so I hope it to be one day.  But the most important part about being in Paris for me was the soul of the city, the jazz music in the air, the smell of crêpes and waffles, the sweeping memories of bygone eras: kings, princes, all the wars and republics, the settling of the Seine, the height of power, the darkness of occupation, and through it all the constant beat of Gallic optimism.  There is no other place where roads and history and life intersect on the same metaphysical plane: past, present, future, left, right and center, night, day and eternity.

The next day I took the train to London at 9 in the morning.  The Eurostar train was high speed and whipped through the chunnel at breakneck speed, leaving us with our ears popped on both ends.  London is gearing up for the Olympics, but I saw none of it, opting to catch a train to Oxford to see my good friend for lunch, before turning around and coming back to Hampton Court Palace where my family rented the Fish Court to have a reunion, 16 years later, of our first family vacation.  It’s a full week of vacation for them, but I was only there for the night.  Dinner was at a new Lebanese restaurant in the town, and dessert was a bottle of Graham’s port bottled 1912–its 100 year anniversary.  It is hard to imagine how much different the world was when every person who made that bottle was alive and well and optimistic.  It has been only 100 years, a blink in history, but an eternity for a young mortal trying to imagine how dead and buried he will be when 2112 rolls around.  In the last century there were two world wars, three brutal totalitarianisms, the transformative liberalization of the global economy, the internet and the politics of interconnectivity, a cold war and a space age.  It is hard to imagine what will happen in the next 100 years.  The port was delicious and perfectly preserved.

At 5 in the morning on Sunday I got up and began my trek back to Budapest, with a Eurostar train from London to Paris Nord, the RER B from Gare du Nord to Charles de Gaulle, the EasyJet from Charles de Gaulle to Budapest T2, and finally a taxi to work where I finished out the work day with 2 meetings and a great dinner at Klassz in Budapest with my Ustream colleagues.  I was reflecting during a mad dash through Waterloo station on Sunday to make the train to Hampton how travel is the one thing I am truly exceptional at:  making ambitious plans, improvising, learning by direct experience, catching the trains on time but also lingering at the memorable and ephemeral moments along the way, and never having too much of a plan in order to avoid disrupting the discovery.  Nothing I have ever done or will do comes close to the experience of making it from point A to point B in as interesting and unique a route as possible, with as many things as possible accomplished along the way.

July 24, 2012Comments are DisabledRead More