Roger Cohen's American Stories

We live in a hyper-information age. Everyday, we are showered by today's world with information, news, emails, and many other junk texts. A lot of it is also our own fault actually, we contanstly and hapticly search for every new bits of information coming in, you know, emails, my space, you tube, or blogs (yes like this one, and like the person writing it now). We live in, William Mitchell's 1995 book, a City of Bits! Anyway, that brings me to the point I am trying to say... Every once in a while, flowing thorough this textual sewer, I would come across a jewel, a piece of art like this article below by Roger Cohen of NYT. This is a beautiful article that I want to archive in my blog so I can read it again. It shows me the profound nature of a work of writing. Something that can move, inspire, and make you excited to live the next day hoping to do the same good work. Crazy hah, but you know what I meant, right, writers out there! If not just read Cohen's article below.

October 30, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist

American Stories

By ROGER COHEN

Of the countless words Barack Obama has uttered since he opened his campaign for president on an icy Illinois morning in February 2007, a handful have kept reverberating in my mind:
“For as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on earth is my story even possible.”

Perhaps the words echo because I’m a naturalized American, and I came here, like many others, seeking relief from Britain’s subtle barriers of religion and class, and possibility broader than in Europe’s confines.

Perhaps they resonate because, having South African parents, I spent part of my childhood in the land of apartheid, and so absorbed as an infant the humiliation of racial segregation, the fear and anger that are the harvest of hurt — just as they are, in Obama’s words, “the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.”

Perhaps they speak to me because I live in New York and watch every day a miracle of civility emerge from the struggles and fatigue of people drawn from every corner of the globe to the glimmer of possibility at the tapering edge of the city’s ruler-straight canyons.

Perhaps they move me because the possibility of stories has animated my life; and no nation offers a blanker page on which to write than America.

Or perhaps it’s simply because those 22 words cleave the air with the sharp blade of truth.
Nowhere else could a 47-year-old man, born, as he has written, of a father “black as pitch” and a mother “white as milk,” a generation distant from the mud shacks of western Kenya, raised for a time as Barry Soetoro (his stepfather’s family name) in Muslim Indonesia, then entrusted to his grandparents in Hawaii — nowhere else could this Barack Hussein Obama rise so far and so fast.

It’s for this sense of possibility, and not for grim-faced dread, that people look to America, which is why the Obama campaign has stirred such global passions.

Americans are decent people. They’re not interested in where you came from. They’re interested in who you are. That has not changed.

But much has in the last eight years. This is a moment of anguish. The Bush presidency has engineered the unlikely double whammy of undermining free-market capitalism and essential freedoms, the nation’s twin badges.

American luster is gone. The American idea has, in Joyce Carol Oates’s words, become a “cruel joke.” Americans are worrying and hurting.

So it is important to step back, from the last machinations of this endless campaign, and think again about what America is.

It is renewal, the place where impossible stories get written.

It is the overcoming of history, the leaving behind of war and barriers, in the name of a future freed from the cruel gyre of memory.

It is reinvention, the absorption of one identity in something larger — the notion that “out of many, we are truly one.”

It is a place better than Bush’s land of shadows where a leader entrusted with the hopes of the earth cannot find within himself a solitary phrase to uplift the soul.

Multiple polls now show Obama with a clear lead. But nobody can know the outcome and nobody should underestimate the immense psychological leap that sending a black couple to the White House would represent.

What I am sure of is this: an ever more interconnected world, where financial chain reactions spread with the virulence of plagues, thirsts for American renewal and a form of American leadership sensitive to humanity’s tied fate.

I also know that this biracial politician, the Harvard graduate who gets whites because he was raised by them, the Kenyan’s son who gets blacks because it was among them that mixed race placed him, is an emblematic figure of the border-hopping 21st century. He is the providential mestizo whose name — O-Ba-Ma — has the three-syllable universality of some child’s lullaby.
And what has he done? What does his experience amount to? Does his record not demonstrate he’s a radical? The interrogation continues. It’s true that his experience is limited.

But Americans seem to be trusting what their eyes tell them: temperament trumps experience and every instinct of this man, whose very identity represents an act of reconciliation, hones toward building change from the center.

Earlier this year, at the end of a road of reddish earth in western Kenya, I found Obama’s half-sister Auma. “He can be trusted,” she said, “to be in dialogue with the world.”
Dialogue, between Americans and beyond America, has been a constant theme. Last year, I spoke to Obama, who told me: “Part of our capacity to lead is linked to our capacity to show restraint.”

Watching the way he has allowed his opponents’ weaknesses to reveal themselves, the way he has enticed them into self-defeating exhaustion pounding against the wall of his equanimity, I have come to understand better what he meant.

Stories require restraint, too. Restraint engages the imagination, which has always been stirred by the American idea, and can be once again.

My Ironman Buddy

Check out Hansen's blog here: http://hansent.blogspot.com/

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Halo Hansen, congratulation for the race !!! You did an amazing job, really!!! it's quite an inspiration for me. Sorry, couldn't come to cheer. I totally forgot about this marathon until Fan Ny told me on Sunday.

I hope sometime in the near future, you can share this experience with some of us, the preparations and the race: physical, mental and i am sure, as important as the other two, the spritual ones. Great job bro!

God Bless you, and... Always Strong! : )

- Bud

A Gray October Day

There is something interesting about leaving in a place with four seasons like here. It seems like you can remember better and more vividly what was happening or what was going on at the same time in the previous season. The sense of time is even more intense when the season is changing.

I was walking out of the office today, saw a very gray sky and a chill temperature. Another woman in red coat was walking in front me, a stark contrast to the the gray sky and an immense field of asphalt. That's when images of the past was flashing in front of me and brought me back to a day in October 2003. I had a bird-eye view of myself, an unease graduate student, waiting for a bus, exhausted after a studio class, worrying about rent, debt-collector, and a woman. I remembered that specific day with the mental details embedded in it because of the same seasonal condition, a dull day with gray sky and a little bit of chill.

Ode to My Family

ehm.. have been thinking about my folks at home, especially my brother. I haven't talked to him for so long. God, please bless him in everything he is doing right now. Amen. I also miss my parents. Ergh, maybe this is because of Angel, she just posted her family photo. The photo reminded me a lot about us 10 years ago, a big family with four kids, two girls and two boys. Their youngest is really just like me in our family photo, except that I am a little more handsome :>

topics for tonight

Tries,

Some topics we can discuss in tonight's interview with Prof. Liddle, start with general questions that ordinary people would ask, and maybe if we have time, can dive deeper into more specific issues.

1) Why we should vote? What's the significant of our individual voices? Why does it matter "this time"? What's at stake in Indonesia? What is direct election (pemilihan langsung)? Why is it important (or not)?

2) What's new and upcoming in this election? What's the hot topic? In US this year, it's the economy and the Irag war, how about in Indonesia, what's important for voters? Who's who in this election? Do you think Rizal Mallarangeng (OSU Alum) can attract young voters like Obama does this year?

3) What's the percentage of overseas voters (Indonesians leaving overseas) in this election? What's the roles of these overseas voters like us?

4) Discuss about democracy in general in Indonesia, put the upcoming election in a historical context of democracy in Indonesia since 1945. Discuss about the reformation project: How is it going during it's first decade (since 1999)? Has it slowed down, is it still developing? Is it in danger? Are we progressing as a society in democracy? We are possibly one of the largest democracy in the world after India and US, and the whole world will be watching us next year, just like what happened 4 years ago.

5) In his opinion, what we (the masses, ordinary people) should look for in the candidates next year? Is it their economic policy, religion, religious tolerancy (i.e fundamental islamists vs liberal islamists), past background (education, civil or military or technocrats, role in reformation, etc), their ability to bring concensus (ala SBY), agenda to fight corruption? This could tie into his paper about "voting behaviour".

Ok tries...there you are, my suggesstions for tonight, looking forward to it. See you.

- Budiman

this strange attachment...

Today, i got to tour a construction site of an office building in town done by a friend that is currently working with me. It was a great experience. I can feel his excitement, love, and this strange attachment to this thing called architecture that probably only us can understand. It reminded me again why I am doing what I am doing right now. It is really a silly profession. A passion, a curse, that made me staying up till 2.10 am doing things that I was not really obligued, professionally, to do, but still did it because I just 'morally' felt needed to. No, I do not consider myself workaholic. I will never get a wife if somebody read this, but I will still say it anyway: it becomes your baby, you know, just like Nk and Fi with their new baby. Weirdo! Hahah. One visiting architect in school mentioned about having that strange attachment too. It is that kind of a maternal relationship you have with the building you have been working on and have to release it to the owner when construction is completed. It's like a parent nervously sending a son/daughter off to college. There she goes, you are on your own.

In that trip, I was also happy that I could bring our two new interns who just got here from Kazan, Russia. They just got here last Saturday and probably still felt a little bit disoriented in a new place halfway from their home, literally and figuratively. I think I will try to befriend them as much as possible during their stay here. They reminded me of my time interning also in Shanghai. I felt estranged and dreaded at first for being in totallly new place. But I was very fortunate then to meet some really good people. I had a great time there both at work and after work hours exploring the city. Oh, I miss my friends over there, Dong Chen, Rabbit, and several others.

Now, back to the Russian interns again. They are staying in a hotel in downtown. And of course, they mentioned how strange that our city center was so quiet at night without any night activites. They had to walk so far on their first night looking for food and only got to eat some hot dogs. They said, it was the opposite of the urban life in their hometown in Kazan. Yeah, as a matter of fact, it was also very different from other big cities in Asia and Europe. But still, I think, this city, this place has it's own charm. Anyway, I gave them a quick tour of places they could go on our way back to the office. And then, I told them about the coming presidential debate tonight and how it might be entertaining for them to watch. They just smiled and, I think, sarcastically talked about their recent presidential election and how nobody really care. She even didn't know the name of the new president. I think their new president is Dmitri Meyedev or something like that. But that response was interesting and unexpected for me.

Ok. Next thing that will be exciting for me to do is to interview Prof. Wd together with Trs about our coming election, will keep you posted.