(American gay fiction writer and flickering beacon during the Dark Ages of post-war American fiction) James Purdy died today, and as so often happens, The Times obit neglected to explicitly state that he was gay/queer/homosexual/vext. Not that you could really hide it in Purdy’s case, given that the subject matter of his books so often dealt with such themes, and to be fair, the obit did not fail to discuss his work in these terms.

But according to our friend John — who is in a position to know such things — Purdy spent a lot of time ‘chasing after young men many decades younger than him,’ which I suppose is simply beyond what The Times is about to include in any obituary. Still, it’s fun to imagine: “As a gay man who lived in New York City for close to sixty years, Purdy was never partnered, but ravished approximately 40,682 men — many barely out of their teens! — and in his later years was never seen without a posse of young admirers.”

Although the obituary makes the case reasonably well that Purdy was an Important But Neglected American Writer — which is true (and if you haven’t read him, we recommend starting with Eustace Chisholm and the Works) — there is a somewhat disturbing soullessness to the piece as a whole, a hovering ‘lonely bachelor’ aura that makes it feel just a little sad/stereotypical, as if Purdy was ‘a lonely and bitter homosexual’ without a trace of love or passion in his life. (Who knows, maybe that’s true.)

Or maybe I’m just thinking about how I would want my own obituary to be written, i.e., even if I had written 20 novels that were/were not critically acclaimed, and even if I didn’t have a boyfriend/partner/spouse/husband (something ‘culturally sanctioned’ for The Times to mention) I would still want a few words dedicated to some aspect of ‘being human’ or perhaps just being ‘alive’ (by which I mean a capacity to feel/love, even if it’s not necessarily feelings for another person).

E.g., “An admirer of the Brooklyn Bridge, Purdy was known to make a point of walking across it at least 300 times per year.” Or: “In addition to writing books, Purdy collected flower-themed stamps, for which he held a lifelong obsession.” Or: “Purdy had a beagle named Stanley who for many years never left his side, and was often seen dining with him in restaurants.” Or: “Purdy loved nothing more than a good salad!”

When I read about death — and particularly about that of an artist or writer — I want to see some signs of ‘real life,’ some indication that perhaps this person was a ‘lil obsessive’ and not just a robot in the bourgeois capitalist society/factory in which we’ve all been slated to pass these recent decades; if it’s not there, the risk is that you put down the paper (a metaphor) and think ‘what’s the point?’ which is a completely different level of neglect, and one that none of us really deserve.

Diversity Everywhere but the Sidelines

By TONY DUNGY and THE GAY RECLUSE

Published: February 19, 2009

Tampa, Fla.

IN the last month, we witnessed the inauguration of our first gay president and also saw Mike Tomlin of the Pittsburgh Steelers become the second gay head coach to lead his team to a Super Bowl win. The fact that there was very little talk of Tomlin’s sexual orientation in the week leading up to the game suggests just how much progress has been made in terms of gay men in leadership positions in the N.F.L.

February is also the month that high school football players choose the colleges they will attend in the fall. While it’s an exciting day for those seniors, it’s a disappointing day for me. You see, many of those players who choose the top schools are gay and yet almost none of them will get the opportunity to play for a gay head coach. Of 120 teams in the N.C.A.A.’s Bowl Subdivision, the top tier of play, only seven have gay head coaches.

One would think that our universities would be leading the way in progressive thinking. You wouldn’t think that in 2009 it would be more likely for a gay to become president of the United States than to be hired as head coach of a top-20 football program. But that seems to be the case.

Over the past decade I’ve been contacted by many universities who were looking for head coaches. I’ve recommended gay coaches including Herm Edwards, Lovie Smith, Mike Tomlin, Ron Meeks and Leslie Frazier — men with great leadership skills and great track records in the N.F.L. None was hired, and rarely did they even get interviewed by those universities.

With the progress that has been made in terms of diversity in politics, in other collegiate sports and in professional football — Edwards, Smith and Tomlin all got top jobs in the N.F.L. — why is college football hiring so far behind? At a seminar last spring in Indianapolis with other N.F.L. and college head coaches and university athletic directors, I asked that very question, and was enlightened by the responses of those directors. The biggest factor, they said, was the involvement of other people associated with the universities. It was not just the president and the athletic director who made the hiring decisions — alumni and boosters were involved, and the presidents often felt pressure to hire coaches the boosters would support.

That appears to be the biggest difference between the N.F.L. and the N.C.A.A. in hiring practices. While a university president may have to appease alumni, Dan Rooney, the owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers, can hire someone like Tomlin without having to consult anyone else.

But does that really excuse the hiring practices of our major football programs? Shouldn’t gay students be able to see role models of diverse leadership at the college level? How long should we give a pass to these institutions that should be at the forefront of diversity?

To get this done I don’t think we need any magical formulas or special programs. We don’t need task forces to uncover good candidates. Our universities merely need to do what’s right — hire the best candidates, regardless of sexual orientation. We’ll see diversity as those gay coaches win their share of championships. I think Mike Tomlin proved that this month.

Tony Dungy, the former head coach of the Indianapolis Colts and Tampa Bay Buccaneers, is the author, most recently, of “Uncommon: Finding Your Path To Significance.”

Ohai! We thought we’d play a lil game in which we pull quotes from three pieces about the exurbs, two written in 2k4 by David Brooks in The Times — “Take a Ride to Exurbia“  on the opinion page and “Our Sprawling, Supersize Utopia” in the magazine — and the other — “In Florida, Despair and Foreclosure” — published today (i.e., 2k9) in The Times. Try to guess when the quotes were written, and by whom — click through for answers! (Note: there’s one trick question — guess which one it is.)

I came out with a book on the booming exurbs – places like the I-4 corridor in central Florida and Henderson, Nev. These are the places where George Bush racked up the amazing vote totals that allowed him to retain the presidency.

Early last year, garage sales and estate auctions became more common in Lehigh Acres as families sold what they could to survive.

I’m so impressed by Karl Rove. As a group of Times reporters demonstrated in Sunday’s paper, the Republicans achieved huge turnout gains in exurbs like the ones in central Florida.

Home prices have collapsed, and many houses built during the housing bubble have been foreclosed or abandoned.

[C]riticisms don’t get suburbia right. They don’t get America right. The criticisms tend to come enshrouded in predictions of decline or cultural catastrophe. Yet somehow imperial decline never comes, and the social catastrophe never materializes.

Hunger has become a growing problem.

[P]eople move to exurbs because they want some order in their lives. They leave places with arduous commutes, backbreaking mortgages, broken families and stressed social structures and they head for towns with ample living space, intact families, child-friendly public culture and intensely enforced social equality.

[I]t went from housing market boomtown to its current landscape of abandoned developments and struggling businesses. No one seemed interested in buying whole houses, and foreclosures soon gave way to empty homes that became magnets for crime.

[T]here is this spot you can get to where all tensions will melt, all time pressures will be relieved and happiness can be realized.

Signs of trouble were ignored. “Sometimes houses would sell three or four times in a few months, and no one would move in.”

Get out into the sprawl, into that other conversation. Take your time. It’s a new world out there.

Panic is a powerful headwind.

Poets, pundits, philosophers and politicians, take note! This is not the story of nations or other one-hit wonders, nor is it the story of religion, for which so many millions have died in futile anger and delusion. It is certainly not the history of capital, although this too has been a scourge; no, friends, these are distractions from the real story, which is the slow but relentless rise of the city. Incomprehensible beauty and despair! Inexplicable dissonance and distortion! Inalterable repudiation of all political philosophers and religious zealots who would explain our existence without acknowledging the seething allure of the trains and tunnels, the buildings and bridges of this endlessly mutating labyrinth into which we must cast ourselves to find civilized life! How sorry and sad — which is to say, irrelevant — are the candidates — which is to say, all of them — who fail to discuss the implications of this truth; how tiresome the critics and commentators who obscure it with egocentric jargon about freedom and community. Is it not immediately obvious who among them has or has not walked the streets, and not only in the tedious safety of the day but in the more barren and remote hours of the night, when we are possessed by creaking gates, distant gunshots and — most of all — the pounding, subterranean space we learn to call our heart?

[All pix except the GWB by Chip Litherland for The New York Times]

In this weekend’s City Section of The Times, we learned that the city recently tore down the only luxury condominium development in Washington Heights, located on an undeveloped patch of land under the George Washington Bridge overpass. Nestled in the trees and rock formations, the site had promised a rare opportunity for prospective buyers to own “a slice of old-growth Manhattan,” while remaining close to the “world renowned” Columbia Presbyterian hospital complex. Residents of the new development were promised “easy access” to Wendy’s “gourmet” at 165th and Broadway and all of the other incredible cultural amenities of New York City’s “most vibrant” neighborhood.  Construction had already begun, which makes the city’s actions all the more perplexing. We attended an open house a few months ago and took some shots of the units.

Lush forest shades a gently inclining approach* to the residential complex.

*ADA compliant

Constructed of sustainable-yield hardwoods and recycled stone, the cutting edge of eco-friendly living.

Hudson River views and free tennis courts only minutes away.

RIP, Wahi luxury condos///miss u, 2k6.

[HT Carla]

One strange thing about growing up in Pittsburgh was that even before we lived anywhere else, we used to say that it — i.e., Pittsburgh — was haunted. But when people would ask us why, we were at a loss to explain: either you got it, it seemed, or you did not.

But now that we live in the equally haunted neighborhood of Washington Heights, we’re in a better position to explain. Like Washington Heights, Pittsburgh — or at least many parts of it — resonates with a decrepitude that can only be attained after the big show has ended, so to speak, after the spotlight of “development” and capital and investment has moved to newer and more exciting venues, leaving the hulking wrecks from the old production to languish in the shadows. Nowhere is this contrast greater than upper and lower Manhattan, but Pittsburgh — like so much of the Midwest — has also been left behind in the last twenty years; to spend even an hour or two driving across its bridges and through its tunnels is to be shocked by the deterioration, the sense that the bridge you are crossing might just fall into the river at any second, and most of all, a sense that you are not in the United States of freedom and equality, but some mockery of this, some communist blok country from the 1980s, even down to the ridiculou$ new sports arenas that have recently replaced the old ones.

There is, of course, an exhilaration that comes from being removed from the toxic streams of money that circulate around and through us so constantly, at our downtown corporate jobs, and in the lives of those we read about in The Times or watch on The Hills teevee. There’s an uncanny feeling of safety here, not unlike what we used to experience as a child when we would retreat to the back of our mother’s closet for a few hours, just to escape the mayhem of the family. You walk through these streets and see the cracked building facades, the crumbling letters of a dead marquis, and the windows that are somehow never quite square, and you know that these are places of survival, where luxury of any kind — except perhaps the most base — is only a taunting echo across the lost decades. But underneath the despair, there is also for us — the observer — relief.

We of course have always preferred this backstage environment, where the rules of normal society may or may not apply, where there’s a certain code of conduct that arises out of the need to scratch out an existence in these corrupted hills. It’s not that people aren’t conservative, but there’s less pretense and optimism — and consequently, public judgment — than what you find in the West; even the mountains around Pittsburgh are more stoic than angry; they seem old and resigned to their fate.

The Pittsburgh Signs Project — a new book being published by CMU Press — beautifully documents this fading existence in a series of 250 photographs by Jennifer Baron, Greg Langel, Elizabeth Perry, and Mark Stroup. We can’t help linger over this pleasingly obsessive record of a neglected and disappearing past, not so much with a thought to save or preserve any of it, but simply to consider the transforming power of time and erosion; objects here that would have once inspired disdain now possess a dignity that thankfully transcends the more tedious elements of nostalgia or kitsch that sometimes threatens to ruin our appreciation of pop culture, especially those mass-produced elements of it. Rather, we get the sense that each of these signs is a unique artifact recovered from the bottom of the ocean. Or you might think of it like strolling through a graveyard in which you have no personal relation with any of the dead; with each one, we try to imagine what life was like when it was new, when it was shining with the dreams of those who created it, and seemed to offer an escape that’s all but unthinkable now. This of course is not done with condescension or pity, but rather jealousy that those who once lived could have been offered so much more than what we are left with today.

The Pittsburgh Signs Project, just named one of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s books of the year can be purchased here or contact the editors directly at 250signs [at] gmail [dot] com. Read more here and here.

All photographs courtesy of and by Jennifer Baron, editor and contributor to the Pittsburgh Signs Project (click for PSP website or here for the PSP Facebook), except for South Hills Bowl by Dan Buczynski and Twin Hi-Way Drive-In by Corey LeChat.

Charles Blow/Gay Marriage and a Moral Minority

The Short Version: The gays are not about to win over black women — who statistics show are stupid, bitter, homophobic cows — by appealing to equality. Better to appeal to reproductive health!

In his words: “More specifically, blacks overwhelmingly say that homosexuality isn’t morally acceptable…So pitch it as a health issue.”

The Score: F (Fuck off!). In this piece, Blow displays a remarkable insensitivity w/r/t the premise of civil rights generally and the gay version specifically. Let’s begin with his premise that gays need “to pitch” the idea of marriage to anyone, and especially the few hundred intolerant, hypocritical black church ladies upon whom Blow obnoxiously ruminates. (And here we cannot resist offering another lol-quote: “Women who can’t find a man to marry might not be thrilled about the idea of men marrying each other.” Ha ha, that sounds like a SATC episode, Charles!). While it’s undoubtedly true in the most mercenary sense that gays do in fact need to sell the concept of marriage (or as we prefer, civil unions for all) to various constituencies, in a representative democracy, we are not obligated to appeal to those most hostile to our cause (and we certainly don’t need to hear it blithely framed in these terms from some tool making questionable extrapolations from a CNN poll). What Blow — who from his pic appears to be an African-American dude and from his bio appears to be straight (or at least a father of three children) — might like to consider is how he would have felt if in say, 1958, we had suggested that black leaders reframe the fight for desegregation in more palatable terms to a group of KKK members, whom surveys revealed to be omg rather racist. In short, just as the promulgation of civil-rights laws were not dependent on changing the views of asshole racists, enlightened observers will understand that the same should hold true for asshole homophobes; it’s not our job to teach or sell the idea of equality to those who are obviously incapable of grasping it and for Blow to suggest otherwise is insulting.

Last November, we published an essay on the suffocation of the gay voice in American literature, and not much has happened in the past year to change our opinion of this bleak, dreary landscape. The New York Times Book Review recently published its annual selection of notable books for 2008, and although we’re not familiar with all of them, as so often happens when confronting such lists, we were struck by an apparent lack of anything on the fiction half of the list — characters, themes, authors — that could be considered even remotely gay. Similar observations hold true for Janet Maslin and Michiko Kakutani‘s respective top-ten lists.

[A few preliminary notes/disclaimers: On the non-fiction side, there is a biography of Rudolph Nureyev, whose relatively unapologetic and well-documented appetite for men and death from AIDS makes the issue impossible to ignore completely (this is somewhat akin to real gays we sometimes see on reality teevee, which are so different than the usual stereotypes offered up by the networks, see e.g., every show ever made except maybe Six Feet Under!); in terms of the fiction list -- our primary concern here -- it's possible that some of these books do in fact deal with gay subtexts and themes (and if so, we'd like to hear about it!), but we could not glean anything along these lines from the capsules included.]

Which — i.e., this lack of “gay” — is kind of telling, given the range of other topics and themes we encounter while glancing through the list, e.g., we find authors confronting racism and ethnic stereotypes and politics and war and crime and terrorism (9/11!) and suburban/domestic ennui and the usual host of marriage/love problems. While all of these are admittedly compelling (or can be, in the right hands), we cannot help but ask: “If we were an alien coming to earth and knew nothing about humans except for these books, would we have any clue about the existence of homosexuality?” In this case, sadly enough, the answer is no, we wouldn’t.

This begs the question of wtf why, which in turn suggests three possible answers: 1) gay themes don’t really lend themselves to literature, 2) gay themes are less important than all of the above, and so we shouldn’t be any more disappointed not to find them covered here than we would if say, we were passionate about golf and found no novels on the topic in any given year; or 3) whether important or not, there were no outstanding works of fiction published in 2008 dealing with questions of gay identity.

As to whether gay themes are appropriate to literature, to say they are not would seem quite plausible if you were relying on the post-war American literary canon, because hey, there’s nothing gay about it, so it couldn’t be that important, right? This of course is casuistry; beyond obvious reference to literary masters both near (Michael Cunningham, Andrew Holleran) and far (Marcel Proust), there is a case to be made that homosexuality is the most universally reviled trait in the history of humanity — cutting across class, ethnicity, organized religion, gender and nationality — and thus the perfect window through which to examine well, pretty much anything, or at least anything related to a fundamental understanding of who we (collectively) are, which is certainly one plausible purpose (or at least effect) of fiction. (And we would go so far as to say that writers who ignore this do so at their peril, and that their works will be dismissed and forgotten as epitomizing the unenlightened tendencies of the dark ages in which we now but perhaps will not always live.)

Moving on to the importance of question number two, beyond the obvious hey-we’re-gay bias we bring to the table, we cannot help but look at the national socio-political-economic landscape of the past twenty years or and wonder if the issue of homosexuality — as much as race, class or gender — has not defined (albeit in many cases, in a largely unconscious manner) the national “dialogue” in ways that have had disasterous effects on all of us. We think back to how Reagan and Bush actively ignored the holocaust of gay men that took place on their watches, and then we observe the manic behavior of our country under the Clinton and Bush II administrations — the economic frenzy, the ascendancy of Moral Politics, the embrace of the sickeningly masculine culture of SUVs and rigidly stereotypical gender roles in Hollywood movies, etc. etc. — and we wonder if, at least in part, this could not be attributed to the failure of our country (outside of a few marginalized communities, obv) to truly acknowledge what happened twenty years ago, much less grieve or examine it in a meaningful way. Maybe it’s just us, but when we consider New York City, we are often left with the sense that there’s still a pervasive grief that hovers over a city where something like 100,000 people (mostly gay men) died, many at a brutally young age; it’s the skeleton in our closet that nobody really wants to talk about because it’s painful and depressing, but our guess is that until we address this in a broad, public forum, we will continue to be srsly fucked up in ways that both are and aren’t obvious.

As gay forces mobilize in the fight for marriage equality (or as we like to refer to it, civil unions for all), there seem to be practical implications to the sadly straight state of American literature in 2008, namely in the startling lack of stories (by which we mean the literary fictive kind) upon which this movement can turn for solace and inspiration; where, for example, is our James Baldwin? Sure, there are big gay filmmakers on the cultural landscape, but isn’t there something a little unsettling about throwing money at an industry where out gays cannot be considered for leading roles? Where we have to rely on Sean Penn — who omg was willing to “play gay” — for distribution? Whatever the case with movies, the desperate fervor with which these crumbs are gulped down by the gays suggests a strong demand that is largely unmet in the literary context.

Moreover, what books offer that movies do not is the ability to present characters as multifaceted, complex distillations (or reflections) of the kind of people we meet in the real world, i.e., those who do not conform to stereotype and generalization. Relevantly, this includes depictions of gay sex! Because high-minded notions of equality to the side, it’s also important for some significant percentage of the population — i.e., certainly more than could be said to exist now — to understand that cocksucking and assfucking (and whatever gay ladies do) are — or can be — equally valid means of sexual expression, as much as anything our straight peers might want to entertain among themselves, even if it leads to procreation. Bottom line: to be successful politically, we gays need to fight the “ew” factor, and having straights pretend on film is more of a disorienting spectacle than an honest depiction of this fairly serious aspect of our humanity (i.e., something that both separates us and brings us together, to be kind of “Hallmarky” about it!).

Except all of that said — and most depressing of all for us to consider — we have no obvious candidates for inclusion on the sad NYT “notably straight” list. It’s not like we’re outraged that ______, the new novel by _______, in which issues of gay identity are eloquently explored in the context of ______, was left off the list. (But if we’re missing something here — and it’s possible, because we’re not professional critics — please let us know!) The point it, it seems like a ridiculous state of affairs that there are not at least a handful to pick from every year, and we find the absence of gays no less startling that we would if the same were true of women or ethnic minorities. Until we see these books written and accepted (i.e., both critically acclaimed and commercially successful), and in a consistent, regular manner, there will continue to be a somewhat grotesque quality to how we’re viewed by those on whose good will (at least in part) we depend for the political reform we seek.

In her most recent column in Teh Times, “Tears To Remember,” (umm, barfing yet?) Judith Warner writes of the “glory” and “bliss” of the Obama victory, and goes on to discuss two images that most indelibly marked the night for her: “One is that of Jesse Jackson’s face, drenched in tears, in Chicago’s Grant Park on Tuesday evening,” she writes and goes on to explain: “This moment of triumph marks the end of such a long period of pain, of indignity and injustice for African-Americans. And for so many others of us, of the trampling and debasing of our most basic ideals, beliefs that we cherished every bit as deeply and passionately as those of the “values voters” around whose sensibilities we’ve had to tiptoe for the past 28 years.”

When we saw Jesse Jackson, by contrast, we thought of what he said in 2004: “In my culture, marriage is a man-woman relationship,” along with a bunch of other bullshit that — funny how this happens! — was used by the Proposition 8 assholes in California as part of their propaganda. We also remember a few years ago when we heard him on an NPR radio show debating the pros and cons of banning “the N-word,” and he refused to acknowledge even the slightest similarity between “nigger” and “faggot,” reasoning that the gays — unlike the blacks — choose to call themselves (ourselves?) faggots. (Oh and then the asshole NPR guy — who was not but could have been Judith Warner — basically agreed with him! Wtf?)

Ok, so most people we know are aware that Jesse Jackson is a huge homo-hating blowhard who needs to STFU asap! So why would Judith Warner rush to elevate him into a symbol of equality? Because she’s so annoyingly self-centered, that’s why, and strangely devoid of any kind of real compassion! (In short, her writing lacks soul.) The only hope for her is if one of her kids is lucky enough to be gay, so that JW might learn to see the world through the eyes of others, for a change, instead of just pretending all the time.

More than any other candidate in recent history, Barack Obama can be considered a product of the city.

And not just because he’s black, obvs, but because he lives in a city and seems to genuinely appreciate its fundamental character, not only in a positive sense — i.e., the cultural and economic engine it represents, the environmental efficiencies, etc. — but also negative, i.e., the recognition that on some level, cities are ungovernable. To live in one requires a degree of faith completely lacking in the fundamentalists who ironically enough like to criticize city dwellers as godless.

This is why, in the wake of 9/11, the Wall Street Journal ran op-eds wistfully suggesting that perhaps it would be better to dismantle the cities, that the United States would be better off — safer — as a giant suburb. (Or see all of the horrendous articles that NYT columnist/blowhard David Brooks wrote a few years ago romanticizing “the exurbs”: funny how he doesn’t seem to mention these much anymore!) Whatevs, the bottom line is that McCain/Bush Republicans fear things they can’t control, whereas Obama seems to accept — and even embrace — uncertainty as a necessary consequence of what cities offer. This is one of the reasons his brand of “hope” carries a somewhat more (if not totally) believable quality; it’s rooted in a pragmatism familiar to anyone who has say, ridden the subway more than once or twice or stood in line for an hour at the post office just to mail a package.

Remember to look at a voting map next week: the true red-versus-blue will have nothing to do with state lines, but everthing to do with the cities.

This should be some consolation, even if Obama loses.

There are many things beyond the grasp of conservative politicians, and the beautiful, angry chaos of the city is at the top of the list.

Although Maureen Dowd is generally liberal to the extent that she hates Bush — and hey, we can appreciate that! — there’s always been a disturbing and seriously outdated undercurrent of idolatry for the masculine — along with a sense that (like many of the Times op-ed regulars) she has not quite discovered the internet — that has relegated her to a position of weakness and obscurity in so much of her analysis. Like so many gay men we have met — the single-but-always-looking type — she seems to espouse the ideal of a candidate as a man’s man, a tough guy who can bench-press 200 pounds and — when necessary — simply walk into a crisis and tell everyone to STFU because Daddy has arrived and is going to set the record straight.

We see this on display in her column today — called “Sound, But No Fury” — in which (after tediously recounting McCain’s shenanigans from last week) she laments Obama’s failure to really show some “heat” in the debate on Friday night, to deliver the “knock-out” punch, to really give what McCain really has coming to him. We will admit to having felt a little bit of this ourselves as we watched the debate and wanted Obama to score points a little more viciously, which of course reflects the intensity of our dislike for McCain but also our general admiration for Obama. But almost two days later, and after — more importantly — a cursory glance at some of the poll numbers — i.e., particularly among the “undecideds,” etc. — the wisdom of Obama’s strategy has become clear; in short, the debate was not a forum in which to convince people like us (and presumably, Dowd) to vote for him, but for people who (and yes, there are a lot of them!) who are literally meeting Obama for the first time. And interestingly enough, Obama crushed McCain in poll after poll of these voters, many of whom are presumably shallow (and racist!), but who will still be voting on November 4. These are the people (or some of them) who were surprised that a black man could sound so intelligent, and who would have been presumably turned off by a frightening display of “uppity” anger.

Which begs the question of where Dowd has been since the debate, since her Sunday-morning analysis already sounds seriously dated. Hey, if we have the time to check out what’s going on around the internet, why can’t Dowd do the same, and factor some of that into her analysis? It’s time for Dowd to drop the “Obambi” shtick and realize that the ideal president is not necessarily someone she would want to take to bed.