The news on cable last night had to do with Jimmy Carter’s interview with Brian Williams, in which he bluntly said much of the enmity toward Obama was guided by racism. “I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he’s African American,” said the former president (and Georgia governor).

Meanwhile, members of the House rebuked South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson for shouting “You lie!” at the president last week while trying to distance themselves from the notion, articulated by Maureen Dowd and others, that the outburst was motivated in part by racism. “I did not take a racial connotation from Mr. Wilson’s remarks,” said Rep. Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the majority leader. Wilson did not, after all, add “boy” to the end of his remarks as Dowd suggested he wished to.

And then there was this excerpt from yet another Bush book by former White House speechwriter Matt Latimer, in which GWB is quoted weighing in on the talent who would replace him. He presciently called the McCain campaign a plane crash in the making (and dismissed Sarah Palin as “the governor of Guam”) but said this about Obama:

“After one of Obama’s blistering speeches against the administration,” Latimer writes, “the president had a very human reaction: He was ticked off. He came in one day to rehearse a speech, fuming. ‘This is a dangerous world,’ he said for no apparent reason, ‘and this cat isn’t remotely qualified to handle it. This guy has no clue, I promise you.’ He wound himself up even more. ‘You think I wasn’t qualified?’ he said to no one in particular. ‘I was qualified.'”

Leaving aside the question of which candidate was more qualified when headed for the presidency, I was struck by Bush’s use of the word “cat.” I don’t think 43 went around using hepcat jive when addressing most issues, though it’s fun to think of Lord Buckley as secretary of state. And I can’t imagine the daddy-o in chief calling anyone else a cat; I think it was some sixties knee-jerk reaction, a shortened version of “spade cat” which makes one wonder what other visions our Condoleezza-loving ex-prez had dancing in his head. 

I was never naive enough to think that Obama’s election meant we had transcended racism in this country, and it was no surprise to see that the states where he lost looked like a map of Dixie. But I didn’t expect the specter of Bush going all Superfly on us, of Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor sharing a smoke and a smile in heaven. Can you dig it?

Took my kids to see Hair this weekend –the Broadway revival of the sixties musical, not the stuff in the trap of my daughter’s shower, though I’ve showed her plenty of that. The last musical I had seen was South Pacific, back in the spring, and that had set me to thinking about my parents’ youth: my father served in the Solomon Islands, my mother met him in the Marines not long after. Hair was a different sort of flashback of someone’s youth — though not exactly mine. 

“So were you like that, Dad?” my daughter whispered during the first act as the Tribe gamboled across the stage. 

I looked like that, I guess, though I never really felt like part of the tribe. Maybe it was my age, the timing of being at the tail end of the baby boom. I remember going to see Hair at the Curran Theater in San Francisco in 1969 with other members of my high school drama club. Before the show I ducked into a head shop at the foot of Haight Street with Nancy Lardner. We were admiring the drug paraphernalia beneath the counter when she became aware of the weekend hippie ogling her in the doorway. 

“Far out,” said the guy. He wore a turtle neck and a pendant and had his two extra inches of hair combed down over his forehead. “I can dig it.” He was practically licking his lips looking at Nancy. 

“That guy is giving me the creeps,” she said as we left, and if we had ventured up into the Haight-Ashbury we would have seen more signs of the dying scene: hard drugs were replacing the free acid, teenage runaways were the prey of chicken hawks. 

Some of us already thought the musical was kind of square then, with the cardboard cutouts of parents the kids used for target practice and the kind of boring trip scene that makes up most of the second act. But then, as now, there were moments like sparks, especially the finale when the doomed Claude, headed for Vietnam, sings the opening lines of the big finale, “The Flesh Failures (Let the Sunshine In).” It’s chilling still and the revival manages to cut through ages of irony and get back to the heart of youth’s eternal questioning. 

I was struck by another irony: my parents willing sacrifice to a greater cause, a just war, and our generation’s sense of being sacrificed for an unjust war. But there wasn’t time to explain that to my kids. My son left at intermission to go to a party, and my daughter fell asleep. Outside the theater they were selling official Hair bandanas, fifteen bucks a pop. You could use one to wipe your eyes.

My son and I went to MOMA yesterday to take in Monet’s Water Lilies, or dive in I should say. The 40-foot wide triptych (which I vividly recalled from the last time they did this show) is the kind of canvas you can disappear into and many of the museum’s members seated before it appeared to be quite lost. 

We then took a stroll though some of MOMA’s permanent collection, and hence a history of modern art (Pollock, Rothko, Rauschenberg, Warhol) — sort of a downward arc for me. By the time we got to the seventies I found myself thinking of food, and I’m happy to report that the cafe on the second floor (thanks to Danny Meyer) has the best grub of any museum I’ve ever visited. The absence of surly servers was disorienting, though. 

Even more discombobulating was the way a number of visitors now experience museums: through their iPhones. My son was taking pictures of different paintings that struck his fancy (one of Jasper John’s flags, Picasso’s Charnel House) but soon I realized half the people there were doing the same thing — and quickly. Stop, point, click, move on. And a number of them took pictures of the wall text too, the better to later read up on what they couldn’t stop to savor.

Huh? To me the great joy of going to look at paintings lies in just that. It’s one thing to read about Pollock, or see a movie about him, and something else altogether to stand before one of those massive drip paintings and get some sense of the action and emotion that went into making them. if you want little images of art you can find them online, better than anything you can capture with your phone. For a lot of people it seems to be a way of charting their existence, a sort of Kilroy-was-here approach to art and life. Maybe they’re making some sort of statement, like Banksy — some sort of massive prank, a work of art in itself. The upside is that it leaves me more time to linger. 

Labor Day in Brooklyn means the West Indian Day parade (a must to avoid unless you are a politician, West Indian or a fan of noise and traffic); the ability to park almost anywhere, since half of the city is elsewhere; and stories about unemployment, like this one that dominates the front page of the New York Times this morning. 

With hard core unemployment numbers approaching ten percent nationwide, it’s easy to ignore the other bad labor news: that there has been essentially zero job growth over the last ten years, for instance, or that the idea of job permanence seems as quaint to those about to enter the work force as the reruns on TV Land. But the irony of a day of respite from work for a nation looking for same is inescapable. 

I’m no Thomas Friedman (and tend to think that the relentlessly positive thinking of world-economy boosters like him is partly what got us into this mess) but it seems pretty obvious to me that things will never be the same, work wise. In a culture that is still defined by profession (“And what do you do?” is still the second or third question being asked of strangers at barbecues across the country) we have lost our driving wheel. Maybe it’s time to change the question. 

As the current health-care hysteria reminds us, Americans don’t like to be compared to Europeans. They have a month off, guaranteed, sure, and far more protection when fired from a job than we will ever have. But they don’t make as much! jingoists will declare. And they can’t buy guns at the corner store. But you can go for months in France, or Italy, or Holland without someone asking what you do for a living. There the point is still to spend time with family and friends; the work is just the way you get to that luxury. 

Maybe we’re entering a national period of self-discovery and reinvention, and the fear-mongering, nostalgic baying of Glenn Beck and his ilk represents the dying throes of mastodon caught in the tar pit. That means the rest of us need to find a way to judge ourselves and others not based on profession, or wealth, or status, or celebrity but something more intangible and personal. Since we’re all in this together (really!) maybe we should compare aspirations and hopes instead of vacations and paychecks. The next time you meet someone at a party try asking them, “What do you dream?” See if they walk away.