As of this morning, PS3 owners should notice a new icon under the video section of the menu: Netflix. The PS3 gained the ability to stream Netflix back in November of 2009, but it required using a special Netflix disc and the user interface now looks outdated compared to newer offerings from Apple TV and Xbox 360. (The Nintendo Wii can also stream Netflix without a disc now as well.)
Photo credit: Matthew Moskovciak/CNET
Part of this is of course because she is a Republican who served under a deeply unpopular president. After the N.A.A.C.P. dutifully honored her with a President’s Image Award in 2002, the black Columbia historian Manning Marable dismissed Rice as a “leading race traitor” and the award as “accommodation” to an antiblack corporate establishment. Around the same time, black audiences chuckled approvingly when Amiri Baraka read the line “Who know what kind of Skeeza is a Condoleezza,” from his poem “Somebody Blew Up America.”
Yet there is more to it than that. Rice’s public self-presentation is distinctly impersonal. Unethnic, for one, but shading into outright ineffability. One grapples for an adjective to describe her personality, even after reading her autobiography, “Extraordinary, Ordinary People.”
She would have us believe that her dazzling journey, from growing up in segregated Birmingham to helping to lead the world, can be credited to attentive parents, the “extraordinary, ordinary” folk of the title. Yet it becomes clear that Rice has always been a wunderkind singleton. As a result, one detects a touch of the perfunctory in the family aspect of her tale, as well as a disinclination toward serious introspection.
Rice’s parents, both educators, provided a fine environment for germination. Rice grew up in the parallel universe that middle-class black parents in the segregated South built for their children, a world of socials, bowling and bonnets, with black children from “rough” neighborhoods kept at a distance. Her recollection of her parents all aflutter trying to teach her about the birds and the bees plays like something out of “Father Knows Best.”
As a young piano student, Rice liked to imagine herself as Mozart’s wife, and in 1968, when she was 13 years old, she spent afternoons mimicking ice-skating moves to Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony. No one in this era was tarring any of this as “white,” and parents insisted that blacks had to be twice as good as whites to succeed. Rice notes, “This was declared as a matter of fact, not a point for debate.”
All of this was ordinary for middle-class blacks in that time and place. What wasn’t ordinary was Rice’s coming out of a political science course at the University of Denver so entranced with Russian history that she decided to become a Soviet specialist. It does not discount black people’s wide range of interests to say that in the early ’70s, Soviet affairs was an unusual career choice for a black woman raised in Jim Crow Birmingham. Members of this first generation of black academics much more commonly sought to explore the black past and present.
You would never know this from Rice’s breezy account of this period in her life. She sometimes sounds like a white debutante from somewhere in Connecticut, as if black people from the Deep South always named their cars after the protagonist of their favorite Russian opera (hers was “Boris Godunov,” for the record). We learn little about Rice’s inner life as she sails to one triumph after another, as a Stanford fellowship becomes a tenure-track assistant professorship, the Council on Foreign Relations sends her to Washington and next thing she knows she’s working at the National Security Council, getting appointed provost of Stanford, and fielding calls from George Bush père, who wants her to meet his son for some foreign policy brush-up.
The rest we know. Yet we will need biographers to give us more than Rice does about her actual work and the reasons for its rapturous reception. Her book comes close only in furnishing scattered childhood evidence of a furiously disciplined, even insular, individual. Rice reminds us that she liked the Temptations and Led Zeppelin and admits a tendency to procrastination (one she has apparently indulged only rarely over the past 30 years). However, this is also someone who as a girl encouraged her father to rat out local kids who were having an unchaperoned party; refused to settle for the kiddie plate in restaurants; and as a teenager adhered enthusiastically to a schedule that had her up at 4:30 for skating practice, followed by school at 7, piano lessons and more skating afterward, and bedtime by 9:30. Plenty of her peers, even the above-average ones with self-sacrificing parents, would have considered this schedule unthinkable.
This singularity presumably helps explain the Republicanism that all but a sliver of her black generation rejected. Her explanation is that she’d rather be ignored by Republicans than patronized by Democrats, but this suggests an ironic, back-door motivation that does not correspond to her general politics, upon which she would find little disagreement from Michael (as well as Shelby) Steele. “There are no excuses and there is no place for victims,” she says she was taught. She rejects the idea that one needs mentors who “look like you,” as well as the term “African-American.”
Yet Rice is not deracialized in the way some suppose. It would be hard to be, growing up in Birmingham in the ’50s. She knew the girls who died in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, and reminds us that to blacks of that era, the immediate response to John F. Kennedy’s assassination was terror that a Southerner was now in the White House.
Despite reports to the contrary, she favors affirmative action, albeit in the sense of outreach rather than so-called diversity quotas (although her comments here reveal a level of ambivalence about aspects of implementation). At Stanford in the 1990s, she helped found the Centers for a New Generation, a youth-education program in depressed East Palo Alto; and she acknowledges that her own rise at Stanford, early in her academic career, was facilitated by the university’s affirmative-action efforts.
We learn these things as facts, but over all, “Extraordinary, Ordinary People” is oddly detached for an autobiography. People like Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Maya Angelou are fully present in their childhood recollections of similar circumstances in a way that Rice never is; she often seems to be watching rather than writing about herself. Those interested in her romantic life, for instance, will have to be satisfied with elliptical glimpses. (She didn’t marry her main college sweetheart, the Denver Broncos wide receiver Rick Upchurch, because he mysteriously “had too many irons in the fire.”)
In general, her political aperçus rarely go deeper than this: “But the war left the Iraqi dictator in power, able to threaten his neighbors and oppress his people. That would be a problem for another day.” Nor is this “Memoir of Family” an insider’s report on Rice’s life after 2000, to which she devotes a single page: the last one.
If there is a lesson from Rice’s book, it is that the civil rights revolution made it possible for an extremely talented black person (a woman, no less) to embrace a race-neutral subject and ride it into service as secretary of state, all the while thinking of herself largely as just a person. That the story is not exactly exciting can perhaps be taken as confirmation of how considerably times have changed.
John McWhorter teaches at Columbia University and is a contributing editor for The New Republic and City Journal.
For the second year in a row, the nearly 54 million retirees and other Americans who receive Social Security benefits will not get any cost-of-living increase in 2011 in their monthly checks, government officials announced Friday, renewing debate over whether the system offers enough help in a weak economy.
The absence of any growth in Social Security checks for consecutive years is unprecedented in the 31/2 decades that payments have been adjusted automatically based on the nation's inflation rate.
The news that retirement benefits will remain static was part of a trio of developments on Friday that drew attention to lingering effects of the recession. Taken together, the new reminders of the country's economic fragility carry large political stakes, coming 21/2 weeks before a midterm election in which the deficit and jobs are paramount concerns among voters.
In the White House and on Capitol Hill, Democrats immediately responded with fresh calls to give extra money to older Americans, a potent voting bloc, and other people who depend on Social Security. Republicans disparaged the idea, contending that it would deepen the deficit and skirt a more fundamental need to put the retirement system on solid financial footing for the long term.
While the parties argued in Washington, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke signaled during a speech in Boston that the Fed was prepared to undertake a new round of unconventional efforts to spur economic growth, with inflation persistently low and unemployment high.
Separately, the Obama administration reported that the federal budget deficit for the fiscal year that ended in September hit $1.29 trillion, in part because of lagging tax collections. The budget gap was lower than the record of $1.4 trillion for 2009 but, as a percentage of the overall economy, was the second-highest since World War II.
The static Social Security payments are a side effect of the nation's low inflation. The Social Security Administration made its announcement moments after the Labor Department released the latest figures for the consumer price index. They show that prices for the third quarter of this year rose by 1.5 percent compared with a year earlier, but fell by 0.6 percent compared with the same period in 2008.
Last year marked the first time consumer prices fell since the automatic adjustment formula has existed, and Social Security recipients did not get an increase in their checks.
This year, the picture is more complicated. Consumer prices have risen slightly from a year ago. But under the government rules, consumer prices must have risen past their level when the last Social Security increase was awarded - in this case, 2008 - for another boost in benefits to take effect. The Labor figures show they did not increase that much.
About 73,000 District residents receive Social Security benefits, while Maryland and Virginia have about 826,000 and 1.2 million beneficiaries, respectively.
Leaders of the AARP, the influential lobby of Americans age 50 and older, said the organization has been deluged lately with complaints from members who depend on Social Security.
"It's like being stuck in neutral," said John Walker, 62, of South Arlington, who was laid off in 2008 from his trucking job and now lives on veterans' benefits and the early Social Security payments he began to collect this year. "I have the same income, but . . . seems like the basic necessities we have from day-to-day living go up. I don't think it's fair."
In early 2009, as part of its efforts to stimulate the economy, Congress approved a one-time $250 payment for each person on Social Security, even though the size of monthly checks had gone up that January by nearly 6 percent.
In his 2011 budget, President Obama proposed another such payment, and many congressional Democrats, courting older voters before the elections, have called for the same thing. So far, Congress has not acted.
On Friday, the White House renewed its call for another payment. "Many seniors are struggling in the face of the economic downturn, having seen their savings fall," White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said in a statement. "Today's news that the Social Security Administration will for a second year not provide a cost of living adjustment for social security benefits highlights these struggles."
In July, Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-N.D.), chairman of the Ways and Means Committee's Social Security subcommittee, introduced legislation to provide a $250 payment to the program's recipients, at a cost of about $14 billion. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Thursday that she will schedule a vote on the measure when lawmakers return for a lame-duck session after the election. The legislation has 127 Democratic co-sponsors and none who are Republican.
In the Senate, which defeated a similar proposal in March, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said that chamber would consider a $250 payment in its lame-duck session, as well.
GOP leaders oppose the idea. Don Stewart, spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), said, "He has a real deficit concern about this," noting that the $14 billion price tag is greater than the entire Kentucky state budget.
House Republican leaders on Friday avoided direct comments on the $250 payments. Instead, they attacked Democrats for not passing a measure earlier, if it was a priority for that party.
And Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.), the ranking Republican on Ways and Means, said: "It will be difficult for many seniors to deal with the lack of a COLA for a second year in a row, but that will pale in comparison to the actual hardships future Social Security recipients will experience if Congress continues to ignore the program's underlying financial problems."
In addition to the nation's 38 million retirees age 65 and older, the lack of a cost-of-living adjustment will affect several other groups of people. They include family members of workers who died prematurely who receive Social Security survivors' benefits, as well as people who qualify for Social Security disability payments.
The formula that determines whether Social Security payments go up also is applied to benefits paid to retired and disabled veterans and retired railroad workers.
The typical retiree receives a Social Security payment of nearly $1,200 per month, or roughly $14,400 a year. A $250 payment would amount to a 1.7 percent increase.
