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Showing posts from 2015

Carter's Crowning Achievement?

Americans have always been captivated by the manner and meaning of their Presidents’ deaths. The assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy shocked the nation, all the more because each coincided with the proliferation of new forms of mass communication. As the historian Richard Wightman Fox has demonstrated, advances in photography fueled widespread obsession with Lincoln's corpse, allowing people from across the nation to imagine that they were peering into an open casket.   Similarly, the perpetual television re-broadcast of Abraham Zapruder’s home-movie caused millions of Americans to feel as if they had personally witnessed JFK being gunned down in Dallas. But this tradition is rooted in more than mere morbid fascination – a mysterious mix of popular culture, national identity and presidential mortality stretches back to the origins of the Republic.   When Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died on July 4, 1826 – 50 years to the day from their signing o

Here Come the Brides

Sidney and Diane met at an April Fool’s Day party in 2006.   They began dating the next day and fell in love.   They weren’t quite ready to get married in the summer of 2008, when California was granting marriage licenses to same-sex couples.    They told me they hadn’t wanted to get married “just because they could,” and while they were (of course) opposed to California's Proposition 8 , they weren’t looking to make a political statement with their nuptials. By year-end 2008, however, Sidney and Diane had reached a decision.   They loved each other.   They wanted to spend their lives together.   They knew that the State of California wouldn’t give them a marriage license but they wanted to get married anyway.    They wanted a wedding for their families, for their friends, for each other. As I sat with Sidney and Diane through our pre-marital sessions, I saw the tenderness and respect with which they treated each other, the true delight they took in each other’s comp