Hi Michael, I absolutely love these kinds of comments. They feel like a reward, a treat, i get for blogging a good idea. I love how you recontextualize and transfer the ideas and give me more food for thought. (You’re a talented blog commenter!) It also hits home a really important point to me about reading and readers that you make explicit in your comments – that as we read someone else’s context, we find connections to our own – and that makes the point stay with us more, I think.

Regarding the Obama example, i was in the US up until March 2008 so I remember the enthusiasm of people, particularly at Rice University where I was teaching, for Obama (forget that Texas is a red state, Houston and of course the university especially, had no cowboys). I wonder if one of the problems common to Obama and Egyptians is that distance from power allows us to imagine much more broadly, but when we are in it, there are so many issues and complications and obstacles that our ideologies do not solve. Obama’s rhetoric of working with both sides meant he ended up working with neither side, compromising on key values, and losing big time on other things (if i may generalize without examples!!!). Idiotic congress indeed – why is that? So sad that the most powerful country in the world can’t get anything done because people are bickering over political power rather than what is important. I get my new from Jon Stewart, so I don’t really know what’s going on 🙂 or maybe I do 🙂