In this context of the recent tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Brian L. Frank’s new body of photographs, “Dreamscape,” made during a six-week-long road trip across the country this past summer, are particularly resonant. Frank sought to explore the notion of American identity in a journey that took him from Virginia to his home base of San Francisco, against the backdrop of the Presidential race. “I kept thinking about how politicians always said the same things and tried to use Americans’ views of themselves to their advantage,” Frank told me. “And I began looking for the commonalities in this shared sense of the American ‘self.’ ”
Despite the drastic changes between landscapes and cultures across the United States, Frank believes that, in the end, there is more that holds the country together than cleaves it apart.
-Elissa Curtis. Click-through for a slideshow: http://nyr.kr/12YTsmC
Funniest Graph of the Day: In 2006, 73 percent of Democrats said President Bush could do something about gasoline prices. Now only 33 percent think President Obama can do anything about them.
Likewise, in 2006 only 47 percent of Republicans thought Bush could fix gas prices. Now 65 percent of them think Obama can fix them.
Both parties’ rank and file evidently view supply and demand through a partisan filter. Democrats do so more than twice as often (40-point swing vs. 18-point swing) as Republicans.
I think in 2006, Democrats just thought that Bush was actually manipulating the oil prices for his friends to benefit. And eventually him. And that’s why we thought he could do something about it. Republicans were blinded by fear. And now republicans think Obama could do something about the oil prices because they think it’s caused by his policies. Which is categorically untrue.
So what this graph is really saying: In 2006, Democrats suspected a president who was an oil man, from an oil family, made is money in oil, as did all of his friends, who went to war of choice on specious grounds with an oil rich country, was somehow directly or indirectly responsible therefor could influence the high prices. Reasonable? Verse today where Republican’s suspect that the president who is in an election year, has increased oil production and opportunity for oil companies, and who’s policies, which every expert agrees are not the cause, is the cause.
Context matters.
