Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of essays by guest contributor Karen M. Thomas as she explores life with a mother suffering from a debilitating disease.

My mother has Alzheimer’s disease. Those five little words have dramatically changed all of our lives – hers as she battles this extremely cruel disease, her three children as we struggle to care for her, and her friends and extended family who continue to love her even if it is now from afar.

I already know how this story will end. It’s not pretty. But the facts are there in black and white: Mom has a fatal disease that is stealing her away brain cell by brain cell. What I didn’t understand, what I couldn’t know at first, is how we would all learn to live with Mom’s illness. And we are living. Yes, there are days when the grief comes in waves, leaving me drowning in sadness. But there are times, too, when I have learned to steal right back, snatching our joy.

Mom lives in a Texas memory care facility near my house. I took her from her New Jersey home more than a year ago after my brother spent nearly a decade caring for her. It’s my turn to soldier her battle. But life is never that simple. I’ve also had to learn how to parent my two girls as I tend to my mother. I have five new words: I am the sandwich generation.

It looks something like this. On a recent night, I took my youngest daughter, 13-year-old Brooke, to family Hawaiian night at Mom’s facility. In the community room, residents and their families sat at long tables festooned with tropical fruit centerpieces, and we placed plastic leis around our necks.

Then dinner arrived, plates piled with rice and chicken kebobs. To my left, Brooke struggled to get her chicken off the sharpened stick. To my right, my mother attempted to place the sharpened end in her mouth. As I toggled back and forth un-spearing meat and taking away spears, I began to get angry. Whose brilliant idea was it to serve dementia patients dinner on a sharp stick and then invite their grandchildren along for the fun?

Suddenly, at the front of the room, music started and Polynesian dancers bounded into the room, their bare feet pounding the floor and their grass skirts swaying with the motion of their hips. Mom clapped in delight. Brooke giggled. And before I knew it, Mom and I stood at the center of the room with the dancers, trying our best to imitate their moves. Brooke, at 13, was too cool to dance. But when I looked at her, we both dissolved into laughter, lost in the silliness of the moment.

When I hugged my mother goodnight, she smiled and patted my back. She was tired and happy, ready for sleep. Brooke chattered beside me as we drove home, her smartphone eerily silent. As I drove, I realized that during the spear debacle, I never really ate. But it didn’t matter. I wasn’t hungry. Somewhere deep inside, I was already quite satiated.

Karen M. Thomas teaches journalism at Southern Methodist University. For more on Karen go here.

My mother was the first writer I ever knew.

For as long as I can remember, Mama worked on a project she called “my book” — a story entitled 617 Crawford, written in careful longhand with changing colors of ink on unlined white paper kept in a 3-ring black binder. She was excited to discover the term roman a clef, because it described what she was attempting — a novel with real events and real people assigned fictional names. She wrote her book off and on for many years, in her so-called free time.

There was very little of that in my mother’s life, as she was the quintessential matriarch: running a household while married to my father and then my stepfather, and raising five children as well as her grandson. She worked both inside and outside of the home — a housewife who managed rental properties — and somehow still found time to offer guidance and counsel to a plethora of friends and family who steadily streamed through our side door.

And so, it was usually when she went on vacation — to places like Miami or Aruba or Las Vegas — that she took with her that black binder, and while sitting at a hotel-room desk, worked on her book. Over the years, she accrued a total of 43 handwritten pages.

In nearly every way, Mama was an improbable writer. Born in 1928 in Nashville, Tennessee, the ninth of 10 children, she had no more than a high school education. She was a mother and wife by age 18, and had three children by 1955 when she and my father migrated to Michigan. They had lean years while my father tried to find steady work in Detroit’s auto plants, and along the way had two more children, myself the youngest. When life improved, we moved to a four-bedroom brick Colonial house in a good neighborhood. Still, she certainly did not, as Virginia Wolfe advised women writers, carve out “a room of one’s own”. There was no time for that. Mama often said of her life that she had to “make a way out of no way” for her family. Writing was a luxury.

Still, as I look back, I realize she had all the qualities that good writers possess: She had a clear point of view about the world, and well-honed debating skills. She was a voracious reader with a wide berth of interests. She loved history, facts and metaphysics. Our den shelves were crowded with everything from World Book Encyclopedias to W.E.B. Dubois (her favorite writer), to books by psychic Edgar Cayce, to the holy Bible.  Every day, she carried the morning’s Detroit Free Press from the front porch where it was delivered to the kitchen to the bathroom to her bedroom — reading it front-to-back in the process.

And she was certainly a magnificent storyteller, keeping listeners enthrall as she shared some tale about so-and-so that left us shaking our heads in disbelief or laughing with incredulity. She enjoyed holding court, often from the kitchen table and just as likely from her king-sized bed. Usually, hers were cautionary tales, and she knew how to gesture with expressive hands to dramatize a point, pause for emphasis, then say, “And you know what happened, don’t you?”, as we all leaned in to hear the end of the story. Mama’s natural sense of suspense and pacing was impeccable.

The other key writer’s skill my mother possessed was a keen understanding of what makes people tick. She was intuitive about others, could judge a person’s makeup after a first encounter, and understood the psychology behind human nature — great insights for character development.

While the world never knew about Mama’s novel, its presence remains more valuable to me than any one of the hundreds of books I’ve read in my lifetime. That story, and knowing my mother was working on it, gave me permission to become a writer myself. There were other validations: she bought a writer’s desk and bookshelf for my bedroom when I was 10, gave me my first journal when I was 12 and later, didn’t flinch when I chose an impractical English major in college. But it was the magic of what lay within the pages of that black binder that set my own course in life.

A few months before she died, when she knew her cancer was terminal but we did not, my mother sat at the kitchen table, put on her reading glasses, and read her entire story aloud. It was a private reading for just my sister Rita and me; I still remember, 21 years later, that Mama recited the words she’d written in a low, confident voice. Her story began:

“As the bus rolled along the Kentucky road nearing the Tennessee borderline, many thoughts filled the mind of Rose Miller, fifteen years old, beautiful, pregnant and running away from home.”

I marvel that my mother, who never took a single writing class, crafted an opening sentence that defined the main character, established the setting and dropped us into the action, complete with complication and suspense. You want to read more.

Thursday would’ve been my mother’s 85th birthday. Had she lived, I have no doubt she would’ve devoted time to completing her book. That soft, black binder now sits on the shelf beside the desk where I write. Its back cover is torn off, pages stained, ink starting to fade. No matter.

Today as we honor our mothers, I thank mine for the gift of a writing life — for showing me through example that it’s the process and not the outcome that matters, that many years spent telling your tale doesn’t lessen its value. And that writing — putting down one word after the other — is a drumbeat toward eternity. Words live on. And through lovely cursive handwriting that moved across dozens of white pages, so does my mom – Fannie Mae Drumwright Davis Robinson. Writer.

(photo credit: dpa, Frank May)

I will admit this now: When I was a student at Spelman College in the early ’80′s, I didn’t know that Africans wrote books.

Lucky for me, the venerable English teacher Millicent Dobbs Jordan changed all that. She taught a course entitled Contemporary West African Literature, a title so enticing that I signed up for the course out of curiosity. Of course we read Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. And No Longer At Ease. In her classroom, Dr. Jordan — who’d witnessed Nigeria’s 1960 independence ceremony — spoke of the bravery of Achebe’s novels, their seminal distinction and extraordinary gift of western language brought to bear on a dignified, true portrayal of Africans. I began then to foment two desires: to become a writer who wrote stories that way, from the inside, and to visit Nigeria.

In the wake of his death, much has rightfully been said about Achebe’s effect on a younger generation of Nigerian writers. Indeed, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Chris Abani, Teju Cole and Uzodinma Iweala owe an immeasurable literary debt to him. The young Nigerian writer Buki Papillon spoke for many, I’m sure, when she wrote on her Facebook status update: “Things Fall Apart was the first book to teach me that the written word can reach into your chest, tear out your heart, shred it, stomp on the pieces and leave you grateful for the experience. RIP, Chinualumogu Achebe. Your work lives on.”

But as Kwame Anthony Appiah points out, for most people around the world, Achebe was “their first African writer.” That includes generations of African-American writers as well. Indeed, Toni Morrison has said she was influenced by Achebe and other African writers who, unlike the black male writers of the ’60s and ’70′s, saw their blackness as central and felt no need to explain themselves to white readers.

**

I did get to fulfill my two desires — to write a story that told my truth about a world others assumed they knew, and to visit Nigeria. After college, a fellowship to study African media women allowed me to live in Lagos for nearly a year. I recall sitting beside the lagoon at the University of Lagos, a slight breeze rippling its water, and reading from cover to cover Achebe’s slim, brilliant and prescient book The Trouble With Nigeria. That book predicted the New Year’s Day coup of ’84, and quite frankly, the entire sad, recent history of his beloved country.

After living amidst the intellectuals and journalists and writers who revered Achebe, I left Nigeria with an even deeper appreciation for his work, as well as that of other African writers, many of them women. I carried that appreciation with me to Columbia University, where I once innocently asked a professor after her lecture who was this Somerset Maugham she spoke of? She looked at me with incredulity and said, “If you’ve never heard of Maugham and you’re at an ivy-league institution, then you should just go back to ‘Go’”. Fuming, I later barged into her office and announced that I was in fact quite well-read in African literature, rattling off names of several authors, Achebe included. “I find that far more valuable than knowing about a British writer who wrote melodramas in the ’30s,” I said. Nodding vigorously, she stumbled out an apology, and later slipped a written one into my mailbox.

Fast-forward many years, and I have just completed a novel based on my time in Nigeria. Into The Go-Slow is its title and it has Achebe’s influence all over it — from the uncompromising newspaper editor inspired by a character from Anthills of the Savannah to the painstaking care I took to render an honest, complex picture of modern-day Nigeria.

I appreciate that Achebe was the godfather to every African writer who came in his wake. But you do not have to be a native son or daughter to show your gratitude for his influence. You can also be a black girl from Detroit and feel just as grateful.

Thank you, Mr. Achebe. RIP.

Credit: Tyler Gourley

From his ground breaking collaboration with Anna Lappé, Grub, to his two more recent books, Vegan Soul Kitchen and Inspired Vegan, Terry has not only continued advancing his argument that soul food is also healthy food, but more importantly, it is a fundamental human right that everyone have access to real food.  A highly sought after speaker at colleges and universities, Terry can more often than not be found plying his trade alongside a host of community based organizations with which he works to help eradicate this nation’s vast array of food deserts.  We recently caught up to get Terry’s take on his latest ventures, and of course, music.

You were recently featured prominently in Byron Hurt’s Soul Food Junkies. Can you say a little about how this collaboration came about?

You know it’s funny, I think I was one of the first funders of the film. A wealthy friend of mine gave me a chunk of money a few years ago to give away to organizations and individuals working around health and food issues. Byron and I are Facebook friends, and he posted that he was working on a new documentary about soul food. I immediately had a check cut to support his film. I don’t know if he remembers that I hooked it up, though, since the check came from my friend’s family foundation. Simply put, I bought my way onto the film (joke).

You’re referred to as everything from a food activist, a vegan, a writer, etc. They’re all parts of what you do, but how much do you think these various tags define who you are?

I’m inspired by multitalented Black men like Paul Robeson, Romare Bearden, andGordon Parks, but one of my major inspirations is the late Edna Lewis. In addition tobeing an accomplished chef and author of four cookbooks, she was a radical politicalactivist, a seamstress well-known for her African-inspired dresses, and a mentor toyounger chefs. I want to be like those elders–exploding with creativity and working tobetter humanity in the process. None of those titles fully capture the complexity of whoI am striving to be in this world. I saw early on that there are so many expectations thatI perform being a “food activist,” a “vegan soul chef” a “cookbook author,” and I feelmore freedom just calling myself a creative person. Yet, I understand that those titlescan be useful in framing what I do.

As you near the completion of your fourth book, can you give us a snapshot of what that book’s about, and how it relates to your previous work, and your evolution as a chef and author?

I’m really excited about my forthcoming book, Afro-Vegan, which will be published next
spring. I feel like all my previous books were preparing me to write this one. I have a
new publisher (Ten Speed/Random House), and this will be my first full-color,
hardback book. It is primarily inspired by visual artist Romare Bearden and approaches
cooking as collage–cutting, pasting, and remixing staples, flavor profiles, and classic
dishes of the African Diaspora.

It’s not everyday that a vegan soul chef ends up featured in a national ad
campaign for a car? What led you to deciding to work with Scion?

Someone sent me a casting call for the campaign. They wanted to feature real individuals who turned their passion into their life’s work, and I had to compete against hundreds of people for 1 of 3 spots. I’m happy with the campaign. It gave me the opportunity to highlight my work in addition to the work of many of my friends and colleagues, and I loved showing off the beauty of Oakland. In the end, everybody wins: they promoted their car, I got paid, and my book sales have spiked over the past few weeks. And no I did not get to keep the car.

Ok, this one is a two-part question, you’re a chef who loves LOVES!!! music have you ever considered a collaboration with Raekwon the Chef, or another musical gourmand? And you know we gotta ask, but what are you
listening to now?

It would be a dream come true to collaborate with MF DOOM. He is probably my
favorite MC of all time, and his MM.. FOOD lp (filled with food-related lyrics and
samples) is sick. I would love to make a meal on two portable burners set up as if they
were turntables while he is performing that album live at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

The past few weeks while writing and testing recipes I have been playing Portishead and
Benga in the background. I have been bumping Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d
city a lot when my daughter is not around, and I just discovered this kid Joey Bada$$
from Brooklyn. I’m excited about this generation of MCs.

In the car, we listen to my daughter’s favorite lp, Back to School: The Remix by Alphabet
Rockers. It’s good.

You can keep up with Bryant via:
@bryantterry
www.bryant-terry.com

(photo: AP/John Shearer)

Mia McKenzie, founder of the feminist blog Black Girl Dangerous, breaks down the inexplicable attacks on Oscar-nominated young actress Quvenzhane Wallis as she sat beaming with innocent joy at the Oscars:

The thing about being a little black girl in the world is that even when you are the youngest person ever to be nominated for an Academy Award, many people will use the occasion not to hold you up for all of the amazing things you obviously are, but to tear you down for the ways you don’t look like them, the ways your name isn’t their kind of right, the ways you don’t remind them of themselves, the ways you are not blonde or blue-eyed, as if those things could possibly matter when set against the otherworldly talent and beauty and brilliance you possess.​

Read the full piece here.

Additional links:

• Mia McKenzie OFFICIAL

• Black Girl Dangerous

• Quvenzhane Wallis OFFICIAL

]]> http://www.boldaslove.us/2013/02/26/mia-mckenzies-open-letter-to-quvenzhane-wallis/feed/ 0 http://www.boldaslove.us/2013/02/23/good-read-rapper-kendrick-lamar-the-black-literary-tradition/ http://www.boldaslove.us/2013/02/23/good-read-rapper-kendrick-lamar-the-black-literary-tradition/#comments Sat, 23 Feb 2013 17:08:49 +0000 Bridgett M. Davis http://www.boldaslove.us/?p=8974

In her recent piece for the Los Angeles Review of Books, “When The Lights Go Down: Kendrick Lamar and the Decline of the Black Blues Narrative”, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah brilliantly argues that Lamar is a direct descendant of Richard Wright, that he is in fact a rare young writer “quietly committed — like Morrison — to telling stores about the community most familiar to him.”

She writes:

“What makes him important is the way in which the autobiographical good kid m.A.A.d city is so novelistic and so eloquently anchored in the literary blues tradition of which Ellison wrote. Lamar is equal parts oral historian and authorial presence, and more than many authors writing today, he has captured all of the pathos and grief of gun violence, poverty, and the families who carve their lives out amidst all of that chaos.

Lamar has offered up his hymnal for a lost generation, a defense for the black family, and in his jumpy prosody, his shell-shocked sensitivities, his clipped memories, and recorded conversations, he has produced “a novel from life” that single-handedly revives the long lost, suppressed literary tradition of young, working-class black boys on fire, with pens smote in hell, telling us how they become gifted, tenderhearted, black men — something we have been missing even though no one seems to notice it.”

And she puts forth the astute observation that a class-based schism between black writers and black readers is the real reason the marketplace teems with urban lit titles:

As some literary black authors struggled to find a culture of readers who looked like them, their would-be readers seemed to be thinking the inverse of the question: where are the literary writers who are writing stories that sound like mine? The post-racial generation had created their own disconnect, and the authors of urban fiction were vampiristic. They saw a void and filled it — cheaply, but they filled it.

They became the writers who were still speaking to black and Latino Americans who were slipping through the cracks, a group of people the new literary generation seemed reluctant to acknowledge as an audience or as subjects. And their failure to do so is what makes work that deeply and realistically deals with class (like the fiction of Z.Z. Packer, Junot Díaz, Edward P. Jones, the reporting of Jelani Cobb, the early music journalism of writers like Bonz Malone and Touré, the theoretical work of Tricia Rose and Greg Tate, and the poetry of Thomas Sayers Ellis and Nikky Finney) so necessary — and it is also why Lamar’s project is more relevant than ever.

You can read Ghansah’s full critique here.

And consider supporting the Los Angeles Review of Books, a non-profit cultural site that has — in this world of shrinking literary criticism — taken a revolutionary stand for “curated, edited, expert, smart and fun opinion written by the best writers and thinkers of our time.”

Additional links:

• Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah OFFICIAL
• Los Angeles Review of Books
• Kendrick Lamar OFFICIAL

(credit: still from video by Todd Heisler/The New York Times)

Greenlight Books was packed on Monday for Ayana Mathis’ reading from her new novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie. And the crowd was an eclectic, diverse mix. It was certainly a wonderful thing for the writer.

“Wow,” she said as she looked out over the throngs. “I think I might cry.”

I wanted to cry too, but for very different reasons.

Yes, it’s always worth celebrating a young black woman’s success, which is why I was there.

But here’s the sad part: All of us had shown up to hear Mathis tell a familiar story — you know, the one about relentless black female hardship against the backdrop of black male fecklessness & abuse.

It’s not that I think there’s no place for these harsh stories of black life, and it’s not just that I’m tired of them dominating our movie screens and bookshelves and iPods.

It’s the cynicism of it all.

I resent the constant implication that black life is code language for adversity, when we all know better.

We all know that real black life is not a domino effect of misfortunes falling against one another. No one’s life is that reductive. In fact, tragedy and loss have always co-existed with resilience and optimism. It’s human nature to quest, to strive for that better place around the bend, as anyone who’s read Holocaust literature or slave narratives will attest.

Even in a South Side Chicago neighborhood where bullets fell innocent people, young couples go to the prom, block associations thrive, and the barbershop opens its doors each day. The human experience is a complex landscape: Big hope, deep pain, small joys. And the determination to forge community in the face of adversity, as this video shows:

So why the pile-on stories of black pathology? They sell.

Whether it’s in music or literature or film, bleak stories of black life are easy to believe, marinated as they are in stereotype, and so they sell. Maybe just maybe it’s the lure of a payday that prompts folks to tell those stories rather than the complicated ones they know to be true.

That’s my definition of cynicism.

And cynicism leads to a missed opportunity. While certain black artists write stories about, say, a mean woman birthing 11 kids she can’t feed by a useless man she despises — or about an illiterate obese, pregnant teen raped by her father and abused by her mother — other artists create magical, textured stories like the Oscar-nominated Beasts of The Southern Wild. Or: other artists grab the slavery story for themselves and do what they want with it. Roots for the hip-hop generation, anyone?

Cynicism sells, but it comes at a hefty price.

What a great story: Kelvin Doe, a teenage engineering whiz in Sierra Leone, has taught himself how to reverse engineer electronics by studying items in garbage heaps.  Very cool stuff, so just watch the video.

Thanks to visual artist Hank Willis Thomas for the heads up.

Here’s why you have to vote tomorrow.

I shake my head at the comments these people make.  These are your “low information voters”.  They’ve been bamboozled by the cynics on the Right, who are mobilizing them to get out and vote for the Romney/Ryan ticket.  What’s sad is that these people have bought the GOP talking points fully.  Notice when the interviewer asks them to get specific, they’re unable to do anything other than sputter some inchoate rage about how Obama’s “not American” or that “they want their freedom back.” What you’re hearing are GOP talking points that tap into the irrational and racist feelings that a certain segment of the population has towards Obama.  You hear the effects of their demonizing Obama at every turn, suggesting that he’s causing the complete ruin of America. Such bullshit, I’m sorry to say.

The sadness is that they don’t know they’re being played.  What we’ve seen for the past four years is a GOP that isn’t in search of what’s best for America, rather they’re in search of a way to return to power.  Nothing sticks in the collective craw of the Koch Brothers, Sheldon Adelson, Karl Rove, and all of the other right wing power players more than the fact that a populist wave, a real desire for change, swept the first African American into the presidency, an event that represents of all of the efforts over the last 50 years to make a more equitable society.

And Koch-Adelsons have pulled out every dirty trick in the book to roll it all back. Voter suppression efforts by Republican-run states (even though a GOP strategist admits it’s just “Republican mythology”). Efforts to break the unions.  Enabling corporations to pour unaccounted dollars into the election. Pledging to repeal a healthcare law that provides coverage for over 30 million more people.  Attacking women’s healthcare and reproductive rights.  Resisting efforts to make the rich (and corporations!) pay their fair share in taxes.

Fact is, the Koch-Adelsons hate everyone who’s not reppin’ for their privilege to do as they see fit.

I have a daughter.  I want her to grow up in a country where she’s in full control of her body and her life.  That means 1) she should get paid the same as any many for the same work.  That the Republicans are against the Fair Pay Act–and Mitt Romney won’t say what his opinion is either way–is shameful for a 21st century nation that purports to be a world leader.  And 2) if there ever comes a time when she needs to get an abortion, she should be able to make that choice and live with whatever moral or ethical consequences there are.

You don’t believe in abortions? Fine, then don’t have one.  But you don’t get to impose your views on the rest of us.  The Amish don’t believe in technology, but they’re not trying to outlaw iPads. They just don’t use them!

It’s worth noting that Obama is not a perfect alternative by any means. There’s a sizable list of things about him and his administration you can take issue with: Not closing Guantanamo Bay and authorizing indefinite detention; continuing the Patriot Act; drone strikes; adding names to a kill list. These are things that the progressive community still has to challenge the administration on because many of them provide no public accountability by the government to us.

This election is also about the Supreme Court.  Within the next four years, there will need to be some new appointments. We will want justices on the Court who look to interpret the Constitution through the prism of today’s society, not one that existed over 200 years ago when blacks were 3/5 human.  We’ll want justices who won’t see the need to re-hear cases that have been settled, i.e., Roe vs. Wade.

Should Barack have articulated a “black agenda”?  Some still press this issue, but I say that’s absurd.  There are absolutely many things that ail our community: higher-than-average unemployment, male incarceration, HIV rates among black women. But to suggest that Obama should’ve had a “black agenda” ignores the fact that he’s the President of the United States, not the President of Black America.  And, especially in this highly partisan environment, I believe it’s asking way too much for Obama to articulate a specific “black agenda”.

Be clear: There’s been no gridlock in Washington.  There’s just Republican obstruction to any and everything Obama had tried to do.  The GOP is in thrall to the extreme right wing billionaires and the rubes who make up the Tea Party are just pawns.  What you see is a group of people who are not concerned about the good of the country.  Rather, they’re most interested in their own power and the power of the few wealthy individuals and corporations that back them.  That, my friends, isn’t democracy.  It’s called plutocracy.

Romney, Ryan and their big money puppeteers don’t care about you or me.  They’re more than willing to wrap themselves in the rhetoric of patriotism in order to convince the uniformed to vote against their own interests

So I say a vote for Barack is a vote for our sisters, wives, mothers and daughters to have the right to choose and to equal pay.  It’s a vote for unions to organize.  It’s a vote to check corporations who still don’t believe you can make a profit AND do some good in the world.  It’s a vote to make it easier for people to get financial aid for higher education.  It’s a vote for the wealthy to pay their fair share. It’s a vote for a president who understands the complexities of the world we live in today.

And, vote tomorrow for Obama is a vote to support the progressive culture we all care about.  I’m not suggesting that Obama is anything other than the centrist he is.  Realistically, that’s the type of person who can make it to the presidency.  We’re some years away from a truly progressive president.  In the meantime, giving Obama another four years signals that America is ready to continue its move towards a more equitable society.  Let him finish what he started.  That’s the kind of encouragement we could all use as we continue to work to make that vision a reality.

In case you missed it, here’s Michelle’s speech in its entirety.  Word is she wrote it herself and worked on it for over a month.  Basically, she set out the Democratic vision–and Barack’s vision–for the country’s future, one that’s far different from the extreme individualism proposed by our friends on the Right.

In the Twitterverse, the speech spawned two great hashtags: #pindropstatus (with a hat tip to Professor Blair Kelley, ’cause Michelle had folks hanging on her every word) and #dropsmic (for that exit music by Beyonce).