In my family, there is no more effective way of dissing someone than the photo block. In one photograph, one of my aunts, according to my mother, who took the picture, leaned over half a second before the shoot button was pressed and blocked all of my grandfather (her father) except his right arm. He was shorter than my aunt, so in the picture she appears to have three arms – two bare and one in a suit jacket. In another, which is one of my favorites, my grandmother is sitting beside one of my sisters, who is blowing out eight candles on her birthday cake. The only problem is that the camera was held in such a way that only the right third of my grandmother’s face made it onto the print. In spite of the score settling, the picture is actually kind of artistic: a fraction of a mature woman’s face, part of her eye, the edge of her cheek, only a little bit of her mouth, which makes it impossible for a smile to offset other elements of her face.
So it’s through this lens, pardon the pun, that I reacted to a photograph I happened across in the business section of the New York Times a couple of weeks ago. There, in full color, was our president and three of his economic lieutenants strutting into a stuffy looking room to announce that they’re going to play hardball with the bankers over the bonuses they awarded themselves a mere year after being bailed out with billions of taxpayer dollars. Apparently I am not the only one who thinks these bad-ass horse and pony shows are a joke: I think a year ago such a story would have landed on the front page rather than being stuck back on the business page. But what was truly odd about the picture is what was missing. In spite of the tag line that read, in part, “Barack Obama and his team of economic advisors …” Christina Romer got cut. The only reason I noticed her absence is that the event was on the television news the night before, and Christina Romer, pardon me for saying this, is hard to miss. I didn’t read the story but as for the visual accompaniment, I suppose her image would have interfered with the tough guy angle. She’s possibly the only one of Obama’s economic advisors who is not beholden to Wall Street, which makes the photo editing even more interesting, I think.
That was on a Friday afternoon, when I was at a coffee shop where the New York Times just happened to be strewn across a table. That evening, it was briefly, briefly mentioned that the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Ted Kennedy’s death had put the goods on full display (with the good parts blurred out) for Cosmopolitan back in the early 1980s. He did this not just because he’s hot – which I think he is – but as a way of paying for law school. Good for him, I think, but it was funny to watch the male newscasters squirm a bit over it, and when the race in Massachusetts came up on Washington Week, his nakedness was not even mentioned. I applaud people who are happy enough with their equipment to share it in checkout lines at grocery stores across the land, but man, if it were revealed that a woman who was running for any public office in this country had once worked as a topless dancer to pay for graduate school, she’d be a household name by now.
So it’s through this lens, pardon the pun, that I reacted to a photograph I happened across in the business section of the New York Times a couple of weeks ago. There, in full color, was our president and three of his economic lieutenants strutting into a stuffy looking room to announce that they’re going to play hardball with the bankers over the bonuses they awarded themselves a mere year after being bailed out with billions of taxpayer dollars. Apparently I am not the only one who thinks these bad-ass horse and pony shows are a joke: I think a year ago such a story would have landed on the front page rather than being stuck back on the business page. But what was truly odd about the picture is what was missing. In spite of the tag line that read, in part, “Barack Obama and his team of economic advisors …” Christina Romer got cut. The only reason I noticed her absence is that the event was on the television news the night before, and Christina Romer, pardon me for saying this, is hard to miss. I didn’t read the story but as for the visual accompaniment, I suppose her image would have interfered with the tough guy angle. She’s possibly the only one of Obama’s economic advisors who is not beholden to Wall Street, which makes the photo editing even more interesting, I think.
That was on a Friday afternoon, when I was at a coffee shop where the New York Times just happened to be strewn across a table. That evening, it was briefly, briefly mentioned that the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Ted Kennedy’s death had put the goods on full display (with the good parts blurred out) for Cosmopolitan back in the early 1980s. He did this not just because he’s hot – which I think he is – but as a way of paying for law school. Good for him, I think, but it was funny to watch the male newscasters squirm a bit over it, and when the race in Massachusetts came up on Washington Week, his nakedness was not even mentioned. I applaud people who are happy enough with their equipment to share it in checkout lines at grocery stores across the land, but man, if it were revealed that a woman who was running for any public office in this country had once worked as a topless dancer to pay for graduate school, she’d be a household name by now.
