Link Banana

In his overgrown plea that people grow at least a little of their own food, Michael Pollan eloquently expressed a theory of change I’ve been wrestling with for a while:

Going personally green is a bet, nothing more or less, though it’s one we probably all should make, even if the odds of it paying off aren’t great. Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when you can’t prove that it will. That, after all, was precisely what happened in Communist Czechoslovakia and Poland, when a handful of individuals like Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik resolved that they would simply conduct their lives “as if” they lived in a free society. That improbable bet created a tiny space of liberty that, in time, expanded to take in, and then help take down, the whole of the Eastern bloc.

The Daily Intelligencer has compiled a useful roundup of opinions on yesterday’s speech by the usual suspects. As you could expect, the right generally denigrated it and the left generally praised it. But, if you actually read the list you’ll get the nuances within those positions.

On a lighter note, The Onion reports that no one wants to give that black guy change.

Though I think Mr. Hitchen’s remarks aren’t much truer today than they are at any time during any campaign, I am tempted to agree with this point:

It is cliché, not plagiarism, that is the problem with our stilted, room-temperature political discourse. It used to be that thinking people would say, with at least a shred of pride, that their own convictions would not shrink to fit on a label or on a bumper sticker. But now it seems that the more vapid and vacuous the logo, the more charm (or should that be “charisma”?) it exerts.

Nicolas Kristof, who came back from book leave just as Tom Friedman went on it, has an interesting counterpoint to Mr. Friedman’s Generation Q (of which I was no fan):

In the ’60s, perhaps the most remarkable Americans were the civil rights workers and antiwar protesters who started movements that transformed the country. In the 1980s, the most fascinating people were entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, who started companies and ended up revolutionizing the way we use technology.

Today the most remarkable young people are the social entrepreneurs, those who see a problem in society and roll up their sleeves to address it in new ways. Bill Drayton, the chief executive of an organization called Ashoka that supports social entrepreneurs, likes to say that such people neither hand out fish nor teach people to fish; their aim is to revolutionize the fishing industry. If that sounds insanely ambitious, it is. John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan title their new book on social entrepreneurs “The Power of Unreasonable People.”