Reflection and Sensation

I ripped these two terms off from a Thomas Jefferson line I’ll have to update later. He was referring to his impression that Europeans are governed by reflection and Africans are governed by sensation. This tracks fairly well with my life experience, with a few exceptions.

Gwen Ifill is another datapoint. How could a black woman, with a pro-Obama book scheduled to come out on inauguration day, who has a financial interest in him winning, accept the moderator job? It has to do with the sensations of money, attention, and ethnocentricity. It demonstrates the same absence of self-reflection that Thomas Jefferson wrote of hundreds of years ago.

As we are presumably still a country of fair and open debate, Gwen Ifill should step down. Instead she plays the race card:

"Do you think they made the same assumptions about Lou Cannon (who is white) when he wrote his book about Reagan?" said Ifill, who is black. Asked if there were racial motives at play, she said, "I don't know what it is. I find it curious."

Brick Oven supports the call for Palin to open the debate congratulating Ifill on her book deal and asking her what the title of the book is going to be.

The name of Ifill’s book is Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama.