Organizing for Action, the permanent Obama campaign, would very much like to sell you a limited-edition — “while supplies last!” — poster bearing the slogan: “The Time to Act Is Now.” The catalog of asininity goes on forever.
The people who genuinely believe that the existential future of mankind is at stake might be forgiven their “Now!” even as we take note of the fact that practically everything they want, from organic cupcakes to bike lanes, they believe to be necessary to the survival of mankind. But it does not stop with Armageddon. Consider this current headline: “Let’s fix our female Asian-American writer blind spot now!” To Celeste Ng, a female Asian American who recently published her first novel, our purported cultural blind spot for female Asian-American writers must present an intensely important occasion for the fierce urgency of now, though she gives cruelly short shrift to female Asian-American left-handed writers of historical romance novels who work while suffering from sleep apnea and living in states whose names begin with the letter “M,” women who truly dwell in the shadows of a culture that seems almost aggressively unwilling to take note of them as a group.
And the grandda — ! — grandperson of them all, the National Organization for Women, makes NOW! its fundamental message: “What do we want? Whatever we want! When do we want it? Now!” (Which is, admittedly, a bit of an improvement over: “What do we want? Dead children! When do we want them? January 1973 and forward!”) Ironically NOW and the woman who embodies its ethic, Gloria Steinem, have only the most tenuous of connections to the present, being about as much a product of the here and now as the costumes seen on reruns of The Partridge Family.
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