The Trifecta: King, Obama, and You

If he is nothing else, your new president is TV ready. Obama works a camera like he's Denzel Washington,one of the many celebrities who feted the new First Family last night at the Lincoln Memorial.

I am dusting off the DVD player today. We need to get some recordable discs, but its been so long since we’ve recorded anything that I can’t remember what kind to get. Actually, I think we’ve only tried to record one thing a couple of years ago, and I didn’t set the timer correctly, so I will be testing things tonight.

There are already a lot of people in D.C. - by tomorrow, it will be a veritable ocean of humanity. The vendors must be having an absolute ball, because half of the people on camera seem to be wearing knit caps with "Obama" woven into them.

Sometimes, when you are a one man show, like I am here at Brown Man Thinking Hard, you can only do so much at a time like this, when we have Martin Luther King's birthday AND the inauguration of Barack Obama back to back. So even though I will probably have more posts than average for the next few days, I'm going to point you in a couple of different directions this morning, so you can get a little bit of the old and the new.

The gang over at Jack and Jill Politics are having themselves the time of their lives - they are posting several updates a day from ground zero on the Mall in Washington, and coordinating with their team members who are running the site this week to post video interviews, pictures - all kinds of stuff. They have been a HUGE influence on me, and I always enjoy getting in the mix with their blog community.

Here in the ATL, the birthplace of Martin Luther King Jr., a friend of mine who is a columnist for the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, Gracie Bonds Staples, has a front page article today, "Foot Soldiers Of Movement Are Grateful", that highlights the people in the SCLC who made it possible for King to be a civil rights icon.

I have read two daily newspapers my whole life - first as a child, when my parents subscribed to the local and state papers in South Carolina, and then here in Georgia, where I have vacillated between the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times as the companion to our local Atlanta newspaper.

So as an avid newspaper reader, I am happy to see Mrs. Staples on the front page. It's about time the AJC started putting more of their black journalists on stories that feature black people - in a town like Atlanta, you would think that this would be an obvious strategy. Looks like change is finally coming to our local print news.

The media focus for the next two days will be on the memory of King and the realization of the Obama presidency. The images of these men is resonating with so many Americans right now because they are a part of a triumvirate, a trio that includes the American individual - you, me, and three hundred million others - standing in between the two of them.

What a trio!