Putting in an Order for a Shipment of Words...

...to the outlet at Poughkeepsie.

• Cornel West (via Raw Story) on materialism and virtue (video), because I have been mumbling for years about how commodifying everything including things and values that should not be commodified is destructive to "society" and "values."  Except I've not quite got the words right.  I have figured that insisting that "everything has a price" leads to libertarianism as opposed to liberty, and I have noticed "civic virtue"seems to be a forgotten quality (and besides, both Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer are running for office in New York City, so what is civic virtue anyway?), and anyone can see that the politicians bleating the loudest about "values" don't seem to have any.
  
  In other words, Dr. West, it's not only civil rights leaders. Also, Volpone is satire.
• Ta-Nehisi Coates on President Obama's speech at the 50th anniversary of Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech:

  Like Du Bois, Barack Obama has taken the stage at a moment when it is popular to assert that black people are the agents of their own doom. There has never been any other such moment in American history. The response to Trayvon Martin, indeed the response to Barack Obama himself, has been to attack black morality, to highlight black criminality and thus change the conversation from what the American state has done to black people, to what black people have done to themselves. Like Du Bois, Barack Obama believes that this these people have a point. His biographer, David Levering Lewis, says that Du Bois came to look back back on that speech with some embarrassment. I don't know that Barack Obama will ever reach such a conclusion.

  Of course that was only one part of the speech. I will point out that W.E.B. Du Bois was not the first person to make the suggestion and Barack Obama will not be the last; the "black people are the agents of their own doom" meme pops up periodically because it's visible, superficial, and easy even if one knows the underlying causes.