"Think peace and and you'll get it. It's up to the people...If we really wanna change it, we can change it." -John Lennon

That quote is copied from the press kit for the Oscar nominated animated short film I Met the Walrus and hits upon a trifecta of my current interests.

The first being that reality is manufactured by the words in our pens and the thoughts in our head. Take responsibility.

Second, the Oscar nominated short films, live action and animated, are top notch. I continue to believe that the French, and French Canadians, are doing the most innovative animation work (Triplets of Belleville, Renaissance, Madame Tutli-Putli and Even Pigeons Go to Heaven all come to mind). Now if they just had the writing of Pixar.

The third is this nonsense about Barack Obama plagiarizing his speeches. Change, or at least the promise of change, has been a major theme of many political leaders. I don't know how Senator Obama could speak about change in a clear and direct way without building on the tradition of leaders before him. A far more dangerous idea is to demand that political leaders constantly dance around their ideas and relinquish any ability to speak plainly and directly.

From Lewis Hyde in The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. [link goes to the free preview page that has the quote on Amazon]

Where someone manages to commercialize a tribe's gift relationships the social fabric of the group is invariably destroyed.

I have yet to read Lewis Hyde's book but I'm already hooked from the free pages on Amazon. He starts off illustrating one of the fundamental differences between the Native Americans and the Europeans that invaded: a gift culture. Native American tribes would exchange gifts of equal or greater value. The purpose being to continually gift the item to others. It created social bonds between tribes. Europeans followed a capitalist model where they warehoused those gifts and used them for production to enrich themselves.

I wonder how this fits in with Robert Putnam's research in Bowling Alone. On the surface it makes Putnam's phrase "social capital" sound like an odd match. But I realize the term social capital could refer to the gifts we exchange to build our bonds.