The Obama special that aired a few nights ago in the US is designed to make people feel comfortable. If it doesn't work, nothing will. It worked on me. I even imagined myself watching it in West Virginia and it seemed to work. I felt at ease.
It was unmistakably contemporary America, yet there were just enough moons hanging low in the sky and views from freight train windows to give it an artisanal beauty. If there were any more, I might have had a high lonesome feeling to "walk off and look for America", but there weren't and instead I had an incredible urge to go to work with my co-workers and desire that President Obama would visit me at work and maybe work a shift beside me. This was my fantasy for the night.
This was smart, manipulative film-making that is honest about being a populist infomercial and has some meat on its bones as well. I didn't sneer or cringe at anything that was said. I am tired of having to feel embarrassed for candidates and the people who support them when lack of sincerity should be the first tip-off that something is rotten. As much as I like my liberal fake news, the dramatic irony of seeing McCain bomb night after night is draining me.
And I know that no matter how hard McCain or Bush tried, they could never make a movie like this. Not in a million monkeys with a million cameras in a million years. The fact that propaganda like this can be made is a positive argument to me. It's a coherent grounded vision.
Obama himself has immense charisma (well duh). Sometimes I look at him (usually in a frontal shot where he is smiling) and something positively Mandelan about him, a sweet, wizened optimism and humility. At other times he seems like an inveterate Chicago politician, nothing bad in that in itself, emanating toughness and with that slight smoker's huskiness to his voice. The third component is preacher-like righteous thunder.
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At the same time, the promises seem really modest. The person I was watching it with asked rhetorically, "Are things really that bad in America?" In a way, I suppose people are unhappy and feel unappreciated. The concerns seemed a bit small and bourgeois, if you can have blue collar bourgeois.
There was little talk of outer space, for example, or of science. Maybe I'm being small-minded myself, but we are in the 21st century and it is time to start acting like it. We need a narrative besides "getting back to a status quo". How long will it be before we will get to the point where we will want to explore things again, not just to keep up with a rival civilization, but because they are interesting? I hope Obama will stimulate people's intellectual curiosity and keep people honest, too.
It seems that an immense amount of capital of every kind is being spent to make this a certainty, and then the only thing we can hope for is an "undo" or "system state restore" to some point in the past. We will get bored there. We don't really want Obama to give us some egalitarian version of the 1920s.
I realize that in 27 minutes, he has to speak to the common denominator and make people feel good. This is tough, despite what he says about there only being one America not a red and a blue. In fact Obama himself arguably spoke two languages in this 30 minutes. Listen to him when he is in front of a white audience and when he is speaking to a largely black gathering.
So the first thing is to banish the fear and distrust, I guess. Must start somewhere.
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6 comments:
I've sympathise with the States in general, the history, the model. But beating the anti-americanism in Europe became almoust impossible. Bush. I am tired. Enough. The Clinton administration ended the siege of Sarajevo. No need for republicans here.
As for the future, I thought he mentioned a far more extensive use of the Internet and technology to allow him to speak directly to the people without the 'help' of the media...maybe it was in another speech...there have been so many. Certainly his use of the Internet so far has been innovative for a political campaign and highly successful. He has been able to run the most organized and finely tuned campaign in history...which speaks to his ability to organize and/or pick smart people.
And then there's McCain now bringing Joe the Plumber (his latest 'monkey'...moveover Joe Six-pack!)on stage with him saying the plumber's his new role model. Now there's a team, along with Hockey Mom, to inspire and lead!
I think the problems of the U.S. right now are big...people close to retirement have seen their finances wiped out by half and will probably not be able to retire...we are lucky in that respect having invested in real estate. People we know your age are having hours cut by half, no more overtime, etc. So the financial disaster is certainly uppermost in people's minds. Then there's war, healthcare and the other stuff. I certainly hope the man with great intelligence and intellectual curiosity wins...and even for him it will be a tough road.
The propaganda triumvirate -- Democrats, the liberal media and leftist bloggers -- have portrayed President Bush, Vice President Cheney and America as dark and evil forces and have whipped the country into a frenzy of desperation, setting the table for a charismatic leader to deliver us from the despair they've manufactured with relentless precision.
Barack Obama, with his mysterious past and messianic aura, then burst upon the scene with the focused purpose of capitalizing on the public's perceived woes by offering dramatic change and unspecified hope. As if the script had been written just for him, he stepped right into his role, expanding on this theme of despair.
No one has used the word and concept of "evil" more than you-knoW-Who, with almost no theological rigour, so that's an argument for the dustbin.
As far as charisma goes, I think America needs a leader who can string a coherent sentence together in English.
Modest goals for modest times. The fact that Obama exceeds so many criteria frightens Americans.
Competence has become scary and unfamiliar, because the country has not been blessed with good leaders of late.
I don't want America to be full of a mediocre conformism with a faux folksy leader at the top who has no interest in anything in the world.
Barack Obama has the kind of cocksure confidence that can only be achieved by not achieving anything else.
Anyone who has actually had to take responsibility for consequences by running any kind of enterprise-- whether economic or academic, or even managing a sports team-- is likely at some point to be chastened by either the setbacks brought on by his own mistakes or by seeing his successes followed by negative consequences that he never anticipated.
The kind of self-righteous self-confidence that has become Obama's trademark is usually found in sophomores in Ivy League colleges--very bright and articulate students, utterly untempered by experience in real world.
The signs of Barack Obama's self-centered immaturity are painfully obvious, though ignored by true believers who have poured their hopes into him, and by the media who just want the symbolism and the ideology that Obama represents.
The triumphal tour of world capitals and photo-op meetings with world leaders by someone who, after all, was still merely a candidate, is just one sign of this self-centered immaturity.
"This is our time!" he proclaimed. And "I will change the world." But ultimately this election is not about him, but about the fate of the United States, at a time of both domestic and international peril, with a major financial crisis still unresolved and a nuclear Iran looming on the horizon.
For someone who has actually accomplished nothing blithely to talk about taking away what has been earned by those who have accomplished something, and give it to whomever he chooses in the name of "spreading the wealth," is the kind of casual arrogance that has led to many economic catastrophes in many countries.
The equally casual ease with which Barack Obama has talked about appointing judges on the basis of their empathies with various segments of the population makes a mockery of the very concept of law.
After this man has wrecked the economy and destroyed constitutional law with his judicial appointments, what can he do for an encore? He can cripple the military and gamble America's future on his ability to sit down with enemy nations and talk them out of causing trouble.
In the foreign policy area he is starting to remind some of the young and inexperienced Kennedy (44at the time) with his Bay of Pigs fiasco then followed by a disastrous summit in 1961 which Khruschev won hands down.
Well-argued. I've been afraid that he will meet Kennedy's fate and I'll say it. I would assume that Iraq is like a very bad IED that must be dismantled with great care, precisely because of the military establishment. I also guess the drawdown will be less dramatic under Obama.
The "sharing the wealth" or "spreading the wealth around" thing is a bit of a straw man, so I'm not going to go there. I guess the "Commonwealth of Virginia" is also a misguided and dangerous concept, then. And call me a communist, but if you get paid a salary of $10 million, I see no reason why your income tax rate could not be as high as 90%. If you're doing good things with the money, giving it to charity, handing out microloans, those are legitimate deductions or expenses and that's part of a different discussion.
I don't know what to make of your claim that he will wreck the economy or the military. There is great cognititive dissonance here. Both economy and military have suffered very much over the last eight years. I'm not talking about just raw power, but the deep trends.
I'd love to leave this topic. America united behind Bush for Afghanistan and advanced this "unelected" president a lot of capital and trust. It seems awfully petty not to "unite" now behind an alleged reformer who lacks the decadent baggage of a Bush or the sleaziness of a Clinton.
If Obama does crash and burn, it will be very hard not to see self-fulfilling prophexies as being partly responsible. I say make a good-faith effort to make America better and if it really doesn't work, it will vinidcate your policies better than sniping.
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