I agree with the Kraut, but don't share his presumptions. on Obama:
This kind of sale is hardly new. Organized religion has been offering a similar commodity -- salvation -- for millennia. Which is why the Obama campaign has the feel of a religious revival with, as writer James Wolcott observed, a "salvational fervor" and "idealistic zeal divorced from any particular policy or cause and chariot-driven by pure euphoria."
"We are the hope of the future," sayeth Obama. We can "remake this world as it should be." Believe in me and I shall redeem not just you but your country -- nay, we can become "a hymn that will heal this nation, repair this world, and make this time different than all the rest."
And believe they do.
listen, if you're going to bite the hook, you might as well swallow the fucking thing, sinker and all. Christ. the Democrats finally have someone they can believe in, their George W. Bush. so it seems.
I'm far from believing in the pre and con cepts of Democracy...nothing in this world attains a large demographic polity, or a Democratic subconscious of Hegelian proportions. sorry, but the locus of political action and theory ought to be the individual, the person. that is the differential all politics should be extrapolated from.
Chuck compares the opiate of the masses to the latest Obamamania, and I do indeed concur. his piece might be a shot in the salvo of the permanent media class's attempt to get the Hill back towards the front of the race; I don't know, and I can't say for certain. but the enthusiasm I've seen from several of the Obama supporters I know is palpable, and as nutty as it is: fuck it, have fun with it. there isn't anything that will undo or bring about change or solve all the problems in DC. (as if the problem weren't DC a se.) you would be crazy to think otherwise, as the Kraut concludes in his column. you can mutter change change change all you want, like a good pwogger, because it isn't going to do anything at all.
but people want to believe it, people want to be madly in love with their candidate. yes, it is pure fucking insanity, unconscionable and completely irrational. whether you realize it or not, the Democracy shark was jumped a long time ago. nothing I've read from the man has even wet my ankles from the pools of meaning. nothing in this world attains or will attain the language, the rhetoric, the zest. if it is a purely religious, metaphysical, whatever, experience, phenomenon, then jump the fuck off the pier.
as our Zen Defeatist Master posits:
I have a great deal of respect for religious faith. Only it had better be of this kind: I believe in spite of the world, of my own senses, and of the rational arguments. The claim that any given religious belief system - Christianity, let us say - is rationally defensible is ludicrous.
politics in general is an opiate, at any fucking level, Chuck. you're missing that fine little fact in your own presumptions, in your own pompetous of love for the state. it's sheer belief that we can change and stop and protect and Democratize and free and un-obesify and so on and so forth. like we can overcome ourselves, through force, or proper regulation and permitting. as if.
back to the Obamaniacs. we know they're crazy. some of us even acknowledge how crazy the concept of Democracy is, or how insane a Republic can be. but fuck it, dudes, they believe in spite of it all. maybe Obamaniacs should familiarize themselves with the concept of aseity, because from what I can tell, belief in Obama is belief per se. I'm still not sure if I'm correct in this analysis, because I'm still working my engineering head around the concept of aseity. I'm at best a hack, at worst a shill, when it comes to philosophy/theology.
but, this kind of lunacy might just be the thing that beckons our downfall. I hope he ends the War on Terror. I hope he ends the Occupation of Iraq. it's a silly belief, I know. I haven't read Axe's stuff on it yet, or looked at his voting record. I'm still not voting. but I'm here to be slain anyway, and this is Defeatist Central.
bring it on.
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