[Kat]
Victor Hanson has a piece up on the seeming paradoxic love affair with Obama: The Way Ahead
But it was this comment that caught my attention:
As Kathy Parker at WaPo and others are astutely pointing out, Obama's nascent rise reflects uncomfortably on who we are.."We are the change!"...as a nation, both the good -optimistic, reasonably messianic, idealistic, good-natured, generous, progressive - ....and the bad - pathologically narcissistic, spoiled, fatherless, rootless, undiscerning, selfishly pragmatic ("Hey, free health care? Sounds good to me! Why not?") Obama somehow manages to combine the two sides, with a very toxic result, where Americans ca(n) project onto him what()ever wish-fulfillment occurs in their self-absorbed minds.
I believe that hits the nail on the head. Obama's speeches are relatively empty of any real policies. They project largely "dreams" of a Utopian future, but are so generic (hope, change, we can) that people can pretty much interpret what he says to mean whatever they want.
[continued in flash traffic]
While the commenter goes on about modern Americans and their narcissism, I have to say that this has been a problem with many people around the world who end up with some extremely good orators that can stir human passions and ends up destroying the nation. Unlike Chris Matthews who enjoys the tingling feeling he gets running down his leg when Obama speaks, what I feel is an automatic, unmistakable feeling of rejection and revulsion.
Without overstating it, though seemingly melodramatic, it reminds me of the feeling I had when a friend's husband asked me if I wanted to feed their pet boa constrictor a live mouse. I refused, but it didn't stop him from dropping a little mouse into the aquarium from a box of mice he'd picked up that day. I watched that little mouse freeze in the corner, mesmerized by the snake, finally squeezed to death and then swallowed. It was at once the most fascinating and most disgusting thing I had ever seen in my life.
I realized that this happens in nature, but for some reason, the idea that this mouse was raised and sold by the pet shop for this purpose, plucked randomly from the box and then placed in another box where it had no opportunity to escape from being eaten as it would in the wild, had an extremely profound effect on me. Actually, the worst part was the fact that the mouse didn't even try to run. As soon as it was dumped in the the aquarium, it froze, mesmerized by a pair of snake eyes.
I had never really cared for snakes before, but I really hated them after that. Conversely, I'd never really liked mice, even "pets", but, after that, I had some real sympathy for what it means to be both a pest and the meal of many larger predators.
I realize that sounds over dramatic, but it is the best words I can put together to describe the actual feeling when I hear him speak, hear the people shouting his name over and over again while people like Oprah Winfrey fawn all over him and Ted Kennedy et al pretend he is the second coming of RFK. Or, worse.
Its not just his policies or his politics.
I recall when I turned out for President Bush in 2004. I can't say how many people said some extremely nasty things to me, accused Bush of believing that he was messianic and that I had some how bought into that. Otherwise, a friend once told me, I would have stayed in my lane and continued to vote Democrat.
None of my acquaintances could figure out that it was the Democrats that had turned me off, not G W Bush that had turned me on. He certainly is no great orator. I'm slightly more liberal than many conservatives that helped to get him elected. I never took his pronouncements of faith to mean anything other than they were: guiding principles and somewhere to turn when he was in need of meditation or strength for some trial. I certainly never saw him as a savior.
I think that is the big difference between myself and others on the left that are turning Obama into some mythical savior of some mythically damaged nation in need of righteous righting:
I've never mistaken a man for a god.
I know, this topic has been done to death, but I can't help but have the same feeling every time I watch him speak at some rally and huge crowds shout his name.
I feel like I'm watching that little mouse get eaten by the boa constrictor.
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