August 29, 2008
Nobody happened to notice last night, but the Clintons were conspiculously absent from the Barack Obama Gong Show at Mile High Stadium. You can’t convince me that they would pass up an outdoor party of 80,000 Democrats unless they were unanimously instructed to stay out by the entire party, which is exactly what happened.
We are entered into a new Dark Age of Boobery and Doubletalk, where a tedious and turgid acceptance speech by an unremarkable non-entity is universally hailed as a soaring and inspirational piece of oratory.
I must have been watching somebody else on a Twilight Zone rerun. What I saw was a real snoozer of a speech composed of hackneyed slogans, delivered by somebody seemingly zonked out on Prozac.
Obama made sure he touched all the bases. Blah blah blah gay rights, Martin Luther King, working families. He looked as though he himself wished he were somewhere else, as did his wife, who appeared to want to make herself invisible, and Joseph Biden, whose face got longer and longer as the speech extended past the international dateline (or so it seemed).
Naturally, the problem is: how do you stretch out a speech when you have no accomplishments to point to? It's Mission Impossible. All he could do was cover the same ground that Bill and Hillary Clinton had already gone into. It's like a comedian who comes out and finds that all his lines had been delivered by the preceding acts. Boooorrrrring!
Nobody has ever accused me of political orthodoxy, and if I were to hold a party for all my political friends, we could hold it in a freakin bodybag, which is where a lot of big pricks wish I were right now. When people were hailing Ronald Reagan as a political genius and inspirational orator, all I was able to discern was a senile, feeble-minded twit. Where the press and media hailed George W. Bush’s debate performance as incisive and provocative, I saw an idiot whose only redeeming characteristic was from a standpoint of self-parody.
But this Obama phenomenon leaves me totally non-plussed. For the life of me, I can’t imagine what the fuss is all about!
Well, that’s not entirely true. Black people have come up with a totally anodyne black Harvard grad who perfectly fits the profile of a character on “Married With Children”. This guy, they figure, is their ticket into the WASP world of money and success. White supporters like him because he is bland like them, too. (I guess!)
Then there’s the generational angle. The younger generation, totally overshadowed by the Baby Boomers and resentful of their accomplishments and flamboyant style, wish to change gears and create a social ambiance of conformity and blankness, just like them, like the kid on the British TV comedy show “Absolutely Fabulous”, who, mortified by the unrestrained behavior of her mother and her mother’s friend, closets herself in a straitjacket of obsolete conformity.
Obama has got one thing right when he says, “This isn’t about me.” It’s more about him being an intersection point for various interests than any personal characteristics he may or may not possess.
Manhattan may be a bad place from which to observe these evolutions because the high cost of living here gives rise to a certain degree of conformity, but it seems as though the Obama generation, submerged in their world of iPods and text messaging, seems more comfortable with living vicariously through digital impulses than any kind of riotous behavior as characterized by Patsy and Edwina on Ab Fab. Their revulsion at the Clintons, though certainly fed by Republicans, seems more precisely motivated by a desire to elbow aside a generation which they perceive as never going to go away, and an obstruction to their own ascendancy. Whether the boomers, who are the most numerous, the richest and the healthiest generation, and can hope to anticipate an even more extended longevity, are prepared to let themselves be consigned to the rubbish bin of history by a set of overreaching underachievers, as characterized by Obama’s elbowing aside of the Clintons, is anybody’s guess, though I would not bet on it.
What is sure, though, is that the country is embarking on a season of unrelieved tedium characterized by Obama on the one hand and the incredibly sphinx-like presence of John McCain, who is himself barely able to enunciate the sophist principles of his party, such as they are. The national debate will be a grindstone of platitudes and relentless calibrations of positions, relieved only by slander and insults, which seem to be the only acceptable avenue of creative expression within the political culture.
The public demands it, and any candidate too high-minded to indulge them is treading perilous ground indeed. People are not interested in mud slinging – they insist on garbage, and the more pungent and stinking the better. This goes a long way toward explaining the Republicans’ continued success in politics. They have never had a coherent message to transmit. What they always have excelled at, however is putting together a team of dreadful alcoholic comedians whose specialty is pouncing upon any serious candidate and ripping him to shreds with tiger’s claws.
Probably the most hideous aspect of the election is the incorporation of world public opinion into the process. People around the world, none of whom have any understanding of this country’s history or the issues, or at most a caricature impression) are insistently expressing their preference. 99% of these shadow suffrages go to Obama, for reasons that can only be characterized as trivial. A recent opinion column in the Financial Times expressed European support of Obama as the desire on the part of Europeans to see a cultivated leadership for Americans, based on some ephemeral concept of snobbery. Would that that were true! Unfortunately, I have never seen or read from him any indications of cultivation beyond what is generally the standard skill set of the average middle-class attorney, which is to say none at all. I work in the legal industry and I know most lawyers to be barely literate beyond the statutes and the decisions. In terms of culture, I have never even known a lawyer who was even capable of decent dinner conversation.
The European preference for Obama must be based on his suits which, though cheap, don’t fall too badly on his slender physique. His wife, also being a Chicago attorney, is not the most stylishly attired person either.
The main attraction Obama holds for Europeans, though, is his bland personality, which is the international standard. In the Brave New Digital World, the nail that sticks out gets hammered down, which is why Russia’s Putin is in disfavor. Sure, he’s nasty, but if Russia had weak leadership with its concomitant instability at the periphery and a loose nuclear arsenal, the west would not like that either.
We have essentially moved into a synthesis of 1984, with correcthink, surveillance cameras the cell phones to denounce each other to Big Brother Obama (can you see this guy’s face on a poster?); and Brave New World, though without the drugs and sex that would make such an arrangement at least barely tolerable. McCain or Obama, take your choice, but either alternative leads to an unsatisfactory result.
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Posted on 8/29/2008
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