the obama swoon

The Swoon Comes to West Oakland Photo: Jill Posener © 2008 All Rights Reserved

Yeah, the swoon thing. Clearly Obama is the nominee. Was this what we were being set up for when John Kerry suggested Obama give the keynote address at the Demo Convention in 2004? I guess so. You gotta give the Demos credit for thinking that far ahead. The comparison being made between BO & RFK is apt - and who knows what might have been had Kennedy lived? But I keep hearing people talk about Barack as if they were reading from a Winnie The Pooh story. Their voices grow sweet and sugary. Men as well as women are enamored of this guy, they speak of Obama's 'vision', his 'hope for the country'. It's as if everyone started believing in the Easter Bunny, Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy all at once.

And which country are they talking about? Is it the country that just recalled hundreds of millions of pounds of beef, of slaughterhouse workers in a video shown torturing diseased cattle as they lead them to the death line? The same country that then uses the meat from those abused animals in the federal school lunch program? Is it the country that has seen a slew of mass killings by disturbed loners in the last year? Is it the country of Tom Cruise's Scientology or the Nation of Self-Medication? Is it the country of the inspirational Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco or the nation of 'god hates fags' Fred Phelps at his Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka. The nation of Code Pink or the Nation Of Islam, the Marine Corps or marine mammals?

What country does Barack have hope for? The country that still executes human beings or the country that describes Cuba as enslaved while millions here cannot read or write, afford health care and feed their children cheap beef at fast food outlets? One Nation Under God? There is no 'one nation'.

What there is, is a sliver of opportunity every few years to redress the most egregious desecrations committed in the name of progress. And while Amerika remains a two party system - shackled to party machinery and wedded to pretending the divides don't exist while driving the wedge deeper - between rich and poor, black and white and immigrant and illegal, male and female, gay and straight, right and left, insured or not, owning or renting, gun supporting or gun opposing, and faithful and faithless - America will swing wildly on it's familiar pendulum.

I heard a plump liberal radio talk show host from the Dakotas in conversation with Tom Daschle the other day and he asked him two questions. First, 'what is China like?' Ok, yeah. I guess if you come from Fargo the vastness of China might escape you. Then he asked 'Do they like us?' They? The Chinese. All 1.3 billion of them. 20% of the entire population of the world. Do they like us? Who is us? It is this level of facile b.s that is driving the Obama campaign, the idea that somehow if we get the right preacher, we can all follow along with the sermon and not feel left out.

I don't dislike BO. He seems like a good and solid human being. He is however not a knight, on any kind of horse, and any armour he's wearing probably includes a bulletproof vest. But a large number of Americans are swooning. Expect a 'wave' to spontaneously sweep the Convention Hall after he takes the stage. This just is not the way to elect a leader of a government. On election day 2008, chances are that almost half the country will have voted against him. He may have hope for them. Let's just all hope it's mutual.

Alright, I'm gonna leave election politics behind for a while. The number of hits on my blog spikes markedly when I write the words lesbian and sex in the same sentence in keywords or in the title....so next blog: Lesbian. Sex. And how heterosexuals taught us everything we know about drama.

Comments

[Deb in Minnesota]

I dunno why so many are swooning over Obama but I suspect it has something to do to with wanting to feel comforted after years of Threat Level Orange.

Also, I wonder, would they be swooning so much if Hillary weren't the other candidate, and it was say, John Edwards?

[Deb in Minnesota]

I was just at the Obama '08 store. You can get a tee shirt for $25.00 that says, "Got Hope?" Americans like to market their hope like milk, I assume. Ha.