faux serious introspection
Doubt, to my mind at least, is not at all the “function of human confusion” though it can certainly lead to confusion if we let it consume us. Then again, if we let our appetite for any emotion or passion or pursuit consume us it is possible we will be rendered helplessly confused – by love, by greed, by faith even. By certainty, even. [Read more →]
May 18, 2009 58 Comments
Notre Bama
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Some thoughts on Obama’s speech starting with conspiracy theories and moving from there to Obama’s liberalism and from there to abortion as a test case of my understanding of his core political aims/vision. This post is potentially two or three in one, so I hope I’ve made the transition points clearly.
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So conspiracy theories. Just a word of caution. I’m starting here and moving on from there, but it is not my intention to create a kind of smear of anyone who disagrees with Obama as conspiracy theorists. I disagree with Obama on a whole a mess of stuff (though I voted for him), and I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I’m gonna start with a side-road that will eventually brings us to the main interstate. The view from the side road I think helps illuminate something very important generally missed on the main road. The conspiracies themselves (a product of the side-road view) are not the important point, but rather what they point to though misinterpret it is: namely what they are intuiting but can’t face up to helps make clear where the main road currently is now located.
To wit, The Obama is a ‘scary Mooslim fer’igner radical‘ conspiracy is the inverse of the 9/11 Conspiracy. In the 9/11 Conspiracy, whatever the rational understanding of potential holes in security systems and mal-performing bureaucracies, emotionally the US is believed, at the core, to be invulnerable. To be in a sense omnipotent. Rather than face (emotionally) the realization that it is not the case, that in some very important places and in some crucial measures no one is behind the wheel, then you believe the US government which is so powerful it must be able to do everything committed the attack. Perversely, this is a more comforting thought as it mentally re-justifies one’s emotional adherence to US perfectionism. The failure to stabilize Iraq after the invasion and gets the lights back on and the water running should have taught us the institutional incapacity of our government. But mostly the Arab world continues to hold to the conspiracy view, thinking the US is hyper-dominant (as opposed to technologically advanced but capacity-wise quite slow and stupid) and see it all as purposeful action on the part of the US to divide Iraq. So American conspiracists are not alone in this mov by any means.
And as I said, the Obama is an anti-American radical come to destroy us all is the mirror image of that conspiracy. In the Obama is radical meme, the emotional belief system that can not be questioned is that the US never changes. That there is some core US-ism, “real America” or whatever it gets called, that can’t be shifted. But even agrees some sort of shift is underway, so therefore the only way to make sense of that evidence while retaining such a core ideological commitment is to say some conspiracy from outside has infiltrated our great land, under the guise of a smiling politician, thereby leveraging this shift from within which if the people knew better would never allow. The “real America” remains unchanged.
Rather than face the reality that Obama’s view are actually the new center. When Obama is citing Eisenhower’s Civil Rights Commission and doing everything short of directly quoting Reinhold Niebuhr, then he is the well within the broad stream of post World War II America.
In that sense it is both a continuation of that tradition (“real America”) with its can-do spirit, optimism and notion of generational calls, as well as newly shifted–the center is still the center but has shifted. [Read more →]
May 18, 2009 21 Comments
