The ecstacy of Barack

[2HOW]

 
Kathleen Parker scrutinizes the hysterical emotionalism of the Obama campaign
THE FOUNDATION
“Here comes the orator! With his flood of words, and his drop of reason.” —Benjamin Franklin

PATRIOT PERSPECTIVE
Editor’s Note: Mr. Alexander is meeting with Air War College NSF alumni this week at Nellis AFB. Any of our “Red Flag” readers with the 414th, please say “hello.” This week’s Patriot Perspective is a guest essay by Mr. Alexander’s colleague Kathleen Parker. For the top conservative commentary on the Web, look no further than The Patriot’s Opinion page.

The ecstasy of Barack
Much has been made of the religious tenor of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

Reports of women weeping and swooning—even of an audience applauding when The One cleared his proboscis (blew his nose for you mortals)—have become frequent events in the heavenly realm of Obi-Wan Obama.

His rhetoric, meanwhile, drips with hints of resurrection, redemption and second comings. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” he said on Super Tuesday night. And his people were glad.

Actually, they were hysterical, the word that best describes what surrounds this young savior and that may be more apt than we imagine. The word is derived from the Greek hystera, or womb. The ancient Greeks considered hysteria a psychoneurosis peculiar to women caused by disturbances of the uterus.

Well, you don’t see any men fainting in Obi’s presence.

Barack Obama has many appealing qualities, not least his own reluctance to be swaddled in purple. Nothing quite says, “I’m only human” like whipping out a hankie and blowing one’s nose in front of 17,000 admirers. The audience’s applause was reportedly awkward, as if the crowd was both approving of anything their savior did, but a little disappointed at this rather ungodly behavior.

So what is the source of this infatuation with Obama? How to explain the hysteria? The religious fervor? The devotion? The weeping and fainting and utter euphoria surrounding a candidate who had the audacity to run for leader of the free world on a platform of mere hope?

If anthropologists made predictions the way meteorologists do, they might have anticipated Obama’s astronomical rise to supernova status in 2008 of the Common Era. Consider the cultural coordinates, and Obama’s intersection with history becomes almost inevitable.

To play weatherman for a moment, he is a perfect storm of the culture of narcissism, the cult of celebrity, and a secular society in which fathers (both the holy and the secular) have been increasingly marginalized from the lives of a generation of young Americans.

All of these trends have been gaining momentum the past few decades. Social critic Christopher Lasch named the culture of narcissism a generation ago and cited addiction to celebrity as one of the disease’s symptoms—all tied to the decline of the family.

That culture has merely become more exaggerated as spiritual alienation and fatherlessness have collided with technology (YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, etc.) that enables the self-absorption of the narcissistic personality.

Grown-ups with decades under their double chins may have a variety of reasons for supporting Obama, but the youth who pack convention halls and stadiums as if for a rock concert constitute a tipping point of another order.

One of Obama’s TV ads, set to rock ‘n’ roll, has a Woodstock feel to it. Text alternating with crowd scenes reads: “We Can Change The World” and “We Can Save The Planet.”

Those are some kind of campaign promises. The kind no mortal could possibly keep, but never mind. Obi-Wan Obama is about hope—and hope, he’ll tell you, knows no limits.

It is thus no surprise that the young are enamored of Obama. He’s a rock star. A telegenic, ultra-bright redeemer fluent in the planetary language of a cosmic generation. The force is with him.

But underpinning that popularity is something that transcends mere policy or politics. It is hunger, and that hunger is clearly spiritual. Human beings seem to have a yearning for the transcendent—hence thousands of years of religion—but we have lately shied away from traditional approaches and old gods.

Thus, in post-Judeo-Christian America, the sports club is the new church. Global warming is the new religion. Vegetarianism is the new sacrament. Hooking up, the new prayer. Talk therapy, the new witnessing. Tattooing and piercing, the new sacred symbols and rituals.

And apparently, Barack Obama is the new messiah.

Here’s how a 20-year-old woman in Seattle described that Obama feeling: “When he was talking about hope, it actually almost made me cry. Like it really made sense, like, for the first, like, whoa...”

This New Age glossolalia may be more sonorous than the guttural emanations from the revival tent, but the emotion is the same. It’s all religion by any other name.

Whatever the Church of Obama promises, we should not mistake this movement for a renaissance of reason. It is more like, well, like whoa.

[Jkwas]

Obama.  His folowers are on ecstacy!  Now he's copying lines from his political buddies and making no excuses to boot. It works out perfect as his followers are the "Copy and Paste" generation(TmJkwas).  Heaven help those who drink his Political Kool-aid and help the rest of us if he ends up in the White House.

[Swamp Yankee]

I recal reading some where to beware of a false profit for those that follow will be decieved. Ever since he came on the scene this keeps popping in my head

Mike Mc

[Dougdubya]

I recal reading some where to beware of a false profit for those that follow will be decieved. Ever since he came on the scene this keeps popping in my head

Mike Mc

If that were the case, Satan wouldn't have put Hitlery up to running for office.

Unless one's working for Beezlebub and the other's working for Appollyon.

[Outlaw]

Bingo on the false Prophet. Hitlery is just the backup just in case the lemmings catch on to him

[Sponsor]

[Pathfinder]

I recal reading some where to beware of a false profit for those that follow will be decieved. Ever since he came on the scene this keeps popping in my head

Mike Mc

You are referring to the anti-Christ, who is supposed to be charming, charismatic, beloved by many, promising to bring peace to the world - before he inflicts his will and brings 7 years of utter chaos and unimaginable strife upon the entire globe. At which point, all hell breaks loose as Christ returns and destroys the evil.

Hitlery was IMHO just a side show, a diversion.

And you are not alone in thinking that obambi seems to fit this bill pretty well. I've been worried about that for some months now. Of course, he could just be another socialist fascist in sheep's clothing waiting to subdue and enslave us all, and turn the US into just another set of consumers and producers, cogs in the great one-world economy, controlled by the one world government.

I could be wrong . . . 

[cookie62]

I recal reading some where to beware of a false profit for those that follow will be decieved. Ever since he came on the scene this keeps popping in my head

Mike Mc

Just the other day I read the quote and had the same thought

[DDMac]

He will have a tragic accident.. and Hillery will be conveniently available to carry on..
It's almost boiler plate history.  Mac.

[Rastus]

Bingo on the false Prophet. Hitlery is just the backup just in case the lemmings catch on to him

+1 on that.

[Teresa Heilevang]

Say What, Barrack?

By Paul R. Hollrah

Tuning in to C-Span recently, I found myself listening to a speech by Senator Barrack Hussein Obama, Jr. He was standing in the pulpit of a black church in Selma, Alabama, and as I studied the body language of the dozen or so black ministers standing behind the senator, I couldn't help but be reminded of the little head-bobbing dolls that people used to place in the rear windows of their 1957 Chevrolets. If their reactions are any indication, the new "Schlickmeister" of the Democrat Party is actually a pretty accomplished public speaker.

However, as he spoke, I found my b.s. alarm going off, repeatedly. But I couldn't quite figure out why until I actually read excerpts of his speech several days later. Here's part of what he said:

"...something happened back here in Selma, Alabama. Something happened in Birmingham that sent out what Bobby Kennedy called, "ripples of hope all around the world." Something happened when a bunch of women decided they were going to walk instead of ride the bus after a long day of doing somebody else's laundry, looking after somebody else's children.

"When (black) men who had PhD's decided 'that's enough' and 'we're going to stand up for our dignity,' that sent a shout across oceans so that my grandfather began to imagine something different for his son. His son, who grew up herding goats in a small village in Africa could suddenly set his sights a little higher and believe that maybe a black man in this world had a chance.

"So the Kennedy's decided we're going to do an airlift.  We're going to go to Africa and start bringing young Africans over to this country and give them scholarships to study so they can learn what a wonderful country America is.

"This young man named Barack Obama got one of those tickets and came over to this country. He met this woman whose great great-great-great- grandfather had owned slaves; but she had a good idea there was some craziness going on because they looked at each other and they decided that we know that, (in) the world as it has been, it might not be possible for us to get together and have a child. There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Alabama, because some folks are willing to march across a bridge. So they got together and Barack Obama Jr. Was born. So don't tell me I don't have a claim on Selma, Alabama. Don't tell me I'm not coming home to Selma, Alabama."

Okay, so what's wrong with that? It all sounds good. But is it?

Obama told his audience that, because some folks had the courage to "march across a bridge" in Selma, Alabama, his mother, a white woman from Kansas, and his father, a black Muslim from Africa, took heart. It gave them the courage to get married and have a child. The problem with that characterization is that Barrack Obama, Jr., was born on August 4, 1961, while the first of three marches across that bridge in Selma didn't occur until March 7, 1965, at least five years after Obama's parents met.

Obama went on to tell his audience that the Kennedys, Jack and Bobby, decided to do an airlift. They would bring some young Africans over so that they could be educated and learn all about America. His grandfather heard that call and sent his son, Barrack Obama, Sr., to America.

The problem with that scenario is that, having been born in August 1961, the future senator was not conceived until sometime in November
1960. So if this African grandfather heard words that ''sent a shout across oceans,'' inspiring him to send his goat-herder son to America, it was not a Democrat Jack Kennedy he heard, nor his brother Bobby, it was a Republican President, Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Obama's speech is reminiscent of Al Gore's claim of having invented the Internet, Hillary Clinton's claim of having been named after the first man to climb Mt. Everest, even though she was born five years and seven months before Sir Edmund climbed the mountain, and John Kerry's imaginary trip to Cambodia.

As one of my black friends, Eddie Huff, has said, "We need to ask some very serious questions of the senator from Illinois. It's not enough to be black, it's not enough to be articulate, and it's not enough to be eloquent and a media darling. The only question will be how deaf an ear, or how blind an eye, will people turn in order to turn a frog into a prince."


''Life's tough.....it's even tougher if you're stupid.'' ~ John Wayne