Among the Intellectualoids
The Department of Early Indoctrination
Obama devotees create a mythology for themselves — and toddlers.
(Page 4 of 4)
The Ultimate Boon
From BARACK:
Here was a man who spoke of “hope” and “change,” whose strong words lifted up the downhearted people and made them believe that the world was not beyond repair.
And Son of Promise:
One sun-drenched day, as his wife Michelle stood by, Barack smiled on a sea of faces from Wichita to Waikiki. He saw whites and blacks, rich and poor, Christians and Muslims and Jews; he saw the ghosts of his parents, of Gramps and Toot, of Martin Luther King, Jr. and JFK. And on that special day Barack was the bridge that held them all together. “I want to be your president,” he said. “Can we make America better? Can we work together, as one?” With a single voice the crowd called out, “Yes! We can!”
YOU COULD NOT ASK FOR a more heroic portrayal than Homer’s of Achilles in The Iliad. Plato groused about it anyway. He thought Achilles’ mourning of fallen soldiers was undignified. The subjective becomes the unquestionable for the devotee of The Myth. As Edith Hamilton wrote in her classic survey Mythology, mankind’s “chief hope of escaping the wrath” of a divinity-imbued myth lay not in logic or empiricism, but “in some magical rite, senseless but powerful, or in some offering made at the cost of pain and grief.” These, frankly, will not be very useful tools for those of us looking to retain individual rights in the face of collectivist fervor.
It is no real surprise that immediately after passionately demanding societal subjugation to the official storyline, Plato’s very next proclamation is that for the “public good” — an appellation as subjective as it gets — “if anyone at all is to have the privilege of lying, the rulers of the State should be the persons.” (Side note: Republic does not deal directly with the relative merits of the Fairness Doctrine.) Once the head of state is presumed to transcend the temporal plane, the need-to-know of those populating the temporal plane is significantly reduced. The natural outcome of indoctrinating children in the mythology of presidential-candidate-as-supernatural-savior is to train them to believe wielding anything less than complete power becomes too ordinary, a life of little consequence.
At the end of Son of Promise a young boy growing up in — sigh, of course, tenement housing decides he, too, wants to be a transformational president. Is there nothing else worth seeking? Is the world now divided between cult-like worker bees attempting to elect a president and a queen bee or two actually becoming president?
About the Author
Shawn Macomber is a contributing editor to The American Spectator.
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William Lannon| 10.27.08 @ 8:23AM
A masterful skewering of the unseemly pretensions of the Obama cult.
joecool| 10.27.08 @ 1:52PM
Wow. It is something of which I knew of my subconscious, but your article brought it to the forefront of my brain.
Indoctrinators wax poetic. Ugh.
Maddie| 10.27.08 @ 2:44PM
» Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
gregorbo| 10.27.08 @ 2:58PM
The Second Coming (W.B. Yeats)
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
skatz51| 10.27.08 @ 3:59PM
OMG! I think I just threw up a little in my mouth.
Emily0717| 10.27.08 @ 4:11PM
Our country is suffering a collective nervous breakdown. Many are going to feel really stupid when they finally see the truth.
Denise| 10.27.08 @ 5:41PM
Not everyone will fall for the "messiah" characterization. Christians bristle at that. But with literature like this, even they are one small step away from having the real messiah supplanted with the Dear Leader. It won't take long.
Emily, you're right about the collective nervous breakdown...I predict a colossal rise in prescriptions of antidepressants over the coming months if Obama loses.
But they'll find a way to blame that on George Bush, too.
Diane Smith| 10.28.08 @ 2:06AM
Denise, your comment about anti-depressants and tranquilizers brought back memories of John Kerry's surprise defeat. For months here in the Bay Area, we had articles about the surge in psychiatric visits by Democrats in Deep Despair.
Wendy Watkins| 10.28.08 @ 3:26AM
This article describes my thoughts as well. People are mesmerized by Obama and non of them question his tactics, his far left ideology, or his inexperience. It's pretty scary.
Nikki Grimes happens to be a wonderful person. She's a friend of mine. But friends can agree to disagree.
frank burns| 10.28.08 @ 9:42AM
"Dear Leader" indeed - this would all be quite funny if it weren't so serious. Deifying a hack Chicago racist pol along the lines of MLK, indoctrinating kids into little knee-bending commies; makes me sick. In fact, I'm thinking of writing one of my own - OBAMA, THE IPECAC - (as in syrup of ipecac).
catherine| 10.28.08 @ 1:10PM
Write it will you can, before BO's truth squads are knocking on your door.
Ms. Know| 10.30.08 @ 12:21AM
A lot of our country is going to be upset when their liberal illuminati politicians, that they feel are saints, let them down.