Saturday, August 30, 2008
Schama on Obama
For some, probably copyright, reason I don't seem to be able to link to Simon Schama's brilliant piece on the Obamoration in the Guardian. You will have to buy the paper - and I do mean you will have to. Killer line on Cheney - 'Obama is Cheney's worst nightmare, for he represents the antidote to the unanswerably laconic. Has there ever been a politician who revelled in deadly quietness quite so much as Cheney?'
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
This URL for Mr Schama's August 30 Guardian article, "In its severity and fury, this was Obama at his most powerful and moving," worked for me.
ReplyDeleteWell, it's a high-styled article (thanks to Dave Lull) but it doesn't tell us anything we don't already know.
ReplyDeleteImho, the best reason for going against the Republicans is the same as the reason for going against the Labour Party here in Britain: that they should be punished for the disasters they have inflicted. And they are disasters, not mere differences of policy. If voters can't even deliver that, then democracy is stuffed. Unglamorous, I suppose. The kind of thing that probably gets a voter to tick the right box in the poll booth but it doesn't make for news.
#yawn# what's on TV...? oh look, it's pets gone wild...
ReplyDeleteUh, Cheney is not running. And Americans are not voting to put a party leader into power. They are voting for a chief executive. A Europeanized parliamentary outlook is precisely what does not apply.
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ReplyDeleteHaha. I don't think you can walk away from this one claiming that Republicans and Democrats have precisely nothing to do with the US presidential election. Bush, Cheney and the Republican Party pushed a line that has produced a huge mess at home and abroad. The notion that success can be claimed by the party and failures blamed on the man sounds a little optimistic to me.
ReplyDeleteHi Mark,
ReplyDeleteAre you saying that every Republican is disqualified at this point from being president?
The fallout from this type of thinking boggles the mind. It means that essentially there should be no election taking place beyond the Democratic National Convention.
Yours,
Rus
Absolutely, Rus. But if these Republicans were prepared to campaign stark naked and answer any question with "I know nothing" in a Fawlty Towers accent, then I might make an exception.
ReplyDeleteSeriously, I just don't buy the line that this is all about electing a "CEO" as Frank put it, to the extent that which party the candidate comes from will not figure in a voter's calculations. As I suggested, from one perspective saying otherwise is just trying to have your cake and eat it.
Hi Mark,
ReplyDeleteWhen I listened to Obama's acceptance speech, I was floored by how trite and unimaginative he could be, how juvenile his criticism of McCain is, and how he purposely interprets statistics poorly to mislead people into thinking wrongly about McCain.
For instance, when he says, "John McCain has voted with George Bush ninety percent of the time," we all should know that that means a whopping 10% of the time he did not vote with George Bush. And we also have to accept, then, that the 90% is probably a fudged figure to a degree, since it comes from someone who is loading a statement to play on anyone's global hate of Bush. Shouldn't McCain have been voting against Bush 90% of the time? Oh really. One thing we can say, that whether the true figure is 90% or somewhat less, Bush definitely did not have McCain in his back pocket. And for many of those times he voted with Bush, he viewed the issues with significantly different eyes. 90% is significantly different.
In Schama's article, we find him trying to make a point here:
And the word that formed in the fire of his indignation was, simply: "ENOUGH!" It was a Shakespearean moment that shook the eighty thousand rigid, and ought to have disabused any Republicans of the idle assumption that they are taking on a remote, effete intellectual who doesn't have the wherewithal for bloody political combat.
As in other places of his speech, when I heard Obama say "enough", I thought how too-obviously trite, what kind of B movie is he scripting here. If effective in garnering and strengthening supporters, however, the emotional trick to such rhetoric is to get those who are disgruntled with any part of life, to attach to the word "enough" wherever they find the desire to express exasperation, whether a general undefined disgruntleness, or well-defined: that their low pay has to stop, that the mistreatment by their spouse has to stop, that the road hogs going to work have to stop, that whatever anyone's pet peeve or problem with the world, it could be blamed on Bush, and Obama, who brings voice to saying that these incidences should stop, must be associated with remedy. The trick, though, is that Obama has the listener define the problems. Whatever the listeners problem, Obama will fix it, the listener is led to believe in such a rhetorical maneuver. Instead of giving us specific visions that JFK and MLK are famous for, he gives us malarkey and hog wash.
There is another article linked to here: E-Note: More information about John McCain. E. Ethelbert Miller, an Obama supporter since Edwards withdrew from the race, leads us there to an item called I Spent Years as a POW with John McCain, and His Finger Should Not Be Near the Red Button by Phillip Butler.
Butler tries to make the point that because McCain was tortured, but not as much as others, because he was a POW for two years, but not as long as Butler's 4.5 years, because he was taken prisoner with broken arms and the pain of this was probably used to torture him but yet this too was common, because he did not sell out and speak badly of the US, which would have gotten him out of the POW camp early, this common bravery is nothing Butler did not do, because of this and more, McCain's POW experience should be minimized. Reading the article, it almost seems that Butler is trying to make the reverse points with a dramatic use of understatement.
Here we have situation where, when and where McCain has shown great courage, loyalty and fortitude, in the face of extreme conditions, he is being put down because of the commonness of it. Sure "John was awarded a Silver Star and Purple Heart for heroism and wounds in combat," but what about Medals of Honor, Service Crosses, and Bronze Stars, he didn't get those? Why didn't he get those? What's up with that?
Obama's campaign has to be based on rhetoric and words. What else does he have, especially when compared to McCain? Even if Obama's conscious intentions are good, he is most likely incapable of handling the position of president. There is nothing that would lead us to believe that he could. Thus the thought has to occur to Democrats to make sure everyone hates Bush, and then all Republicans by association. Obama is gaining supporters based on the idea that anyone should be president besides a Republican. E. Ethelbert Miller had me looking closely at Edwards, and I was impressed. But verbose Obama for the sake of a Democrat: Enough.
Yours,
Rus
AA Gill has a good piece on Obama's malarkey and hogwash in the Sunday Times today.
ReplyDeleteHi Vernon,
ReplyDeleteThanks. A must read: Barack Obama's army. This isn't even the best part, but here:
Personal life stories of the Oprah type become the leitmotif of the conference. One after the other, every speaker gets up and begins by saying, with a cracking voice: “I want to tell you a story about a woman who came to this country with nothing but a dream. During the day she folded anchovies. In the evening she ironed for lapdancers. She had nothing to live in but her dream. She brought up 15 children. I am the youngest of those children and she put me through Harvard Law School by taking in taxidermy. There was always love in our home and road kill on the table.”
Cumulatively, these stories sound like the Yorkshireman’s sketch from Monty Python as a 12-step share.
Cumulatively these witticisms make for an exceptional piece to decompress with.
Yours,
Rus
If that's the way you feel Rus, that's the way. Nothing wrong with it, everything right with it. McCain is a patriot with fine qualities (but then so is Obama, nb). However, imho, that doesn't mean McCain's political views are ones likely to make the US and the world a safer and generally more pleasant place. The world has moved on and it's time some of the ideas of the Republicans, especially their fiscal/business ones, were fiercely reined in. If you look on the Bush/Cheney neocon era as a grand experiment, I'd say it has gone horribly wrong. Still, that's just my 2 cents. What would be the point of a blog without some decent arguments?
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