Saturday, October 31, 2009
Pathetic
Is anything more pathetic, at this point, than Obama's insistent appeasement?
In a way, it makes perfect sense. He is trying to hold on to the unique energy of his campaign, and the mass support that he found across interests and borders. But I feel like a fundamental piece of logic then slips away when this is your model of governance: you are no longer making decisions or setting policy, but simply locating utterly spurious "middle grounds" between opposed constituencies. No leadership, no ideals, no goals; merely mathematical calculations of the betwixt and between. Instead of the decider, we have the reactor.
Look at my post from last year about Girl Talk's anticipation of this very problem, which the DJ/artist represented as a kind of unceasing, formless noise. The delirium of the mashup, in which two songs in two totally different (and racially coded) genres are combined, gives way to the loss of all coherence.
Right now O is attempting to compensate with representation. He will get up in the middle of the night-- can't sleep!-- and go salute the bodies-- he's really thinking about it!-- so that we can trust that his non-decision, whenever he makes it, was truly fraught with personal anguish and gravitas. Here, too, a double-edged sword, in this case, his legendary self-composure. Could it be that this placid self that stood up so well in debates against fools is the mask that reveals the truth on the inside-- that this is a person who feels nothing? Someone for whom it must be represented to actually occur?
posted by James Hussein Dixon : 10/31/2009 12:31:00 PM
In a way, it makes perfect sense. He is trying to hold on to the unique energy of his campaign, and the mass support that he found across interests and borders. But I feel like a fundamental piece of logic then slips away when this is your model of governance: you are no longer making decisions or setting policy, but simply locating utterly spurious "middle grounds" between opposed constituencies. No leadership, no ideals, no goals; merely mathematical calculations of the betwixt and between. Instead of the decider, we have the reactor.
Look at my post from last year about Girl Talk's anticipation of this very problem, which the DJ/artist represented as a kind of unceasing, formless noise. The delirium of the mashup, in which two songs in two totally different (and racially coded) genres are combined, gives way to the loss of all coherence.
Right now O is attempting to compensate with representation. He will get up in the middle of the night-- can't sleep!-- and go salute the bodies-- he's really thinking about it!-- so that we can trust that his non-decision, whenever he makes it, was truly fraught with personal anguish and gravitas. Here, too, a double-edged sword, in this case, his legendary self-composure. Could it be that this placid self that stood up so well in debates against fools is the mask that reveals the truth on the inside-- that this is a person who feels nothing? Someone for whom it must be represented to actually occur?
posted by James Hussein Dixon : 10/31/2009 12:31:00 PM
