Exiting Bizarro World - Democratic Underground

Pamela Troy

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Sun Oct-26-08 07:25 PM
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Exiting Bizarro World

Edited on Sun Oct-26-08 07:26 PM by Pamela Troy

“There is a cult-like atmosphere around Barack Obama, which his campaign has carefully and successfully fabricated, which concerns me. The messiah complex. Fainting audience members at rallies. Special Obama flags and an Obama presidential seal. A graphic with the portrayal of the globe and Obama's name on it, which adorns everything from Obama's plane to his street literature. Young school children singing songs praising Obama. Teenagers wearing camouflage outfits and marching in military order chanting Obama's name and the professions he is going to open to them. An Obama world tour, culminating in a speech in Berlin where Obama proclaims we are all citizens of the world. I dare say, this is ominous stuff.” Mark Levin, NRO

It sure is! I’m glad Mark Levin told me about this because quite honestly, I had no idea that Obama had his own special flags fluttering in the breeze at his rallies, or a logo showing Obama covering the earth “which adorns everything from Obama’s plane to his street literature.” the only logo I’ve seen has been a stylized O with a red and white striped drape across the bottom, and the only reference I can find to an Obama flag is a case where some imaginative Freepers mistook the Ohio state flag for an Obamacized version of the American flag. I had no idea Obama was writing “street literature," “set in the world of hustlers, pimps, thugs, chickenheads, blinged-out rappers or 'round-the-way baby mamas.” (apparently the man is more versatile than I’d imagined) but I guess it’s not surprising he’d put his logo on it. It’s probably a kind of gritty shorthand, like graffiti tagging, appealing to the streetwise sensibility of the young audience of this new, cutting edge literary genre.

Speaking of which, I can’t find any marching teenagers in camouflage chanting Obama’s name and the professions he’s going to open to them (which, frankly, doesn’t sound like very adroit sloganeering. Too many syllables.) Given that I live in what some consider America’s ground zero for liberalism, San Francisco, this is a bit strange. You’d think they’d be all over the place out here. You’d think that at least one of my lunches at an outdoor café in the Castro would have been interrupted by a starry-eyed young fellow in camouflage rising from his seat to serenade us with “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.”

Every now and then I get the creepy sense that I’m inhabiting a parallel universe unrelated to the world of some of the people around me. I got that feeling years ago, in the days shortly after 9/11 when I would turn on the TV and see quotes from George W. Bush juxtaposed with quotes from FDR and Winston Churchill. Now I’m getting it again, but to a lesser extent and from a smaller group of people. We seem to be going out the way we came in, via a national crisis, and as we exit the Bizarro world of the Bush II presidency, it’s the die-hard Bush fans who are looking around in horrified amazement and asking if we’ve all gone crazy.

“I honestly never thought we'd see such a thing in our country,” says poor Mark Levin. “I sense what's occurring in this election is a recklessness and abandonment of rationality that has preceded the voluntary surrender of liberty and security in other places.”

We might actually give up torture. We might actually revive Habeas Corpus. And attorney/client confidentiality. And in the topsy-turvey world of the far right and the National Review, that would, I guess, qualify as “the voluntary surrender of liberty and security.”