Attack of the 50-foot Negro

Steve Benen at The Carpetbagger Report has a bit on how the narrative against Obama has devolved to it's ultimate Hollywood-Kryptonite form: He's a Commie-Socialist-Pinko. From Mars.

Benen rightfully observes a few things. ONE, how in fair cricket it just isn't done to suggest that avid uncritical melding of pro-military, pro-corporate views may accrue fascist-sounding and -appearing trappings and behaviours like, oh, monolithic definitions of "patriot" and flags on everything including the NYSE and big aircraft carriers named for still-living politicians related to the current boss. And TWO, how this accusation of soulless socialistic monsterdom is not supposed to rile the sensibilities of leftward leaning types, what with it being patently obvious like how women are just awful drivers and Polish people are really dumb.

Wait, those last things aren't true? Next, someone will tell me liberals don't cheer aborted babies and may, just may, actually love their own children. As if.

Yes, the Commie meme is especially dear to this blogger what with it being a perverse driver of so much of the last 50 years' triumphs and trainwrecks and an endlessly evolving project about Moonshots and (Red Menace-like) Tsunamis. The short exposition is the fact that thinking is damn boring, and that feeling, well, that's what some intelligent designer™ designed us for and here we are, feeling to the max. 21st C. American life is an orgy of sensation, the Friday the 13th franchise or the endless parade of bad 50s sci-fi all rolled up. Spooky stories enliven us, no matter how ridiculously stretched the telling has to get. And hey, I have slides to prove it...



So now, we have the main feature. Obama the alien being, a Muslim in reel one, a radical Christian in reel two, a liberal non-bowling elitist in reel three and, next, now, the ultimate culmination that only sputniks, UFOs, mushroom clouds and Rosa Parks could deliver. Attack of the 50 Foot Negro. There goes the galaxy.

Does it make sense? Hah. Sense would be Hillary Clinton realizing she's fragging one of her own and her legacy in her quixotic search for relevance and its last gasp cartoon of Boomer consultant-solution-speak, all the while making John McCain appear like a breath of fresh air to a GOP-fatigued electorate. Sense in this age of hyperreal, with adults displaying the appetites, patience and judgment of children is as rare as Iridium, something I hear scientists say we find on Earth mostly because asteroids deliver it from outerspace with big cataclysmic booms of their own.

I digress. Benen points out the odd idea that comparisons to Joe Stalin shouldn't trouble a sturdy liberal head but calling a conservative fascist is somehow akin to calling one a pedophile and just beyond the pale. There is nothing so complicated here as the "I'm rubber, you're glue" model of 7 year old debate. But Andrew Sullivan thinks he sees more.

[Kristol's] calling him a lying, Godless communist.

You could argue, as Kristol and others hilariously will, that Lou Dobbs has no base,
that fundamentalist Christianism has no problem with "the other" in a globalized world, that dozens of state constitutional amendments banning civil marriages that had never and would never have taken place were just spirited forms of civic engagement, rather than scapegoating or politicking on resentment. You could also argue, as others legitimately will, that spasms of economic distress and social discontent are unconnected. Hey: Weimar had nothing to do with Hitler. But Kristol is doing something much more pernicious: he is saying that Obama is faking faith, that his very profession of faith is a "mask" that is slipping, and that Kristol is the person to determine whose faith is genuine and who is a fraud.

A non-Christian manipulator of Christianity is calling a Christian a liar about his own faith. That's where they've gone to already. And it's only the middle of April. What are they so scared of?

What? Something so scary, so alien it makes them quake. Something William James would call a 'novel idea,' too novel and too discombobulating for comfort. They are scared of a black man who tilts their understanding of the machine, one whom many of their fellow Rs actually liked before he started getting the Michael Rennie treatment from Hillary and Mark Penn. They are scared of a 6-foot, 1.5 inch man, who is liked almost regardless AND because of his color. But it's his invocation of intrinsic goods, of the things we'd like to believe about ourselves collectively as Americans, that's what makes him seem 50-foot tall.

Leave be those small-town voters who may or may not be "bitter" about getting the shaft for the last 30 years. It's Hillary and Kristol who are apoplectic that their particular Boomer projects straddling two American centuries just haven't been the Moonshots they'd hoped for. They've got nukes. And Flag pins. And the 50-foot Commie-Alien with a real map to the moon must pay.

Innovate? But it's raining, Fouro.

Innovate? But it's raining, Fouro.

Been quite bz around here in the first qtr, so, in lieu of catching up with some lame posts I thought I'd upload some of what we've been exploring and sharing. These are sized down so a click or two to "view image in new window" should make them legible. See any patterns?









































I'll bet your brain hurts after all that.