An Admirable Summation

October 19, 2009


An Admirable Summation
Thusly and therefore:
On the topic of lesser evilism, there's one thing that's now certain: Obama is worse than his predecessor. It's possible that McCain would have managed to be even worse. It's possible he would have had a stroke and President Palin would be in charge. Again, so what? A crank and a loon could as easily have managed to accidentally make things better. What we have now is a bright, rational, thoroughly competent man who is continuing the very same policies that made Cheney/Bush so damaging. He does it in complete sentences, without the twitching and unnerving irritability of the last president. The lurid freak show is outsourced to Biden.

As for revolution, this is silly, as is the imputed "worse the better" strategy. What grandiosity! You come off like a Freeper fixated on caricatures of hippies. Obama is already making things worse and has done more polarizing than Rumsfeld and Cheney. My god, look what he's done to the pwogs. They're polarized to the point where their only common outlet for activism is shrieking "fascism!" and wailing about the stupidity of the faux grassroots right wingers. They actually have less going for them than they did in the previous regime. Obama has successfully demobilized and atomized them.
[excerpting a previous commenter] But really, don't you think you're all just a bunch of upper middle class wankers who got your brains addled by too much edumacation?
You've been reading too much Atrios. His affected Brit slang and sophomoric emulation of the snide, right wing crotch-grabbing style are contagious.
The last point about Atrios is obviously of incalculably lesser significance than the earlier, broader arguments. I included it because it's both deservedly, cruelly accurate and hugely funny. Spot on!, as the affectedly Britty, slangy Atrios might natter.

On the pathetically lamentable topic of what Obama has "done to the pwogs": I will soon have much more on the progressives' collapse into utter irrelevance and intellectual impotence since Obama's ascendance to the Office of the Divine (Earth Subdivision, where we regrettably dwell). For quite a while, this has been one of my ongoing themes in my analysis of the numerous dangers represented by Obama. As just one example:
I confess that I am very fearful for the future of this country, even more fearful than I have been in the Bush years. And that, I also confess, is a development I would never have predicted. But there had been the possibility of opposition over the past seven years, although it finally became clear that all such opposition was a deadly illusion, and that the nominal opposition was in certain respects even guiltier than the Bush criminals.

An Obama victory will kill much of the possibility for meaningful political opposition for good -- that is, opposition that might significantly alter the existing system without destroying it (if that is at all possible, which I am almost entirely convinced it is not). But the resentments, the anger and possibly even the hatred will remain, and they may grow. What happens then?

It hardly bears thinking about.
So, a lot more to come on all that, once I manage to get the nausea under control. Besides, there are other essays I want to write first, and many other subjects of much greater moment.

But to sate, however temporarily and unsatisfactorily, your masochistic hunger, here's a passage I wrote about the glories of today's progressive, ah, movement at the end of April 2008:
This primary from hell has been useful in certain respects. It has revealed a great deal about both remaining Democratic candidates, and it has shown those who are still capable of seeing and identifying what is in front of them much about the online progressive movement. It was indisputably clear much earlier (and I wrote about this fact even before the 2006 election), but now it is has been burned into the minds of some of us with a ferocious fire: the Democrats and most of the "leading" online progressives represent nothing even approaching the solution. They are precisely, ineradicably, unalterably the problem. Beyond this central, immovable fact, and in place of an understanding of history (by which I mean more than the time between elections, and more than even one or two decades) and an appreciation of political theory and reality, culture and the numerous and complicated ways in which a multitude of factors interact, we have empty slogans from children's books and shitty, fifth-rate melodrama. Awesome.
And to think we've barely begun ... well, best not to think about it too long or too much, unless you have a bottle of superbly aged single malt grasped firmly in hand and headed directly toward your open mouth. Never mind the glass.

Now ... drink! It helps, doesn't it? Yes, the flesh is weak. For which we give deeply grateful thanks, o bountiful God. You non-existent Schlub.
posted by Arthur Silber at 12:28 PM