Overdosing On Obama
Jan. 21st, 2009 10:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraI went into Obama overload pretty early in the inauguration process – like a week before.
Part of this was toxic immersion in the 24-hour news cycle. So, turn it off! you say. Easier said than done in this household – Ben is a news junkie, spends hours every day cruising the news sites, hunched over his computer like a Roman presdigitator poring over chicken guts. MSNBC goes on at dawn. And MSNBC was really the worst offender in turning what truly was an historic moment into the kind of hagiography that gives us black velvet portraits of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. exchanging fist thumps.
It was the language more than anything else that drove me crazy. “This thing is ordained,” trumpets a headline on the Huffington Post. Spike Lee takes it one step further, maintaining on MSNBC’s Morning Joe that God made the economy crash and burn so that Obama would win. “I’m a better person because he’s been elected,” declares Oprah.
And I’m thinking, this is the language of coronation, the divine right of kings.
None of this is Obama’s fault, of course, and I’m very pleased he’s moving so swiftly on Guantanamo. Nor do I fault his media guys: bread and circuses is the tried and true formula for mob control, and since all the bread is going to the banks and financial institutions, there ain’t nothing left for the rest of us right now but spectacle.
And part of it, of course, is just me. Little Miss Stormcloud. Mary, Mary, quite contrary. Person voted Most Likely To Be Perpetual Stranger At the Party in high school.
Personality cults scare me. I don’t care who the personality is. Koolaid is Koolaid.
This morning we find out that while Obama’s ratings were higher than any president’s since Reagan, they still didn’t beat American Idol’s, and the stock market slipped another 4%. This evidence of the torturer’s horse scratching its innocent behind comforts me strangely.
Part of this was toxic immersion in the 24-hour news cycle. So, turn it off! you say. Easier said than done in this household – Ben is a news junkie, spends hours every day cruising the news sites, hunched over his computer like a Roman presdigitator poring over chicken guts. MSNBC goes on at dawn. And MSNBC was really the worst offender in turning what truly was an historic moment into the kind of hagiography that gives us black velvet portraits of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. exchanging fist thumps.
It was the language more than anything else that drove me crazy. “This thing is ordained,” trumpets a headline on the Huffington Post. Spike Lee takes it one step further, maintaining on MSNBC’s Morning Joe that God made the economy crash and burn so that Obama would win. “I’m a better person because he’s been elected,” declares Oprah.
And I’m thinking, this is the language of coronation, the divine right of kings.
None of this is Obama’s fault, of course, and I’m very pleased he’s moving so swiftly on Guantanamo. Nor do I fault his media guys: bread and circuses is the tried and true formula for mob control, and since all the bread is going to the banks and financial institutions, there ain’t nothing left for the rest of us right now but spectacle.
And part of it, of course, is just me. Little Miss Stormcloud. Mary, Mary, quite contrary. Person voted Most Likely To Be Perpetual Stranger At the Party in high school.
Personality cults scare me. I don’t care who the personality is. Koolaid is Koolaid.
This morning we find out that while Obama’s ratings were higher than any president’s since Reagan, they still didn’t beat American Idol’s, and the stock market slipped another 4%. This evidence of the torturer’s horse scratching its innocent behind comforts me strangely.
