Scamalot and the Obaminable Snowjob

While I have prevailed in my courageous battle against manflu, I slept too late to prove it with a new post. Therefore I'll do the next best thing, which is a repost of the sequel to yesterday's offering. My point in reviscerating these old eviscerations is to see how well they hold up in light of Obama's holdup of the country.

And of course, we also want to check in on the changing contours of the psychic waveform produced by infantile fantasy crashing on the rocks of the reality principle. Given the level of hysterical fantasy projected into Obama, we knew the country was going to be in for a screwed awakening, as this Nobody from Nowhere underwent the formality of actually existing. But I'm pretty sure that only wideawake godballs with 20/∞ cʘʘnvision knew it would be this bad.

*****

I really was never any more than what I was -- a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze. Now it had blown up in my face and was hanging over me. I wasn't a preacher performing miracles. It would have driven anybody mad. --Bob Dylan

Let's meditate for awhile on the political implications of the Devil card with our UnKnown Friend.

First of all, one must understand that, whatever else you may think of him, the being known as Satan is a source of inspiration; to be in-spired is to receive spirit, and it should go without saying that to merely be "spiritual" is neither here nor there, since there are good and evil spirits. After all, Deepak is spiritual. Marianne Williamson is spiritual. Osama bin Laden is definitely spiritual.

Thus, this demonic counter-inspiration is still a kind of inspiration. In fact, very much so. To avoid premature saturation, let's just call it (-i). Most of us, assuming we weren't permanently damaged by higher education, can recognize (i) when we see it, but many people confuse (i) and (-i), with catastrophic results.

For example, America's founders were quite obviously animated by genuine (i). The reactionary counter-revolutionaries -- i.e., the proglodyte left -- are always more or less animated by (-i). Regardless of what they say, they specifically want to arrest and undo our founding, which revolves around liberty converging upon the nonlocal attractor of the Judeo-Christian God (i.e., e pluribus unum, or freedom converging upon the One, or Sovereign Good). Obviously, the Founders did not envision a radically secularized and demoralized populace converging upon an omnipotent state. Leave that to the radical French revolutionaries to deicide. And therefore genocide.

The campaign of John Edwards, for example, was an exercise in pure (-i). How then did it differ from Obama's campaign? I would say that the Edwards campaign was equally driven by (+H) -- i.e., open class warfare and unhinged primitive envy -- whereas Obama's campaign was imbued with a meretricious (-L) -- that is, a shallow caricature of the higher unity produced by genuine love. Obama, like all men of the left, wishes to enforce unity from on high, which is just another name for tyranny. The bribes, the 2:00 AM weekend votes, the secret meetings -- this is the unity of thieves and criminals.

Thus, there is always deep well of (H) under the (-L), but the obamaniacs are able to split off and deny the (H) by bathing in the (-L). To see this, all you have to do is criticize Obama, which signals to the somnolent zombies that you are not a member of their social trance, which then triggers the anger that is analogous to being rudely awakened from a deep sleep at 3:00AM.

Along these lines, reader Mike M. left an astute comment yesterday:

"This swooning Obama-worship of someone who seems to be an empty suit is bizarre and curious. Note how it follows the irrational demonization of the current POTUS now seen as a figure of such mythic evil that he, George Bush, is held to have deliberately murdered thousands of innocent Americans on 9/11 as a pretext for immoral imperialist war. This is a view which is resolutely held by graduates of our most prestigious universities! That such an event would have no historical precedent and that such a purported crime would exceed the ruthless cynical evil of the purported Nazi burning of the Reichstag cannot be without meaning....

"Given the powerful projection, scapegoating and displacement poured into the demonization of George W. Bush, could it be that this Obamessiah persona is a necessary counter to the fabricated evil Bush-Hitler figure, and the powerful divisive hysteria and paranoia which has accompanied the demonization of George Bush -- sort of virtual particle and anti-particles emerging from a spiritual vacuum?"

Yes. That is exactly what I am trying to say. Genuine (L) is convergent upon wholeness, truth, beauty, light, harmony, and freedom. It is never reactive, but active. On the other hand, the Obama-love (-L) is almost wholly reactive, as it exists side by side with the (H) from which it is derived.

Come to think of it, I saw a fine example of this in the latest lunacy from the Windy Hindi. He writes that "I am far more worried about an invisible epidemic than I am about H1N1. I'm referring to the spread of distrust that has become contagion beyond all reasonable boundaries.... [W]hen mistrust becomes the actual, avowed basis for politics, healthy skepticism has turned malignant. Right now, the political credo has shifted from 'I don't trust your position on the issues' to 'I don't trust who you are and everybody like you.' We would be ashamed to apply such an attitude to people of color, although it was common enough in the past."

But them, without irony or shame, Deepak malignantly characterizes those who oppose socialized medicine as not "so much a dissenting minority as a faction that wants to destroy the Democrats. This is bad faith in action. It has no interest in finding the right answer to a sore dilemma. Its ambition is merely to discredit, vilify, and cast the seeds of toxic mistrust." Feel the Love!

A spiritually normal person is unnerved by the kind of hysterical adulation (-L) being directed at Obama. You cannot help wondering about the impoverished state of his soul, and how it must be a pathological mirror-image of what is being projected into him -- like an unconscious lock that corresponds perfectly to the projected key. Such a man -- as was true of Clinton -- seeks his own center in the periphery of the idealizing rabble, so to speak. It couldn't be more different from a man with an immutable axis and incorruptible center to which people are "magnetized," such as Ronald Reagan.

I read somewhere yesterday -- can't think of the source at the moment -- that Reagan and Obama are mirror images, in the sense that Reagan spent decades dissenting from the foolish liberal orthodoxies and pieties believed by the intellectual elite, while Obama couldn't be more cravenly conformist in his beliefs. He seems to have indiscriminately swallowed leftism whole without ever questioning its faulty assumptions, let alone baleful effects. He's certainly the most provincial and conformist president in my lifetime.

If mother love is like the open circle that is both infinite and enveloping (and potentially suffocating), father love is like the absolute point or axis. The circle must come first (i.e., the ineffable background subject of being), followed by the point, which forms the center (and which will in turn extend "vertically" to the celestial Father, of whom our earthly father is just an authorized deputy).

A man without a father (or father energy, which can come from other sources) is generally a man without a center. He will be either a weakling, or a weak man imitating a strong man (the belligerent Sean Penn or Keith Olbermann or Nameless Troll type).

In addition to seeking his center in the adulation of others, it is also possible for the weak man to fabricate it in a kind of centerless, manic energy -- again, Clinton comes to mind. He is bubbling over with scattered hysterical thought devoid of any coherence or consistency. He is most focussed when he is focused on the adulation of the crowd, which provides him with a faux center and a temporary integration (and also keeps shame and guilt at bay). But it's an addiction, which is why he can't leave politics alone, but also why he has no enduring political principles.

There is a fascinating chapter in Dylan's autobiography, in which he discusses at length the horror of being idealized in the manner he was back in the 1960s. Again, our society has become so narcissistic, that not only is such a bizarre situation seen as normative, but it is something that people actively seek (i.e., the cult of celebrity). People want to be famous and adulated, but obviously for all the wrong reasons. There are few good reasons to be famous. Which is why, as Dennis Prager says, most famous people are utterly insignificant, while most significant people aren't famous.

I am also reminded of something Schuon said, that the spiritually normal man does things because they please God, not for the horizontal affirmation of others. He made a related comment about the purpose of secular humanism, which is "to make oneself as useful as possible to a humanity as useless as possible." Look at Obama, whose whole economic platform involves making himself useful to the takers against the makers. And once there are more takers than makers, i.e., people dependent upon the state, we may have reached the point of no return. Thus the rush to ram through the ill-considered health care bill, in order to turn all citizens into serfs with his signature.

One can't help wondering if Obama's absence of a father is a critical element here. It is interesting, is it not, that he identifies with his "blackness," even though his father was an utterly useless abandoning-irresponsible-alcoholic-bigamist-Marxist? If a boy is not initiated by the love of a virtuous man, then he will remain left behind in the murky, oceanic, intoxicating, boundary-less realm of mother love, which is as different from father-love as wave is to particle or music to architecture.

Please bear in mind that I am in no way denigrating mother love. Indeed, in watching Mrs. G. interact with Future Leader over the past four years, I am more in awe of it than ever. However, I am equally aware (as is Mrs. G) that if this love weren't tempered by father love, we could have a real monster on our hands.

Awhile back Hoarhey made an insightful comment to the effect that the country wasn't prepared to cope with another fatherless president working out his issues on the national stage. In fact, it is probably no coincidence that in Clinton, the country chose a feminized, mother-bound man as president after the conclusion of the Cold War, since father had done his job and was therefore felt to be no longer necessary. But now, in a time of hot war, were Americans naive enough -- or in such denial -- to think that we could cow our enemies with sufficient mother love?

Yes. We. Were.