Once again at at Covenant Zone Thursday night meeting, we heard voiced the fear that Obama might be the first President to be so humiliated by reality, making a mess of his Messianic self-image and great inexperience, that he would commit suicide. I wonder is this VDH piece had something to do with that dark thread.
Works and Days » Hope He Can Change
Works and Days » Hope He Can Change
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If he kills himself, I wonder if he'll have taken the rest of us with him first.
I laughed at him when I first encountered him. Then I came to despise him as cheap street hustler. Now I fear him, a man who will strut and fret his hour upon the stage, realize his sound and fury is a tale told my an idiot, that he is the idiot, that the audience is booing and laughing at him, that nothing he says or does signifies anything but a brief breath of foul air blowing across our nation, blowing out our lives. This ignorant and malignant fool might not even have the good sense to regret what he's done. Not a tragic figure but a buffoon.
Four years of this? Not a chance. We won't survive it. But that's a good thing, perhaps. We voted for this cocky kid, for image and infatuation with ourselves as cool people doing something really cool. This is like a date that turn out to be a nightmare with Freddy the Slasher. Bad. If we survive, maybe this lesson will stick for a generation. What price?
Hmm,
I still say pray for him; what good is building up resentment that cannot be discharged within the system we want to defend? It hamstrings us as we try to figure out what we can do. Hence the need for forgiveness as explained by Roger Scruton in the piece below. The point of suggesting that only O's suicide could discharge the resentments his early failures/obstacles (given reality) seem to forebode is to remind us that we have no choice but to want him to succeed and to talk about how that could happen if he learns (see the VDH link).
I don't think we can really hope or expect his suicide, however "logical" it seems to someone asking how else can the impending humiliations be handled? Our/his capacity for self-delusion can be immense. And besides, Biden would be an even greater nightmare, something even Obama is probably recognizing, which should encourage his sense of responsibility.
"We won't survive it, but that's a good thing, perhaps?" That doesn't make much sense, though in presenting a paradox that our need for survival must overcome it begins to point things out in hopes of a finding a source of new creativity! Let's focus on the latter; the problem with all justifiable resentment taken too much to heart is that it begins to delude us, or leaves us tired and frustrated, as to what we can hope to do in the given reality. Let's focus on what O can or should do, on the nature of the reality we need continually to explore, even if we are destined to learn through O's failures/awakenings to reality/delusions about our enemies and the nature of real economic growth.
Never before have we had such a chance to talk to people about how resentment - e.g. the great scapegoating of George Bush, the completely fantastical misconceptions about how a war can or cannot be managed by ordinary human beings, i.e. the article of faith that Bush's war was was a complete disaster - deludes us.
i might add for those unfamiliar with what I have leaned about the anthropology of resentment, that I think resentment is inevitable and necessary, and inescapable part of the human condition. Humanity is organized around shared conceptions of the sacred and these simultaneously attract and alienate. We have no choice. And this just why our resentment can delude us so, when it come to apprehending what is and is not possible to do with one's resentment.
Our president isn't just some party hack easy to dispose of when he turns out to be a fool or a coward or an idiot. Obama is not a man in a position like the Canadian who just left the political scene in disgrace. The president is more than the man: he is the avatar of the nation. It doesn't matter if we voted for him: once he is our president, he is then our national symbol of the greatness of our land and its people. Hippies and trendies and groupies have made a fool of our nation, and we have to survive it till he is gone. We might not survive it, not if the world turns on us as if we were a sick animal in the wild, something to be preyed upon and killed. The nation won't literally die and leave a hole in the Earth: we'll die as a democracy of worth instead, turning into a bitter and disillusioned nation who hates. That is not who we are now.
Obama is not a capable politician, nor doe he have the mettle to become one. We can see it, though it might be pleasant to give our deepest optimism a shot for fun. How can we know this? We can know by looking at the man, at his gestures, at his language, at his mind at work. He is a boy in a man's job, and he is a grown man who is a boy. Can he grow on the job? Why in the job but not in life previously? Why expect the totally unlikely for reasons other than optimism for its own sake? We must prepare for the day when we have to deal with the coming disasters he brings. If, by good chance, he doesn't unleash a world of danger on our nation, then we can say we were wrong. I could easily live with that.
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