In
1989 Zbigniew Kazimierz Brezezinski, a premier theorist of totalitarian
political systems, published The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of
Communism in the Twentieth Century. He lived a long and eventful life and
unfortunately sold the services of his formidable Polish intellect to the likes
of Lyndon Johnson and the feckless, attempted rabbit
slayer, James Earl Carter Jr. (For those taken with odd coincidences,
Brezezinksi was awarded his Harvard Ph.D. with a dissertation on Lenin’s
terror-command state in 1953, the same year Stalin turned room temperature,
leaving his second-string in charge of the one Lenin had created.)
One
also cannot help but wonder whether Brezezinski ever came to regret that
portion of the sub-title he gave to his book – the “Death of Communism” – having
died in 2017, a couple of months after Barack “Mugabe” Obama was done with the
“transformation” he had earlier promised of the United States of America back
in 2008. In his mistitled book, Brezezinski made an observation that really
jumps out at a discerning reader: “Communism thus appealed to the simpletons
and the sophisticates alike…” Yes, except for the past-tense of the verb. Moreover,
these days it can be a challenge to separate the sophisticates from the simpletons.
This
insight does help to dispel the mystery of Obama’s rapid ascendency – from a
no-account, back-bench, corrupt state senator to “heal the planet” President of
the United States. Obama is a simpleton who passed himself off as a
sophisticate with a great deal of assistance from high placed, fake-sophisticates
like New York Times columnist, David
Brooks. Recall, that it was Brooks, who after interviewing candidate Obama, was
so smitten with the combination of his blackness and well-pressed
slacks, gushed that that he was destined be a great President. Then, of
course, there was Senior Newsweek Editor,
Evan
Thomas’s comment on Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech: “I mean in a way Obama’s
standing above the country, above – above the world, he’s sort of God.”
Here
is a clue as to how it unfolded, how Obama rose to divinity, happily documented
for us by, again, the New York Times long
before the thin, street agitator from South Chicago, Hawaii, Indonesia, or
wherever he was from, proclaimed himself as The One.
The new president of the Review is Barack Obama, a 28-year-old graduate of Columbia University who spent four years heading a community development program for poor blacks on Chicago's South Side before enrolling in law school. His late father, Barack Obama, was a finance minister in Kenya and his mother, Ann Dunham, is an American anthropologist now doing fieldwork in Indonesia. Mr. Obama was born in Hawaii.
''The fact that I've been elected shows a lot of progress,'' Mr. Obama said today in an interview. ''It's encouraging.”
What
the NYT scribblers omit in this article,
one of their typical “first black fill-in-the-blank” panegyrics, is more interesting
and relevant than what we get to read. But skipping through the boiler plate, reverential
tripe, here, luckily, we have Obama captured, unaware, on record as the self-promoting
simpleton he is and has always been. “The fact that I've been elected shows a lot of progress…. It’s
encouraging.” Perhaps, but the little we know about Harvard and the lot we know
about Obama suggest that this election had nothing to do with what most people
think of as “progress.”
His
remarks in fact do tell us all we need to know about the career path Obama had
in mind and the fake sophistication that would be layered around him as he
hustled his way up to the highest ring on the boss-ladder. “Progress” is a gem
of Obama-Speak, one that captures the solipsistic equation of his personal
advancement with “that arc of the moral universe that bends toward justice.” Recall,
this was a Martin Luther King apothegm, a favorite of OHB, used during his
reign to keep reminding those “folks” out there that the course of his
presidency and the “moral arc of
the universe” were pretty much on the same track. This sort of theatrical moralizing
yourself into the woven fabric of the universe is a common adolescent trait,
usually forgivable because most adolescents grow up and wise up. Obama did neither
and ended up convinced that the banalities that always seemed to be popping
into his head and out of his busy mouth were profound moral revelations. “If you're walking down the
right path and you’re willing to keep walking, eventually you'll make progress.”
Ok, well maybe this inspiration came to Obama after channeling that old Nancy
Sinatra tune: “These
boots are made for walking and that's just what they'll do. One of these
days these boots are gonna walk all over you,” which, when you think about it,
is what happened to the American people when Obama started walking down his path.
But,
on to “It’s encouraging.” Always the master of misdirection and condescension, even
at 28 years old Obama was already posing as the sage elder who has divined the
“right way” everyone needs to go and, if politely asked, is willing to point in
that direction.
It
was certainly encouraging for Obama, enabling him to tout himself later in
quest of another presidency as a constitutional law scholar even though during
his tenure as editor of this “most prestigious” journal he skipped on one of
the standard expectations for appointment to the post, never publishing a
single paragraph on the law or anything remotely related. In fact, he never
published anything other than two books about his favorite subject, himself,
and there is ample reason to suspect that, even with those, he had a lot of
help. All of this was fairly common knowledge, but for the sophisticates in
journalism and the commentariat (Brezezinski’s sophisticates, including his airhead
daughter, Mika, it
seems) it was time for white America to atone for its racist past. Obama was the
right black, platitude-polishing slickster to make it happen, endorsed by the
illustrious Senator
Harry Reid for his “light-skinned”
appearance and speaking patterns “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to
have one.”
Obama’s Presidency with its culmination in Cult-Marx, identity politics vastly expanded the population of Brezesinski’s simpletons who swoon when the “free stuff for everyone guy” comes along and says things like “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” Identity politics, crudely reductionist in its approach and primitive in its emotional appeal, makes the natives even more restless. The mad scramble is on. All the incentives are to join, if you can, one of the communities of the marginalized and oppressed, articulate your grievances, agitate for revenge and demand the assistance of the state in taking it. If none is immediately available for membership more are under development, and barring that, you can resort to being a self-flagellating advocate for one of them. There are many self-serving options.
The moralists who call the shots now are all about structuring this new social order so as to protect and reward the oppressed, and then punish the oppressors after they are outed. Most importantly, in such an order it is obviously neither healthy nor prudent for anyone to risk being branded as an oppressor of any sort, or even suspected as such. Which is why in the post-Obama era not-being-a-racist certification has become the most coveted social prize. “Please, really, I am not a racist. How can I convince you? I’ll do anything.” Consider for a moment the power dynamics in play here, and then you quickly understand why political resistance has almost completely collapsed to the moral-extortion racketeering that Obama and his minions institutionalized and now operates openly in both parties.
In
her great work, The Origins of
Totalitarianism, Hannah
Arendt wrote: “Society
is always prone to accept a person offhand for what he pretends to be, so that
a crackpot posing as a genius always has a certain chance to be believed.” Written
long before the arrival of The One, it is comforting to believe that if she had
been alive to contemplate the crackpot of Hope and Change, she would have been
a one of the few sophisticates who did not fall for the scam.
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