From Varsity 25 April 2008
I’m not the only person feeling invigorated by the US presidential stuff. Over the holiday my ten year old brother, observing the colours of my father’s rug-challenged skull, exclaimed:
‘Hillary’s beating Obama’.
Aside from the robust impertinence (the kids in ‘Bedknobs and Broomsticks’ would never have gotten away with a line like that), it at least shows how the contest has captured the imagination, even amongst an age-group which genuinely believes ‘Soulja Boy’ to be musically talented and free of retardation.
It’s easy, really. Get a hip young black dude, a haggard white sour-faced whale, talk about how great both are. Then make them fight each other for years for the right to lose to a deranged ‘Nam vet who looks like the violent, lecherous younger brother of the Emperor from Star Wars. All the elements are in place. It’s perfect PR for the democratic system, really. One wonders why they didn’t think of it before. Actually I say perfect, but I mean almost perfect, because there are some flaws with it, the most important of which is the fact that Obama and Clinton have both been so ravaged by their ambition that they have gone entirely mad.
Obama started this madness, probably, when he seized on Hillary’s (in hindsight gravely erroneous) ‘anti-hope’ mantra, and cunningly flipped it on its head to make himself the candidate of ‘hope’. Abstract concepts are great things to run on, because they mean nothing. However, what Obama has proven is that by twinning the abstract concept with another descriptive noun, picked at random, you can mean even less than nothing. I like the guy, even though he does always look like he might disappear and compete in a long-distance running race, but his bestselling book of ideology, ‘The Audacity Of Hope’, could just as easily have been called ‘The Complexity of Dream, or ‘The Danger Of Creed’. ‘The Belligerence of Humour’, anyone? If he’d gotten Robert Ludlum on the case in time (i.e. before Robert Ludlum died in 2001), they could have called it something even funkier. ‘The Chicago Compromise’, perhaps. Or ‘The Honolulu Hopefulness’.
In amongst all the routine mudslinging there have been some genuine moments of comedy: the word ‘misspeak’, for instance, when the meaning is ‘lie’. I think we can all agree that ‘misspeak’ sounds friendlier: it suggests that there was some kind of purer, inner truth, cruelly distorted by the evil mouth. Almost as good are McCain’s ‘senior moments’ on unimportant issues like the difference between Iran and Iraq. Senior moments are justly celebrated for their hilariousness, but your mother posting her car-keys has fewer global implications than, say, a war. When it comes down to it, do you really want Harold Bishop’s cake-filled finger on the button?
Unfortunately I suspect the answer is yes, particularly when the alternative is, basically, an older, thinner version of the Carlton character from the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. I’d vote for Will Smith, who’s never made a bad movie, but Carlton was always getting bitched on. As for the white whale, I’ll say only this: would you trust someone who thought it was a good idea to delegate her husband, the President of the United States’s, sexual needs to the work experience? There are some responsibilities which must simply be taken on the chin, and I don’t like her priorities.
It’s irrelevant anyway, because the strongest candidate by miles was the dangerously crackers black Republican Alan Keyes, whose entire being was given over to righteous indignation for the ten minutes he was around, before his anti-discrimination ticket resulted in him being, er, discriminated off the radar and out to pasture. He deserved a go, if only so we might have seen what vengeance he was capable of wreaking on the electorate.
‘Hillary’s beating Obama’.
Aside from the robust impertinence (the kids in ‘Bedknobs and Broomsticks’ would never have gotten away with a line like that), it at least shows how the contest has captured the imagination, even amongst an age-group which genuinely believes ‘Soulja Boy’ to be musically talented and free of retardation.
It’s easy, really. Get a hip young black dude, a haggard white sour-faced whale, talk about how great both are. Then make them fight each other for years for the right to lose to a deranged ‘Nam vet who looks like the violent, lecherous younger brother of the Emperor from Star Wars. All the elements are in place. It’s perfect PR for the democratic system, really. One wonders why they didn’t think of it before. Actually I say perfect, but I mean almost perfect, because there are some flaws with it, the most important of which is the fact that Obama and Clinton have both been so ravaged by their ambition that they have gone entirely mad.
Obama started this madness, probably, when he seized on Hillary’s (in hindsight gravely erroneous) ‘anti-hope’ mantra, and cunningly flipped it on its head to make himself the candidate of ‘hope’. Abstract concepts are great things to run on, because they mean nothing. However, what Obama has proven is that by twinning the abstract concept with another descriptive noun, picked at random, you can mean even less than nothing. I like the guy, even though he does always look like he might disappear and compete in a long-distance running race, but his bestselling book of ideology, ‘The Audacity Of Hope’, could just as easily have been called ‘The Complexity of Dream, or ‘The Danger Of Creed’. ‘The Belligerence of Humour’, anyone? If he’d gotten Robert Ludlum on the case in time (i.e. before Robert Ludlum died in 2001), they could have called it something even funkier. ‘The Chicago Compromise’, perhaps. Or ‘The Honolulu Hopefulness’.
In amongst all the routine mudslinging there have been some genuine moments of comedy: the word ‘misspeak’, for instance, when the meaning is ‘lie’. I think we can all agree that ‘misspeak’ sounds friendlier: it suggests that there was some kind of purer, inner truth, cruelly distorted by the evil mouth. Almost as good are McCain’s ‘senior moments’ on unimportant issues like the difference between Iran and Iraq. Senior moments are justly celebrated for their hilariousness, but your mother posting her car-keys has fewer global implications than, say, a war. When it comes down to it, do you really want Harold Bishop’s cake-filled finger on the button?
Unfortunately I suspect the answer is yes, particularly when the alternative is, basically, an older, thinner version of the Carlton character from the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. I’d vote for Will Smith, who’s never made a bad movie, but Carlton was always getting bitched on. As for the white whale, I’ll say only this: would you trust someone who thought it was a good idea to delegate her husband, the President of the United States’s, sexual needs to the work experience? There are some responsibilities which must simply be taken on the chin, and I don’t like her priorities.
It’s irrelevant anyway, because the strongest candidate by miles was the dangerously crackers black Republican Alan Keyes, whose entire being was given over to righteous indignation for the ten minutes he was around, before his anti-discrimination ticket resulted in him being, er, discriminated off the radar and out to pasture. He deserved a go, if only so we might have seen what vengeance he was capable of wreaking on the electorate.
