Showing posts with label messianic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label messianic. Show all posts

Thursday, February 07, 2008

Their own Bobby Kennedy

Confronted with a presidential candidate who challenges them to be more than the sum total of their desires, some young Americans have become unhinged, mistaking the messenger for the Messiah.

Or
so says ABC's Jake Tapper:
Inspiration is nice. But some folks seem to be getting out of hand.

It's as if Tom Daschle descended from on high saying, "Be not afraid; for behold I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all the people: for there is born to you this day in the city of Chicago a Savior, who is Barack the Democrat."

Obama supporter Kathleen Geier writes that she's "getting increasingly weirded out by some of Obama's supporters. On listservs I'm on, some people who should know better – hard-bitten, not-so-young cynics, even – are gushing about Barack…

Describing various encounters with Obama supporters, she writes, "Excuse me, but this sounds more like a cult than a political campaign. The language used here is the language of evangelical Christianity – the Obama volunteers speak of 'coming to Obama' in the same way born-again Christians talk about 'coming to Jesus.'...So I say, we should all get a grip, stop all this unseemly mooning over Barack, see him and the political landscape he is a part of in a cooler, clearer, and more realistic light, and get to work."

Joe Klein, writing at Time, notes "something just a wee bit creepy about the mass messianism" he sees in Obama's Super Tuesday speech.

"We are the ones we've been waiting for," Obama said. "This time can be different because this campaign for the presidency of the United States of America is different. It's different not because of me. It's different because of you."

Says Klein: "That is not just maddeningly vague but also disingenuous: the campaign is entirely about Obama and his ability to inspire. Rather than focusing on any specific issue or cause — other than an amorphous desire for change — the message is becoming dangerously self-referential. The Obama campaign all too often is about how wonderful the Obama campaign is.“
IF I'M BARACK OBAMA, this kind of nonsense is messing with my mind. Then again, I think your mind already has to be pretty well messed with to go into politics.

Still . . . whose fault is it that some 21st century Americans are mistaking the first coming of Obama with the second one of Jesus Christ? I say it's our own damn fault, all of us.

We Baby Boomers, having thrown over God, family and tradition -- by and large -- seem to think we can raise up a new generation in a transcendental vacuum. God and family have been replaced with cynicism and stuff.

And the world we've created in our own image spiritlessly slinks off toward Sodom.

Until. . . .

The quadrennial silly season begins, and comes upon the political horizon a Democratic candidate who looks like America -- looks like America in all its messy, polyglot glory. And this candidate, Barack Obama, talks of creating a government that sticks up for the little people, while declaring to the world that our ends do not justify George Bush's torturing means.

WHEN MODERN AMERICANS once again hear rhetoric based upon enduring principles and not a laundry list of unpayable bribes . . . well, they can get discombobulated. Really, we haven't heard such unbridled apparent idealism since the spring of '68, when Bobby Kennedy appealed to the better angels of Americans' nature and got killed for his trouble.

In a nation unfamiliar with the audacity of Christian belief and praxis -- in a nation where many Christian churches are unfamiliar with the audacity of Christian doctrine and practice -- we do not know how to deal with the idealistic. When someone calls us to look beyond ourselves as the source and summit of whatever the hell it is we're looking for, why are we surprised when some who stumble in the darkness mistake the formerly normative for the supernatural?

We created Seinfeld Nation -- a country about nothing. So we have to deal with it when the ingenuous overreact to Something . . . especially when Something comes in the form of a presidential candidate.

So far, I don't think even "gimlet-eyed" journalists like Time's Joe Klein know how to deal with it and, in fact, are partially misreading it -- accustomed as journalists are to a different kind of political rhetoric. A recap from the Tapper excerpt above:

"We are the ones we've been waiting for," Obama said. "This time can be different because this campaign for the presidency of the United States of America is different. It's different not because of me. It's different because of you."

Says Klein: "That is not just maddeningly vague but also disingenuous: the campaign is entirely about Obama and his ability to inspire. Rather than focusing on any specific issue or cause — other than an amorphous desire for change — the message is becoming dangerously self-referential. The Obama campaign all too often is about how wonderful the Obama campaign is.“
WELL, that's one interpretation . . . the cynical one.

On the other hand, what Obama just might have been saying -- in a more upbeat manner -- is:
"The change agent you have been waiting for is you. You have the power, not me. So get off your asses and effect some change."
Of course, that messianic scenario has the power to throw several sectors of American society into their own conniption narrative.