Thursday, July 14, 2011

Do you think he smoked a cigarette when he was done?

I would be embarrassed to have an Esquire magazine in my house.
And that was before I read this.
While Obama's story is ancient, it is also utterly contemporary, perfectly of the moment. His gift — and it is a gift that makes him emblematic — is that he inhabits all these roles without being limited by them. He has managed, miraculously, to remain something of an outsider while being the president of the United States of America, the most inside man in the world. He's African-American, but he's not African-American. He's from Chicago, but he's from Hawaii.
Yeah, yeah.  He's liquid, but he's solid.  He's tall while being short.  He's non-threateningly threatening.  He has balls of steel yet he's made of gold.  He's man, but he's woman, and gay while being perfectly straight.   I'm so effing deep.

A REAL Original
American
Beyond all of the self-pleasuring Stephen Marche must have done while writing this, I was quite surprised to hear that Walt Whitman was "the Original American".

Never cottoned to Whitman, no matter how hard my literature professors tried to cram him down my throat.  Bleah!

Original American my asterisk.

3 comments:

John Scotus said...

I think he is smoking something, but not tobacco.
The article should have been titled, "This is your brain on crack."

Severian said...

there are lots of reasons I'm not a leftist, but as I get older, my fact- and reason-based annoyance at them fades, replaced by something more visceral.

Because let's face it: lefties are creepy.

I mean, I like me some Tom Sowell, but I'd never in a million years write a tongue-bathing paean like this to the guy. I'm sure Sowell is a fine human being, but he's not the mythopoeic embodiment of this or the avatar of that or the glorious unveiling of Universal Spirit or whatever. He's just a dude, and I'm sure that loses his temper and cuts farts and uses the ol' toe wedge on the golf course every now and again. It wouldn't even bother me to learn that he has three cats and is a devoted fan of Glee, because hey, he's only human. Only leftists set up substitute gods like this and venerate them; if I felt like that about any living human being, I'd consider my life to be meaningless and my soul a void.

nightfly said...

Exactly, Severian. Also - quite the reverse. If I were a President or a celebrity of some sort, and someone wrote this Esquire article about me, I'd consider it a moral imperative to demand a retraction, if I hadn't died either from laughter or embarrassment.

I'm a fairly straight-arrow Catholic... we don't even talk like this about the Pope.