Oba-Messiah

Rock of ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in thee
--Augustis Toplady

Oh, Let us all from bondage flee
Let my people go
--Go Down Moses

It's gonna be a new day for you
A new day for you, new day for you, new day for you
--A New Day for You, Basia

Fever in the Morning
Fever all through the night,
--You Give Me Fever, Peggy Lee

___________

Part the third in our Obama trilogy: He is Come.

These are dire times, trouble all across the land. Our conventional leadership has sold us down the proverbial river. A messianic fervor has taken over, and Obamania is that phenomenon.

People have always turned to saviors at such times. Moses came when the people needed liberation and freedom from bondage. The dynamism of such movements propels their prophet onto front and center stage; the problem is the mass blindness which allows this to occur.

Rationalism isn't so sexy and cannot support such a fever pitch, and it is only the fever of being on board a winning team which unleashes the mob energy. Obamania is a political Lollapalooza.

While there are prophets are on every street corner, it takes charisma plus mass desperation to mobilize the mob so they can elevate their prophet to the position of savior.

The Right wing has been playing from the End Times playbook, hastening the degradation of events in the Middle East to facilitate their biblically-ordained Rapture. They feel Armageddon is inevitable and that they will be saved, anyway.

However, the Left feels desolation in the wake of the destructive fundamentalist project in the "Holy lands." They look to Obama to free them from enslavement to this mad project, and he brings Good News -- a message of hope and salvation -- for the price of our devotion and ballot. He is a savior shilling for a vote.

The problem I have with Obamania is its Never-Never land aspect. All will be washed away if we just hop aboard that train. The fanaticism of the left for Obama is as distasteful as that displayed by the right for their presumptive messiahs. Fanatics are fanatics.

The promise of infinite potential is similar to that echoed by two books fronting the entry at my local Borders, both by other O[prah]-gurus.

Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose is self-explanatory, and Neale Donald Walsch's Happier Than God, which tells you how you can be, y'know, happier than God. Does anyone else wonder, what if your life's purpose is cleaning out sewer gratings? And is God really all that "happy," what with his immense responsibilities. So you see, even the feel-good books bring with them a sense of responsibility.

I don't mean to be a killjoy, but even the Founding Fathers didn't hand us a life purpose and happiness on a plate. All we were promised was the right to "pursue" life and happiness. Attaining them was not guaranteed.

We want a savior to "take us away" from this vale of tears. "www.Mybarackobama" tells us today that one million people "own a piece of this campaign," and that they are "disillusioned by partisan gridlock in Washington." That may be, but what they don't tell us is that a president may not remove that gridlock, photogenic and optimistic as he or she may be.

How does Obama fit the bill of savior:

[1] Obama is dashing and charismatic. It is doubtful that if he looked like his Kenyan father Obama would be rock-star material in the U.S. We are not quite that color blind yet. As it is, even Larry the Cable guys can look at him in approval, perhaps even imagining they share some of his appeal.

Hillary, however, lacks the same "twinning" phenomenon. Fewer people would like to imagine they share Hillary's flat midwestern intonation or frumpy body or over-the-hill persona. The thing she offers is her intellect, unfortunately, something which has never been a winning quality for the American voter.

[2] Obama's acceptance is unconditional. "We will do it," whatever it is. Come all ye faithful. But what we presume is, it is he who will do the heavy lifting in Washington. He asks nothing of us, just promises a new day, via our acceptance (=vote.) In this way, he is both parent and savior, which we know any good religion conflates for us anyway.

The following two points are not p.c. They are gotten from the local street, and our street is not Worth Avenue. We never promised you a rose garden at Ranger:

[3] We are finally admitting that the Savior is not really a blonde/blue Aryan as depicted on the veleteen Dollar Store paintings. Rather, He was most likely of African extraction, and Obama more nearly approximates this reality than the pasty-faced Jim Bakkers of the world.

While Obama is not running for ecclesiastical post, nonetheless, election as president is the closest we get to national ordination. The fervor behind Obama exceeds that accorded to your typical politico.

[4] Pro-ball. America has been idolizing trim, black athletes since Jackie Robinson crossed the color line. Obama is the Superbowl and March Madness rolled into one, with the invocation by team chaplain Dr. Martin Luther King.

If all else disappoints in real life, the athlete's achievement on the track or field is one of pure beauty and clarity. While Obama is not an olympian, either, desegregation and idolization on that field has allowed for his entree as rock star-candidate.

Swing low, sweet chariot, comin' for to carry me home.