Do You Believe in Magic?

If you think we are worked by strings,
Like a Japanese marionette,
You don't understand these things:
It is simply Court etiquette
--The Gentlemen of Japan, The Mikado

And it's magic, if the music is groovy
It makes you feel happy like an old-time movie
--Do You Believe in Magic? The Lovin' Spoonful

There is no political solution
To our troubled evolution
Have no faith in constitution
There is no bloody revolution
--Spirits in the Material World, Sting
____________

In "The Obama Delusion," the WaPo's Robert Samuelson charges Obama with boilerplate, "goody-bag" politics; nothing unusual, but certainly disingenuous for the man who's arrived on the Change Express. Samuelson says,

"The subtext of Obama's campaign is that his own life narrative -- to become the first African American president, a huge milestone in the nation's journey from slavery -- can serve as a metaphor for other political stalemates. . . "

This statement confuses matters. Obama does not have a slavery pedigree. His father was a shoot-and-scoot African freely in the U.S., and Obama pere freely spread his genetics in the best Darwinian sense.

The main point is, Obama does not arise from American slave stock. His blackness is not an American reality; it is a campaign bullet point.

Samuelson continues,

"(O)n inspection, the metaphor is a mirage. Repudiating racism is not a magic cure-all for the nation's ills. The task requires independent ideas, and Obama has few. If you examine his agenda, it is completely ordinary, highly partisan, not candid and mostly unresponsive to many pressing national problems."

"The contrast between his broad rhetoric and his narrow agenda is stark, and yet the media -- preoccupied with the political "horse race" -- have treated his invocation of "change" as a serious idea rather than a shallow campaign slogan. He seems to have hypnotized much of the media and the public with his eloquence and the symbolism of his life story. The result is a mass delusion that Obama is forthrightly engaging the nation's major problems when, so far, he isn't."

In a piece today on the Beatlemania phenomena that has become Obama rallies, Charlotte Allen poses the direct question, "We Scream, We Swoon, How Dumb Can We Get?"

"(S)uch episodes of screaming, gushing and swooning make me wonder whether women -- I should say, 'we women,' of course -- aren't the weaker sex after all. Or even the stupid sex, our brains permanently occluded by random emotions, psychosomatic flailings and distraction by the superficial."

Of course, it is not women alone who have been swept into the machine. Maybe with the rising cost of all commodities, American are looking for added value, the super-sized meal, wherever they can find it.

The Doonesbury cartoon is reminiscent of a recent experience at a megachurch. The crowd was getting primed for the advent of the pastor via a rollicking music show featuring tunes which were both hypnotic and repetitive. "No more sorrow / no more pain / no more heartache, you are free," repeat, ad nauseum.

Many in the audience began twirling round and round, like dervishes. The pastor was absent that day, but his surrogate later lectured on the need for tithing. The best of the show was the narcotic-like repetition of the vacuous lyrics, which had the effect of inducing a mildly hallucinegenic experience.

Why choose a dull campaigner when you can have politics + a rock concert? Multitasking -- it is the American way, right?