So I was premature in proclaiming peak wingnut has been reached.
Public awareness of his election as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review resulted in a publishing contract for a book about race relations. To recruit him to join their faculty, the University of Chicago Law School gave Obama a fellowship and an office to work on his book. He initially intended to complete the book in a year, but the project took much longer, as the effort evolved into a personal memoir. So he could work uninterrupted, Obama and his wife Michelle traveled to Bali, where he immersed himself for several months in his manuscript. That’s the official version. Recent scientific analysis of the text suggests the manuscript may have been co-authored by Obama and his nearby neighbor and associate William Ayers, a former domestic terrorist and current education professor at Illinois University who calls himself a communist “with a small ‘c.'” The book was published in mid-1995 as Dreams from My Father.
But he is outdone. You know it’s good when it starts with this:
There is a scene in Flannery O’Connor’s 1960 novel The Violent Bear It Away, wherein the protagonist, a 14-year-old boy, is picked up hitchhiking by a man in a lavender automobile. The man plies the boy, Francis Tarwater, with whiskey and reefer. When the boy wakes up he’s lying in a field with his pants around his ankles, and his asshole burning. I won’t get into the Catholic allegory in that story, or the implication that the man in the lavender automobile is Satan, or Tarwater’s own inexorable slide into fundamentalist prophecy. I will aver, however, that I find the story relevant. Hold that thought.
There have been any variety of temperaments and personalities to hold the office of President. They range from heroes to rapscallions. I fervently believe, however, that not one person to hold that office has ever hated his opposition. There have been the churlish and disdainful, for sure. Carter presumed a moral vanity against his foes, which grievance he nurtures to this day. Nixon was consumed by paranoia and fear, to the point of ridiculous capers in the cause of an aforetold landslide victory.
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Did I mention this man hates me? You and me? Yes he does. Why? Because he can. Yes He Can. Beneath that cool persona is a megalomaniac. Cool? Like Stalin after a purge, emotionally and sexually spent. Like Saddam after a torture session, dozing in his chair with someone’s genitals curled in his fist. Like Pol Pot after a petit mal seizure, mumbling a litany of the dead. Cool that way.
So I will cast my pathetic vote, and ramp up my relocation to the mountains. Reduce my footprint. Carbon? That will be a nice byproduct, but I mean my personal footprint. My credit footprint. My interface with authority footprint. I’m researching micro-hydro water turbines for that stream, windmills for water, a half-acre patch for vegetables, a few goats, and a bison. Just because I want a fucking bison. My address? Fifty rounds up that gravel road.
I do hate to sound Randy Weaverish. But this is the fundament of my world view right now.
Speaking of fundaments, remember that guy in the lavender automobile?
Precisely. The whiskey of Hope. The jokesmoke of Change. I am Tarwater. We are all Tarwater.
The internets bringing together preachers in the quads in one place.
The internets bringing together preachers in the quads in one place.
….and gives them their megaphone of malarkey-making.