The contrast between Barack Obama’s “Dreams from My Father” and his “Audacity of Hope” can be explained in part by the fact that they are two different kinds of books. The former is a slow, painful, beautiful and honest journey through the thickets of personal, racial, and family history. The latter is the other side, what you come to after appropriate purging in the sweat lodge of life experiences. And the latter, particularly towards the end, becomes for me madly equivocating—not in the sense of the Funkadelic’s national anthem, “One Nation Under a Grove,” but more in the sense of the necessary middle ground of politics. Now, for me, it would have been outstanding for Senator Obama to proceed as a principled iconoclast in “The Audacity of Hope.” But that’s me. Hope is not entropic. How could it be? And, of course, hope is precisely what is needed in the governing of our country. So in the speech which appears on this page, I have been fascinated by its reception in the media—both the mainstream media and in the blogosphere, that low-rent district where even now gentrification “slouches like some rough beast toward Bethlehem”—but that’s another story. My point is that a kind of rehearsed ignorance almost universally obtains: the presumptive nominee is said to be moving toward the center. How can saying what you have always said represent change?
Well, I guess it could represent change, but not the “change we can believe in” which Senator Obama espouses, but the endless change that reading from a script written from another time would inspire. I opened my comments by referencing Senator Obama’s books because they really provide a framework for understanding how he has chosen to animate his run for the White House. Those in the media are distressed because they either didn’t bother to read what he wrote, or did so through the heavy lens of preconceived notions—those old scripts that I referred to earlier. Air America and MSNBC Commentator Rachel Maddow is the only cable news person I have heard to resist the script and for that, the Frat Boy turned politician, turned commentator, and always idiot Joe Scarborough (he was sitting in for the energetically myopic David Gregory) chastised Ms. Maddow, suggesting that maybe she hadn’t heard the same thing. The proliferation of media seldom includes voices willing to not only go off script, but to create their own script. Who knew, even with its rehearsed indignation, logic-riddled objectivity, and neo-racism (and I am referring to Black, White, Hispanic and other commentators), the media emperor is butt naked. Aww, the awfulness of access….
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