Charles Pierce on Obama in Wisconsin

"The Cynic and Senator Obama" - Struggling to find a reason to believe, Charles Pierce channels Norman Mailer and Hunter Thompson in Esquire as he follows Obama campaigning through the worst winter Wisconsin has seen in a hundred years. Calling himself "the cynic," Pierce sees Obama as ignoring the fundamental ways we have sold out:

The cynic will admit that it’s all great politics. Tell America that it is a great country that simply has lost its way for a spell. Tell the American people that they are a great people who are better than those hucksters who come to divide us. It has a marvelous anesthetic appeal. Swirl down through the clouds of memory and forget that the country allowed itself to follow George Bush over the cliff not merely because it was shocked by the attacks of September 11, 2001, but because it was too pissing-down-the-shoes scared to do anything else. Forget about how eagerly the American people cheered the brutish and the nasty, how simple it was to sell raw animal vengeance dressed up as geopolitical wisdom, and how dumbly everyone followed until well after it was revealed that the people selling it didn’t know enough about the world to throw to a cat. This was the era of complicity. Can Obama end it, thought the cynic, without admitting it ever existed?

...We are not an honest and decent people in our politics, in the way we deal with one another as a political commonwealth. We will trade away our most precious rights in exchange for a bag of magic charms, and even when we find out that these include the black prison, the waterboard, and the secret microphone, we’ll think we got the better of the deal. We’ll swap our obligation to intelligent self-government for any huckster’s trick that makes us laugh or keeps us entertained in our cars for the evening drive-time shift. We hold this truth to be self-evident -- that all men are out to get what’s ours.

There's lots of this sort of reflection.  The writing snaps like a live power line downed by lightning.  Read it for yourself.

Here's one more taste:

The cynic decides that politics is better on the radio, the same way baseball is, where you have to construct the scene in your own head. Radio is for dreamers. Television is for hucksters, and it has leached from American politics all of its creative imagination.

-Barry Orton

Comments

We are everything. We carry all parts of the human condition. And the scolding from a paralyzed cinic who can't motivate nor inspire is narcissism that abuses the power of the written word.

At issue are subsets. subsets are always at issue in this game of life. The conservative right subset was used by Bush/cheney/rumsfield as they laughed behind their back. The left leaning subset was used by the status quo of the Clinton Machine. But there was this group of people out there that felt powerless and broke and this man comes along to inspire and tap into the belief that when people come together for social just of hunger shelter and the future that they can out power all of the money that politicians have sold out to.

that is what matters.

so while this comfortable cynic writes his predictable pablum and did nothing to change the world himself people sent in a 100.00 or less with hope to believe.

and that is what the cynic hates, the courage to believe in spite of our humanity and perversion

cynics bore the fuck out of me