Another Evert Cillier Opus

By John Ballard

As I said before,  Evert Cillier is an acquired taste.
Just in case one or two others are interested he's put up another creation, shorter this time than his usual ten or fifteen thousand word screed.
And more poetic. Literally.

In 1917, Wallace Stevens, to my mind the best American poet of the 20th century (sorry, Sylvia Plath fans), published one of his most famous poems, �Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.� What with Barack Obama being our first black President, and also a leader who elicits a variety of responses, from the sensible to the absurd, I thought it might be interesting to look at Obama through the lens of this poem.

This is from Stanza XI.

...Obama has surrounded himself with Ivy League academics and public service experts, most of whom have never built a business from the ground up or had to meet a payroll. They're all supersmart and have thought a lot about the real world, but they've never really lived in it. Talk about a bubble: there is no worse a bubble than the bubble of the intellect. The privileged, entitled intellect. These guys and gals KNOW they're right, and that makes them only a tad less idiotic than religious fundamentalists. We're talking the Taliban of the Brain. Brainy Obama surrounded by all these brains. Outsized cerebellum linked to outsized cerebellum in a circle jerk of outsized cerebellums.

No wonder they're fucking up. No wonder they're losing sight of what Americans outside the Washington bubble want. It's the best and the brightest all over again. Remember, the smart guys who got us into Vietnam and kept us there till over 50,000 Americans were dead, as well as over a million and a half Vietnamese and Cambodians? For fucking what? You tell me. For some damn construct in their brainy brains that was as ridiculous as the medieval construct of trying to figure out how many angels could dance on a pin. McNamara and crew actually thought that if they kept stepping up the number of American troops in Vietnam, they could get to a point where the Vietnamese Commies would go, �that's just too many American soldiers, we surrender.� A calculation more idiotic than calculating the number of angels doing the Hanky Panky on a pin. McNamara and his fuckwits of numerate intelligence figured there's a number out there in the universe of numbers that's assignable to a people's love of their nation; their calculations didn't include the calculation that when people are fighting for their country against some hated invader, they are likely to fight harder than the invader, and likely to fight to the last man.

This is a basic fact of human nature known to the biggest dickbrains in the galaxy, but it had escaped the American brains in the White House and in the Pentagon because they were living in a bubble of their own bizarre fundamentalist braininess.

When it comes to Obamaland, Barack and his White House have constructed a similar bubble. A really peculiar bubble, because it's made of of these equal but disparate parts: Reinhold Niebuhr (you have to fight evil, you can't appease it); the book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard Thaler and White House staffer Cass Sunstein (people can be nudged by legislation to do the right thing); Arpege advertising (promise them anything but give them a meaningless bauble); Cicero (when all else fails, our man will save the day with a speech); Milton Friedman (private enterprise does everything better than government can, and too big to fail is OK because the free market takes care of everything); Nuremberg Trial amnesia (don't prosecute the elite for torture and other crimes, just prosecute the lower minions who followed the orders of the elite); Ayn Rand (the rich deserves our attention more than the poor, because they make political contributions and vote, and the poor do neither); and Murphy's Law (if it's broken, fix it just a little, so everything can and will go wrong again).

Here's why this bubble is so scary. The only reason our half-a-loaf President is palatable is because his predecessors have set the bar lower than the pond scum in the backyard of a used-car salesman. It's not that difficult for a man of Obama's IQ and charm to rise above pond scum....

I have taken a juicy, thick steak and cut out one of the most delicious parts. If you're still hungry go to the link. Take it or leave it. I'm starting to understand both Obama and Cilliers as Rorschach exercises.