Drill Here, Drill Now, Drill Often: Raise energy taxes? Sue Opec Surely you jest. Lower speed limits to 55MPR? Why not 35MPH? No? 55MPH is not only not a sane energy plan, but is rather, Chinese Water Torture!

Drill Here, Drill Now, Drill Often: What in the world makes Senators Obama, Reid, Durbin, Schumer, and Speaker Pelosie and company think we want petroleum less productive let alone more expensive by way of raised taxes. I don’t recall saying that we wanted to lose jobs. The petroleum you know will simply flow where it‘s most productive.

But enough of Barack Obama. Let’s talk about Michelle Obama. So as we all know Michelle Obama is all-in for the “struggle”.

Oh yes, I heard Senator Obama’s edict. Senator Obama says blah blah blah. Well in response I say blah, or in other words if you don’t want Michelle’s political formulations critiqued then tell her not to make political speeches, otherwise clam up, quit whining, have some gripe-water. It’s unbecoming in a presidential candidate, bans on this bans on that why not just ban free speech, your list is too large and ungainly, I can’t keep up. Besides, Michelle doesn’t strike me as a shrinking violet.

Sure upon many circumstances, I think, family members are not fair game without qualification, but the boundary is limited by the family member. So by dint of her own political elocutions she has entered the public square, and therefore, it would be disrespectful to not treat her as a participant. Senator Obama’s command then is an unwarranted transcursion of the public square’s limits. To the measure of Mrs. Obama’s public speech is to the measure we are right to respond.

Drill Here, Drill Now, Drill Often: No we’re not clamoring for socialism (that would be Progressives). Actually we’re telling the government to get the heck out of the way so that private industry can provide the goods and services that fuels our dynamic economy.

But on such account as dullness her speech wasn’t unique. Too many political speeches fall victim to that malaise to raise so much as an eyebrow. Also, though it ought not need be said, to criticize a speech is not synonymous with taking a position one way or the other as concerns her person. I have more than a couple friends and family members whom though I’m fond of, like and love even, I would never ever vote for them to any political office.

Anyway, I read through her speech a couple of times and I noted the familiar political touch stones, objects, symbols as it were common to many political speeches. However, hers was not a political speech as much as a literary event.

Sure, it should have been readily apparent as after the preliminary stuff she starts her speech proper:

“And when you look over the year and what has happened, you realize just how amazing this journey is, so come with me for the last fifteen or so months when it started in Sprinfield, Illinois at Barack’s announcement in February, a year or so ago.”

And quickly and soon enough we are retailed with the Obama Odyssey, “an amazing journey” of sorts that actually begins in the middle and rings out epic over the course of many words and symbolic rhetoric. So yes former President Clinton was not altogether wrong when he described the Obama campaign as a “fairy tale,” he simply guessed wrong on the genre. An easiest enough mistake I think to make.

“And talent in the highest and broadest sense means a talent for life.” That sounds familiar doesn’t it? so familiar I can’t say if Boris Pasternak was the first to pen it (in the character of Yuri). Not a terribly bad saying in itself, but it does sound like one of those artsy clichés you would find on a coffee mug, or poster, or if willing to pay extra price, engraved on some stained glass artifact. It sounds like a cliché because it’s a mantra of the left, modern, post-modern or otherwise. It is at the core of the left’s world-view. Is it the sole symbol of that view? No, I wouldn’t be so bold to make that assertion.

But nonetheless as we’re talking not about a quality, but rather a reductionist caricature of life, claiming that life can be reduced to a “talent,” quickly enough life is understood as a craft. A craft that can be developed and mastered into a narrative. The Romantic hero struggling against circumstances, or perhaps the Epic hero struggling against circumstances.

So it is that Barack and Michelle have mastered the post-modern craft. So yes, I like more than one reader was taken with the political statement themed by “struggle,” “fear,” “challenge,” “hope,” etc. Yes, her dystopian landscape peopled by the trembling masses made its impression. It was inescapable I’m afraid.

“And see what happens when you live in a nation where the vast majority of Americans are struggling every day to reach an ever-shifting and moving bar, then what happens in that nation is that people do become isolated.”

“And the problem with fear is that it cuts us off. Fear is the worst enemy. It cuts us off from one another and our own families, and our communities, and it has certainly cut us off from the rest of the world.”

Isolated, alienated, cut and divided. So in our singular, excuse me, “isolated,” existence Mrs. Obama goes on to say:

“They do live in a level of division [division, as in not unity, or is that labor?], because see, when you’re that busy struggling all the time, which most people that you know and I know are, that you don’t have time to get to know your neighbor. You don’t have time to reach out and have conversations, to share stories. In fact, you feel very alone in your struggle, because you feel that somehow, it must be your fault that you’re struggling so.”

I was flinching soon enough by her repeated use of “struggle.” Soon enough I knew she was all-in for the “struggle.” And Marx’s “class struggle” felt like a bat hitting me over the head--thus the flinching. As in yes I get it, Barack and Michelle claim proletariat bona fides. It is the ground of “unity” from which they stand, which idea is more Hegleian than Marx, but they go together well, or so says Georg Lukacs, a dull and dreary Marxist critic, I know, but never mind that for now.

Are we really to believe living in Kansas qualifies as an unthinkable hardship? And though we commend Michelle’s father for providing for his family, does that not put him squarely in the American tradition? Have we come so far that we now equate paying back student loans as the thing of greatest hardship? Attending Ivy League schools qualifies as drudgery? Well…Since when is taking a job as a community organizer and living a middle class life the thing equated with great sacrifice. Making a choice and doing what you want to do is now the definition of sacrifice? Only in America.

Yes it is absurd, Mrs. Obama’s epic narrative indicts, refutes and is contradicted by the reality of her and Barack’s real life narrative, but fortunately Lukacs (to pick but one of many possible modern/post-modern thinkers) in an essay titled The Ideal of the Harmonious Man in Bourgeois Aesthetics comes to our aide a bit, albeit unwillingly (yea, I don‘t know whether I was feeling penitential myself, or just a little empathetic with Mr. Patterson, but reading Marx‘s tomb, er tome, was out of the question, not feeling that penitential today or yesterday): So Lukacs says,

“Gorky [no idea who he is, but he’s a writer] achieves a coincidence of the artistic and the political unity [unity?] that is neither automatic or mechanical [artful then?]….Thus a principle of artistic representation turns into a political and social principal.”

Art like everything then is derived from politics, everything is politics, either a unified singularity, or an illegitimate and wanting dichotomy. Such is the vision of the left where “think globally act locally” is the sole vision. Or to put it another way, the revolutionary makes art of his own life, and conversely every artist is a revolutionary, which is to say singular clap trap or worse.

Which may explain why the “they,” principal villain, of her epic morphs from the Clintons to this:

“And this is where Barack gets it. He understands that our challenge is us, that we have lost a sense of empathy.”

In a singular, political, artistic existence the villain must be us, society. What other villain could there be if (raise consciousness anyone?) our lives are wholly defined as a singular event rather than a dynamic dichotomy, let alone a manifold of expressions.

And so the Clintons lost because they were ran a political campaign that had some mythical (event staging) overtones against what Yuri (Dr. Zhivago) describes as:

“It seems to me that socialism is the sea, and all these separate, these private, individual revolutionaries, are flowing into it--the sea of life, the sea of spontaneity. I said life, but I mean life as you see it in a great picture, transformed by genius, creatively enriched. Only now people have decided to experience it not in books and pictures but in themselves, not as an abstraction but in practice.”

The Clintons lost to a literary event, an artful fiction, which helps explain why our MSM, self defined intelligencia, and others are all agog. They hunger to make of themselves papyrus, canvas, marble, and things. Dr. Zhivago I think begins to see the folly in what he says above, as the passage in the previous post suggests, but we’ll have to see. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

But to answer the question of the Obama genre that eluded former President Clinton; theirs is not an epic at all, but rather a parody of an epic, a genre made famous by Alexander Pope and his mock epics.

So it is meet that we give Mr. Pope the last words from the Dunciad: