Being there is not enough
I’m not the first person who while watching the political rise of Barack Obama has been reminded of Chauncey Gardiner or Chance the Gardener, played by Peter Sellers in Being There which was based on a novel by Jerzy Kosinski. Chance is a “simple man” who finds himself in the public limelight where his simplistic utterances are mistaken by the politicians and the people for profound statements. “In this Obama frenzied age you can’t help but draw a few parallels between the characters mocked in Being There and the most rabid of Obama supporters,” is the way one critic put it. Joel Stein makes a similar point. “Obama is Peter Sellers in ‘Being There,’” he writes, quoting a marriage therapist:
You feel young again. You feel like everything is possible. He helps you feel that way and you want to feel that way; it’s a great marriage. Unfortunately, the divorce will happen very quickly.
Indeed, after watching Obama’s very, very mediocre performance since his inauguration, I’ve been making calls to my divorce lawyer. Yes, I can.
Update: I haven’t filed for divorce yet… I’ll give the man a chance.
This a classless low blow.
Coming from a movement led by Joe the Plumber and Rush Limbaugh this means what exactly?
Not to mention the previous white house occupant.
I’m not sure which movement you’re thinking about. Does Joel Stein belong to it? Hey, don’t worry too much. I’ve been talking with the lawyer. I’ve yet to file for divorce.
Obama is much too prolix for the part. While the Peter Sellers spoke brief enigmatic sentences with Buddah-like serenity, our boy Obama deluged us with faux-portentous humbug. Obama is not a simpleton. He just chooses to use language the way the squid uses ink.
My theory is that Obama, like Bill Clinton, did not actually expect to win. He thought it would be a fine thing to run and build a national machine with powerful connections and a talent bank he could call upon next time. Unfortunately for him and us, the Republicans handed him the office. I almost feel sorry for him.
What’s most disappointing to me with Obama, although also the most humorous too, is how completely and utterly this big Lefty seems blinkered in what is now the classic Keynsian economic mindset which Lefties for the last 30 years always kind of hinted they hated. (Albeit without really coming up with any big coherent alternatives, which is why they’d come up with all those nice vague phrases like “The Third Way” or etc.)
Got a recession? Stimulate it! Got somebody “too big to fail”? Bail ‘em out!
Forget “Change we can believe in,” how is this change at all?
And yet, if ever there were a circumstance that seemed so odd, and so begging for an alternative view of why it came about other than the old “business cycle” idea and alternatives other than “stimulate” and “bail out” this would seem to be it.
To *some* damn extent at least it seems different, isn’t it? You got mega-corporations whose owners thought it was just peachy-keen to pay their CEO’s tens of millions of dollars despite their share prices being taken to zero, and Obama and his people can think of nothing new or different to do than just bail them out?
What about—just to throw out one or two examples off the top of my head—have government take them over and pay the shareholders the zero they are now owed and then conduct an orderly liquidation of them if indeed the bankruptcy option is truly the untenable one it’s supposed to be due to its liquidations allegedly not being orderly enough? After all that’s been the *only* reason being given for not letting them go into bankruptcy and for bailing them out so far.
Or what about quick passage of new bankruptcy laws allowing that “more orderly liquidation”? They can draft and pass a multi-hundred-page stimulus bill in days, why not a one page one giving bankruptcy judges lots more discretion so as to make the liquidations more “orderly”? Allowing a representative of the Treasury or the Fed to appear to give advice to the Judge as to how to do that? Hell,with one or sentences they could *require* the Judges to *make* Treasury be the administrators of the bankruptcy estates even, doing so as orderly as they want, so long as they do get liquidated.
But no, it’s not really disorderly liquidations that are the problem; it’s *any* liquidations at all obviously. No matter how stupidly run they were before. Nor that they will continue to be run by the same stupes.
That said it’s still amazing to me to hear Obama the Lefty talk about the tension between stimulating and bailing out and keeping the national debt down. A Lefty worried about the national debt? Nuts; anyone ever remember Bush being worried about that debt? And in fact wasn’t it Cheney who once came out on his behalf and said that what they learned from Reagan was that the debt doesn’t matter?
And you also have to grant that Obama’s come right into the middle of this, when it’s already a full-blown crisis, so that it’s tough to indict him for not trying anything different from what’s been thought of in the past right away.
You sure would like to see him or his people “thinking differently” at least a bit though. The old economic verities just seem so dubious now. Like some scientist once said about how real science advances though; it’s not via the cool dispassionate appraisal of new evidence, it’s through the funerals of one old scientist at a time.
Cheers,
Obama will have my tax dollars but he will not have my heart. He is unfaithful. He is cheating on me with Corporate America. He voted yes to listen to my communications even after he swore not too. He is too insecure and paranoid. Who wants a spouse who doesn’t trust them and controls them? I also don’t like his friends. They are a bad influence on him. He listens to them and ends up making decisions that make no sense. He wants to take out loans in our name and give it to his rich friends without my consent. He is starting off on an ambitious adventure in Pakistan but doesn’t know how to get to his desired destination. Of all things he wants to buy overly complicated weapons that he doesn’t need (even more than my last deadbeat husband did a year). Sure he is younger, cuter and more articulate but I was hoping for someone with a bit more wisdom and character.
I’m becoming more and more fond of what looks like a libertarian/paleocon/new left (I guess that is what the groups involved are called) movement that is springing up. It gives me HOPE for real CHANGE.
‘I’m not sure which movement you’re thinking about. ‘
The so called conservative movement.
Got a recession? Stimulate it! Got somebody “too big to fail”? Bail ‘em out!
Since it was dirty lefties who brought out the anti trust legislation you can’t say they believe in too big to fail, bail them out, clearly they believe too big too fail should never come into existence.
How would a ‘conservative’ end a recession? Tax cuts for rich people? How does that work anyway? Since accourding to numerous statements made by George Bush the rich avoid taxes via loopholes and therefore already ‘are not being taxed’ why should we give them a tax cut? How would that make any difference? Also given the events of the last few years hearing that allowing our betters to keep their money because they invest it and drive the economy makes me ill. Look where they drove it.
Screw it there’s no point. Whatever occurs it will be blamed on demcrats anyway no matter who actually controlled government when the ponzi scheme was enacted.
As you should know, TAC has been critical of the so called conservative movement and in fact, some of its editors voted for Obama in the last election. Your response reminds me of that of Bush supporters in the last eight years. If I or anyone else are critical of Obama’s performance, we’ll write about that as we did with regard to Bush.
I went back to read the Joel Stein piece in its entirety and a truly frieghtening sentence popped out at me.
“I can’t root against a person who believes he can change the world.” – Stein
This is the most succinct evidence for the argument to repeal the franchise I ever saw. A growing number, perhaps a majority, of our fellow citizens vote on this hebephrenic impulse. So Democracy leads to this, and endless round of morons gulled by narcissists.
“Hebephrenic.” I love it. Worried a bit about it’s first syllable until I looked it up, but it’s okay.
Keep ‘em coming Thom, you’re on fire.
Cheers,
This advice is really going to help, thanks.
I’ve been lurking for a while and wanted you to know I enjoy reading your articles.