Source: Townhall
Barack Obama isn’t just conducting a political campaign; he’s launching his very own religious cult.
Under the headline “Obama Supporters Take His Name as Their
Own,” the New York Times reported on a bizarre fad among the
candidate’s enraptured acolytes: across the country, they’ve begun
adopting his middle name, Hussein. “The result is a group of unlikely
sounding Husseins,” writes reporter Jodi Kantor, “from Jaime Hussein
Alvarez of Washington, D.C., to Kelly Hussein Crowley of Norman,
Oklahoma, to Sarah Beth Hussein Frumkin of Chicago.”
One of the key elements in many religious cults involves a name
change – like transitioning from Richard Alpert to Baba Ram Dass, or
from Malcolm Little to Malcolm X. To Obama’s true-believers, adding an
Islamic middle name is a small price to pay for connecting with a
candidate who qualifies as a “lightworker” and “an enlightened being,”
according to San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford.
“Many spiritually advanced people I know,” he writes,
“identify Obama as a Lightworker, the rare kind of attuned being who
has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health
care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of
being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this
bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us
evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and
they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.” (Italics in
the original)
Author Garen Thomas makes similar observations in “Yes We Can:
A Biography of Barack Obama”, a newly published book for children.
“There has emerged a new leader who seems to be granting Americans a
renewed license to dream. Barack Obama has proven repeatedly that he
can touch people from all genders,” (not just both of them, you’ll
note, but all of ‘em), “political affiliations, and across racial
divides. There are few times in your life when you have a real
opportunity to alter the course of history and put civilization back on
a course toward prosperity and unity for all races and genders.” All of
them—again. “If you were to look at dates in your history books, you
might see centuries pass before something remarkable and worth noting
occurred, when one person or a group of people stood up for change,
making an enlightened leap in the evolution of the human story.”
Among those willing to make precisely that sort of
“enlightened leap” is the 1980’s “Culture Club” star, the inimitable
Boy George, who wrote his latest song to honor “the enlightened being”
from Illinois. The chorus proclaims “Yes We Can/Make it to the Promised
Land,” but Boy George himself couldn’t quit make it to the promised
land of the United States due to visa problems regarding his history of
drug busts.
Nevertheless, others who did manage to bask in the actual
presence of The Lightworker described the experience in terms calling
to mind the knock-kneed awe of Dorothy and friends as they tremulously
approached the Great Oz. The Los Angeles Times quoted actor Eric
Christian Olsen as saying: “Nothing is more fundamentally powerful than
how I felt when I met him.” Nothing, Mr. Olsen? Not your love of your
wife or your partner or your parents or your country, or the death of
your dog or the visit of Pope Benedict or the Red Sox winning the
series? Nothing more powerful than meeting Obama?
Describing the thrill of his all-too-fleeting encounter with
the Hope Pope, Olsen continued: “I stood, my hand embraced in his and…I
felt something…something that I can only describe as an overpowering
sense of Hope.” (capitalization in the original).
Reading through numerous similar accounts, I, too, felt
something….something that I can only describe as an overpowering sense
of … embarrassment.
How can intelligent and responsible people fall for this mass
hysteria over a politician whose only real accomplishment in 47 years
of living has been to build up the mass hysteria and messianic
expectations surrounding this campaign? When I was in high school, I
remember feeling puzzled and bemused by the similar frenzy surrounding
the hip new British band, the Beatles. Yeah, they were great musicians
and their clothes and hair cuts looked indisputably cool, but it still
seemed hard to explain the smart teenaged girls I knew who flocked to
see them at the Hollywood Bowl and ended up shrieking to the point of
hoarseness, while weeping and, literally, wetting themselves in an orgy
of adulation.
The difference, of course, is that we can still listen to
Beatles songs with pleasure and satisfaction some forty years later,
but it’s doubtful that any Obama speech (let alone his fumbling,
bumbling off-teleprompter interviews) will thrill anyone even next
year.
As with other moments of religious and quasi-religious frenzy,
it’s not what the candidate is saying, or the proposals (what
proposals, exactly?) he’s making, or even Obama himself that creates
the manic energy surrounding his campaign. It’s the phenomenon itself,
the crazed delirium of the Oba-maniacs, that compels attention, even
fascination. Some people went to those first Beatles concerts as much
to watch the tearful, hysterical, hollering adolescent girls as to hear
the music; in fact those screaming sweeties usually drowned out the
performances on stage so crowds couldn’t even hear the tunes and
lyrics. It didn’t matter for the participants, who cared only about the
transcendent excitement, the mass delirium, of the historic experience.
So, too, the messianic yearnings and wild-eyed, zombie-like
devotion of Obama’s unhinged followers comes across as far more
exciting and significant than the surprisingly pedestrian and
platitudinous substance of his actual campaign. For the candidate as
cult leader, it’s not the message; it’s the moment.