THE LEFT’S OBAMANIA IS PAVING THE WAY FOR A NEW RIGHT!

Almost two years ago the world, or rather the soft, left-leaning, socialist part of it, heralded the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States as akin to the second coming. Obama was the new Messiah, a man whose politically correct lineage and black skin made him irresistible to a large section of the democratic West. Here finally, was their 

champion! A man whose polished prose and cool demeanor were so much more sophisticated than the incumbent President George Bush whose folksy delivery and often tearful connections with ordinary people drew derision and scorn from the media savvy Obama camp. Yet two years on hope has turned to mope and Obama’s joyous “Yes We Can” catch phrase is mocked as “No We Can’t”. Why?

Why indeed? Maybe it is because the Left are hardly ever right. They are either ridden with bitterness and invective as, fore instance, in their treatment of, and reaction to, the policies and personalities of Reagan, Thatcher and Bush; or, as in their embracement of the peace movement, Israel / Palestine, the Soviet Union, Nuclear Disarmament, Iran, environmentalism, multiculturalism, civil rights, racial and sexual politics and ultimately Barack Obama in whose diminutive figure all their causes were to be embodied, they become zealots and idolators. And like all idolators who invest all their hopes and fears in a single individual or cause, they are bound to be disappointed.

Obama is not God, nor is he a particular impressive politician, but he is black and for our new Establishment this was his greatest qualification and one behind which a myriad of causes could rally. Global Warming! Obama’ll Fix It! The Financial Crisis! Don’t worry Obama’ll Fix it! Terrorism! Iraq! Afghanistan! Education! Health Care! Whatever it is Obama’s The Man! The only trouble is, Obama isn’t The Man. In fact no one could ever be The Man that the Left expected Obama to be. Except God, and even God might have bulked at the Left’s ‘Fix It’ list.

Obama’s biggest mistake after putting on the mantle of the Messiah was to try and live up to the people’s expectations. Instead of focusing say on solving the financial crisis Obama stormed in with Healthcare Reform, global warming taxes and a whole raft of social engineering projects that guaranteed more government, more spending and no real job creation. The US is a country that espouses individualism and low taxes so these measures were stirring up a hornets nest that crystalized in the formation of The Tea Party. 

Further Obama’s cronies may have mocked Bush’s emotional responses and failings but they showed that for all his faults George W Bush was human. Whilst Obama’s cold logical reactions and seeming indifference to his nation’s fallibilities only further exacerbate the sense of disappointment among his disciples. This has also given the wider public the impression that their new President has descended not from Heaven, as the Left seemed to think at his inauguration, but from the Planet Vulcan.

When Obama won in 2008 the Left lost all sense of propriety, with political commentators and pundits behaving more like star-struck groupies at a pop concert than hardened hacks. As this piece from the Guardian from the 5th November 2008 shows:

“There had been tears all evening ... “America, we have come so far” he said, as if the entire nation were gathered before him. “We have seen so much. But there is so much more to do.”

He also had a message to the rest of the world, one that will be welcomed almost everywhere. “To all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from Parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of our world - our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.”

In this speech, and with his victory, Barrack Obama has drawn a line under the last eight years, ending an American era that few will mourn. For today marked nothing less than the first day of the Obama presidency.”

Few mortal man, land even fewer politicians, warrant such clap-trap and of course receiving it is destined to disappoint and preordained to fail. Now that the world faces even greater uncertainty as the prospect of a second, darker wave of the financial crisis looms and political polarization follows as consensus gives way to self interest. Obama, far from unifying Americans around a ‘shared destiny’, has set them at each others throats. Not for decades has there been so much anger and mistrust of government and this anger is not going away, it is growing. 

In Europe, where the Left rejoiced and celebrated almost as if Obama had been elected head of the European Union, hopes that some egalitarian wonderfulness would seep out of the US and envelope the world have been dashed as realpolitik and the economic realities caused by decades of government overspending sink in. 

Europe and the US now face decades of high unemployment and falling living standards with the ever present threat of civil unrest, racial division, and political and financial collapse hanging over them like an acrid smog, irritating and at the same time, frightening. 

Worse for nations used to their creature comforts and being top dog, the West’s role in the world’s pecking order is under threat as never before and in this as in everything else Obama has been found wanting. in his desire to be all things to all men Obama has weaken rather than strengthen the US abroad. Dithering or circumventing problems and by striving to please the antiwar brigade at home and those who see conflict and fighting terrorism as a series of wrongs rather than enforcing rights, Obama, like so many on the Left in Europe, has undermined and underwhelmed, when he should be been wowing and winning.

At the very time the West needs strong charismatic leaders, and decisive action it’s strongest country is failing. Its financial sector has already shown itself to be driven by greed and then weak when it should have been strong. Now at the behest of those same financial charlatans the President is seeking refuge in cheap exports, QE, and inflating away America’s debts with trillions of undervalued dollars. The irony is though that he may just be stoking the fires of revolution instead and paving the way for a President that is strong enough to restore the West’s place in the World Order and in doing so be hated by the Left and derided by Europe’s intelligentsia. In fact, that is how it should be, and by achieving such loathing, he or she, will show him or herself to be a true successor to Reagan, Thatcher and Bush, and worthy of the title, President.

IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT

For some reason, and without any rhyme, I have become increasingly obsessed by end of the world science fiction films these last few weeks. Usually my thoughts, such as they are, flit between the Third Reich, an idyllic England that probably never existed but in my mind resembles Devon circa 1965 and large, milky-white breasts preferably attached to a sex-crazed woman whose own obsession is to sit naked on my face and wriggle, slowly.

As an obsession this future sci fi doom scenario began quietly and, by obsessional standards, surreptitiously with my re-reading some predominately 1950s and 1960s novels over the last few weeks including John Wyndham’s brilliant Day of the Triffids and the gorgeously haunting Chocky, Edmund Cooper’s All Fools Day and Kronk and a few forgotten gems like Steve Frazee’s Sky Block (Bodley Head, 1955) and George O. Smith’s Hellflower (Bodley Head, 1955). These apocalyptic tomes sowed the seeds of my own personal journey to a kind of McCarthyite nirvana where mankind or rather mankind as personified by pockets of very middle class ‘nice’ people fought off nasty, untrustworthy aliens and, after many setbacks, won.

And thus it came to pass that I watched on an almost daily basis films like ‘War of the Worlds’ including both the 1953 version and the 2005 versions, Independence Day, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Day After, Threads, The Omega Man, Day of the Triffids, No Blade of Grass, Village of the Damned, The Earth Dies Screaming, The Day the Earth Caught Fire, Gattica, I Robot, Planet of the Apes and a film that terrorized me as an eight year old, Dr Who - Invasion Earth 2150 AD.

Why my usually earth-bound mind had filled with end-of-the-world visions perplexed me for a while, particularly as all references to this phenomenon usually cite the fifties fear of communism and the burgeoning Cold War as the cause. Which, given that all the West has to fear coming out of Russia right now is the nouveau riche and visually disturbing fashion, meant I was obviously barking at the wrong shoulder pads. But fifties sci fi films did capture a mood and a sense of a nation's fear. Fear of communists and of invasion purvey films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Invaders from Mars more than anything else and, despite Senator Joe McCarthy's perhaps overzealous patriotism, the alien was the bad guy, and the bad guy was communist scum, admittedly portrayed as a little green man, but commie scum nevertheless.

It is interesting that in the original 1953 version of War of the Worlds, mankind, personified by action man actor Gene Barry, is prepared to fight the alien no matter what the cost and to exhaust every remedy in their desire to fight to the last. But in Spielberg's 2005 reworking of the War of the Worlds. mankind, personified by new man Tom Cruise, is portrayed as a fleeing, craven rabble where even the ‘hero’ is shown killing a man who had hidden him and his daughter from the aliens because the man who saves him is prepared to fight the invader and Cruise is worried that the noise of the man’s gun might alert other nearby aliens and consequently endanger him and his daughter. So Spielberg reduces the fighter to a crazed ‘survivalist’ that Cruise has to kill in order to survive. Crazed man bad, craven man good is the modern message which that means that 21st Century man doesn’t kill and fight the invader he hides and flees and lets the alien assimilate him and his culture. Ultimately of course, mankind fails and is only saved by our bacteria which, unsurprisingly given how generally revolting we all are, poisons and kills the aliens. But still Spielberg leads by example and the example is give in.

In our brave new world there is no modern McCarthy to alert the citizens to the threat of an alien, dangerous ideal. Nor is there a fear of another Cold War because Communism has been trounced by the Capitalist West and hurrah the wicked commie alien witch is dead. Or is she? Perhaps she’s just changed sex, grown a beard and started believing in an ideology that is as vicious and as threatening to our way of life as anything that Marx and Lenin concocted. In fact, if anything, the witches new cave dwelling cronies are more dangerous because, since the fifties, we have lost the will to fight the alien and those that can or do want to fight, are portrayed, like Spielberg's gibbering survivalist, as dangerous fools. It is no coincidence that George Bush’s attempts, tragic as they were, to fight Islam were damned as the futile gestures of a ‘stupid’ man. The new ‘wise’ men reason and emphasize with the alien and alien culture for they see only goodness in aliens and will ‘assimilate’ their culture into our culture and eventually our differences will blur and we will all live as one. Cue singing birds and smiling, multi ethnic crowd.

In the post WWII world, where the shadow cast by Nagasaki and Hiroshima was still fresh and communist expansion into China and Korea were just happening, McCarthy saw a threat to the US and the US way of life that was very real and his ‘scare-monger’ views permeated society creating witch-hunts against perceived communists. Reds-under-the-bed scare stories were everywhere and many card carrying communists, trade unionists, socialists and indeed totally innocentists were arrested and quizzed by the FBI and also, which is often forgotten, many real Moscow connected spies and radicals were outed and exposed. Despite the cost in liberal sensibilities and a few left wing casualties, the Cold War was won and communist ideology silenced.

The ‘red’ Russian alien too would eventually be defeated, and ironically by another ‘tough’ actor from the fifties, Ronald Reagan. Reagan was also portrayed as stupid and hateful by the liberal media and, in particular, Europe’s left-leaning intelligentsia who ruthlessly lampooned Reagan from the moment he took office. They were so clever and he was so stupid but then what could Europe expect from America? What indeed. Here, proclaimed the liberal alien loving intelligentsia, is a crazed, gibbering, communist-baiting half-wit who will start a nuclear war, a man who won’t even talk to the Russian aliens. Well the alien-loving intelligentsia were wrong and the ‘stupid’ actor was right and communism collapsed and right now the intelligentsia are wrong again, only now there’s a ‘smart’ man in the Whitehouse with the hots for bearded alien witches and Spielberg is writing the script.

The 21st Century alien is not to be feared, its followers are not to be hated, and most of all it is not to be fought. In fact we created the alien with our bad policies and imperialist ways and now must make amends and even if the aliens do bad things now and then like fly planes into tall buildings or blow up tube trains we mustn’t get angry because most aliens aren’t like that and when they are its our fault anyway. We should in fact listen to the new Obama disciples, men like actor Sean Penn and director Oliver Stone, who has just made a love-you hugumentary about Venezuelan President, the thug Hugo Chavez, and who paraded with him arm in arm at the Venice film festival last week. Stone leads by example and gets into bed with the enemy. Not for Stone, the red-under-the-bed, the reds in his world are in his bed and fucking him up the arse!

No, the witch is not dead, she’s alive, has a beard, a poe-face, a hatred of women and a circumcised clitoris-severing cock and is preparing to lead her people out of the caves and into the promised land or, to be more specific, Europe. We now live in a world where the fifties' science fiction cold war analogies have become realities, only no one is listening. We need a big bad wolf like McCarthy to stir the people up and champion our imperialist, capitalist, wonderful and flawed world before it is too late and yes, we probably need a ‘stupid’ commie hating leader too. One who speaks from the heart rather than one who speaks well to the heart and who isn’t afraid to look a crafty alien in the eye from time to time and, if necessary, blow his head off. But most of all we need to tell Oliver Stone he’s crap.