Gayer than Laughter

It's a good thing I smoke so much fucking weed, because girlie, if I didn't, then the bitter pressure in the back of my throat would surely have gushed forth when my man Dennis P. drew my attention to this. I mean, I like eating ass as much as the next faggot, but their are certain depths that even my nose fails to plumb. You know whadumsayin?

Anyway. Ezra:

The other great leaders I've heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence.

Is that is or is that ain't the purplest prose you ever done read? Our highest selves? A glittering ideal? Dude, you want to know where America exists as a glittering ideal. In yah imagination.

There is plenty to criticize about mainline American exceptionalism, but you know, there's at least something semi-rational about it. There is, at least, the conviction that the United States is a nation whose unique institutions create unique benefits, freedoms, and liberties for its citizens. There is, at minimum, a material idealism behind the notion that we need to export our supposed way of life, for in the estimation of the exceptionalist, that way of life is objectively preferable to any other. That may be crass Hegelianism; it may be end-of-historical bumpus; but, fuck me, at least it's an ethos.

Listen up. I may be wrong about everything. America may well be the last, best motherfucking hope for all the motherfucking world. It may yet be proven that late state capital in the late Republic of the latter-day States is the best system of human organization ever devised by happenstance and human intelligence. But even if all those things, unlikely though they are, turn out to be true, there is nothing in the least transcendent about it. The Queen of the Night hitting the high F is trascendent. El Greco's View of Toledo is transcendent. Hell, the breaded, pan-fried sweetbreads at Po are pretty damned transcendent. Obama is just a politician, and America is just a country.

Klein is the sort of wound-tight progressive who gets pissy because Maureen Dowd writes about his candidates' wardrobes, but we're supposed to raise our hands and sway because Barack Obama is the "triumph of word over flesh." I don't even know what that means, but I know what the residents of Chicago's South Side would say if they heard it: Nigga, please.