An Englishman Is about to Talk French

I happened to be cooking dinner last night when the President arrived on the radio to make what one might charitably call a speech; like everything Obama says these days, it had the dull, affectless quality of a fourth-place effort in a high-school forensics competition combined with the clackety, bullet-pointed style of a Risk Management seminar.  First slide: Get the Job Done.  It's hard to recall that this guy used to attempt to imitate--never successfully, but he tried--better orators; he allowed the occasional complex syntax to impinge upon the uncertain borders of his declarative kingdom.  Now, he speaks English the way I speak French when I'm sober: fluent within phrases, herky-jerky as soon as anything grows into a sentence.  The result is that weird habit of conversant but not really fluent speakers of a language to talk very fast while talking very slow.  Having spent several years now isolated from any actual humans, he's getting worse and worse at impersonating an actual human.

You know, I have always been essentially a materialist, philosophically speaking; I mean, I believed that consciousness was epiphenomenal and all that, that the mind was just a metaphoric abstraction of the physical brain; that being was fundamentally electrochemical and all that.  Then I met Glenn Beck; I will not go into the details here.  Suffice to say, he awakened in me the capacity to believe in, well, if not the supernatural per se, then at least the mildly transcendent, that which cannot be accounted for by our science.  Beck, offstage and out-of-studio, is not actually a person; he is a sort of sub-golem, animate but not actually alive, mobile but not motive, a sort of automaton in the sense that the Christian world used to imagine animals: a machine that merely gives the impression of being alive.  Then, before he starts broadcasting, the Reptiloids or Annunaki or Rupert Murdoch or whomever, they draw the appropriate sigils in the dirt and masturbate their great barbed penises and call up his demon or operating thetan or, uh, whatever, which incorporates or instantiates or something into his meatmind and turns him into a creature, possessed.

So Obama, it seems to me, occupies only the former state of being; his Cartesian mind-body is on the splits or something; perhaps he had a real soul once which was so repelled by the necessities of power that it packed a hobo bag and hopped the first train out of the vast, post-Soviet hulk of a terminal that is the physical embodiment of the President's current mind.  Or perhaps there never were any passengers and there was never a train.  All that concrete was built in the last years of an empire that had already, for all intents and purposes, collapsed; the tracks lead nowhere; the lights never turned on; beyond its walls there is no city, nothing but grass and low hills and unharvested wheat.