“Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.” Milan Kundera
by Dennis Dale
The appeal of Barack Obama is best understood as http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4810.
The Obama campaign–as any, only more so–is more a work of art than of argument. As such it is (present tense, for it continues) a narrative blend of http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3786.
This phenomenon-as-political movement is improvisational, interactive environmental http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=5721. We are all players in this melodrama. All the world is a stage, indeed.What do I mean herein by “kitsch”? Not merely that it is sentimental, though sentiment is its base material, and would hardly differentiate it from any other political campaign or movement. I refer to the self conscious aspect of kitsch, as the celebration of a given sentiment as its own justification, a transcendent thing in itself. Kitsch is not the artist saying “behold this truth”, but the audience saying “behold our love of truth.” This is its appeal, directly to our vanity.
What makes kitsch bad art, its unearned catharsis, makes it the most effective demagogy. It requires nothing of us other than acquiescence to the sentiment. Kitsch is the saccharine film soundtrack that drops in before anything has actually happened, cuing us to emote inwardly. A neatly closed emotional system, impervious to doubt, skepticism and irony.
Those few of us left capable of viewing the Obama phenomenon with detachment will recognize these aspects in it–particularly its offer of an easy, celebratory catharsis. In the adoring crowds, in the deliberately incurious and uncritical appreciation of the candidate and now president-elect that continues. In the candidate’s unspoken collusion with the media to equate his personal ambition with the civil rights movement itself.
Barack Obama effortlessly assumes the mantle of grievance for the greatest sins of the nation–slavery, segregation, disenfranchisement–not with a greater understanding of this history, as is habitually and thoughtlessly assumed, but with an inferior understanding of it; for Barack Obama, having neither the black American nor white American experience, American race relations is a cherished romance that became one with his considerable ambition. This romance will not be sacrificed now.
For a candidate to arrive on the scene as a sort of prefabricated historical figure, for his ascension to be defined as an act of justice and absolution; in light of the grand myth of the civil rights movement in America and the sheer power of this narrative–the wonder of Barack Obama is not that he is here, but that it has taken this long for him to arrive. His eloquence and apparent decency are magnified, of course, by this calculus of atonement. About the time of the election a prominent political reporter could be found on a television interview program, with perhaps unintentional frankness, trumpeting Obama as a http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2854.
The news reports following the candidate’s triumph proclaimed the fall of a “barrier.” But the barrier had faded long ago–in fact it was over ten years ago the nation was so transfixed by an African American public figure, Colin Powell, for the very same reasons it’s now enamored of Barack Obama, that at one point it seemed he could have chosen between the presidential candidacy of either political party–this before his political affiliation was confirmed. In fact, the automatic goodwill bestowed on that man has still not dissipated, despite the fact his personal career of mediocrity in powerful positions has only been interrupted by his implication in the misinformation campaign preceding the Iraq war.
Barack Obama did not “http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=5946", as the headlines trumpeted. Barack Obama was carried along by a powerful force to where he is. Barack Obama was inevitable.
http://dennisdale.blogspot.com/2008/11/deconstructing-barry-part-i.html