the impossible magical negro standard
It's not too often the present catches up with the brighter side of the future. Oh, sure, it catches up plenty with the dreary dystopian future. Smog choked skies, militarized police forces, endless high-tech wars, and vat-raised Olympic gymnasts are a dime a dozen.
It's the shiny, some might say naïve, optimism of the future that is difficult to obtain. The far-fetched, world-changing innovations like the electric highway, cold fusion, sex robots, and the flying car are always just out of reach.
Yet here we are. Against all odds we have somehow seized the future and we have elected a black man. Barack Obama.
Cooked up in a Frankenstein's lab filled with strange silver spheres crackling with electricity. Alchemically mixed from vials and test-tubes of bubbling liquids labeled "Kenyan Dad" and "Grandma's Bomber Assembly Line." Even his race seems futuristic.
He is a demographically sensible best-case scenario of blackness, the sort of black that listens to NPR, but doesn't host a show on NPR. He is the sort of black that appreciates hip-hop "for the stories it can tell," but shakes his head disapprovingly when Jay-Z says "bitch."
Obama was raised by sensible whites who instilled in him all of the wizardly knowledge of white greatness and then he unleashed his magic on the chocolate streets of Chicago, levitating the downtrodden and scrying a better tomorrow.
As Master Yoda sobbed, just another face in the crowd of millions, Obama took to the stage in Grant Park and reminded the world that we can still catch up to the future. Two days later, we have been repeatedly reminded by the media and by political activists, that the future is the ultimate Christmas present: once opened it will never be as magical as it was during the unwrapping.
The inevitable disillusionment is already beginning to creep into the more liberal supporters of Barack Obama. Next to the bottled tears of vanquished republicans, the sweetest liqueur is distilled from the liquid eye-farts of the far left. Lefties are as perpetually aggrieved as evangelical Christians and as self-righteous as the flag-sucking dimwits who organize counter protests whenever there is a rally against war.
Lefties have a PETA-like commitment to making you despise what might otherwise be a rational cause.
Take for example, Ralph Nader, who once again placed his thumb on the scales of the neoconservatives and their beloved wars in his misguided narcissism to prove a point about the two-party system in America. Having tipped a couple peripheral states like Missouri away from Obama in what was otherwise a landslide, Nader was eager to gain the spotlight and provide a cold bucket of water for anyone enamored with their new flying car.
Nader, America's purity troll, hauled his droopy stroke face in front of the Fox News cameras and slurred out a defense of his accusation that Obama is an "Uncle Tom" for aligning himself with the "corporatists."
This prompted breathless indignation from Fox host Shepard Smith, who has probably sat smiling while Tom Delay referred to a milquetoast democrat as, "The gibbering sub-humanoid result of a failed abortion raised by rats living in a medical waste dumpster." Shep scoffed at Nader after the segment ended and shook his head like Obama hearing the word "nigger" slip from the rhymes of Nas.
"Why would he end his career like that?" Shep wondered. He was apparently unaware of the old adage that, "The arc of Nader is long but it bends toward LaRouche."
Paroxysms of anger are de rigueur among the peripheral right and the left of the political spectrum. After a momentary flash of joy at Obama's election the melodramatic cretins on TV and on the blogs began to gnash their teeth that Obama had chosen Rahm Emmanuel as his chief of staff.
Republicans, who moments earlier had clasped their flag pins and acted as if they were a part of the beautiful America that had elected the first black president, viciously turned on Obama and pointed to Emmanuel as proof that Obama was no bipartisan healer.
A simultaneous cry went up from the baby's first president coalition in the blogosphere. They were enraged that Obama selected a filthy member of Clinton's Democratic Leadership Council. Emmanuel once said mean things to Howard Dean, their patron saint of ideological purity and abject failure, and thus he was persona non grata.
When word was leaked that economist Larry Summers was in contention for an Obama treasury appointment the liberal blogs practically rioted. Do you know why? Because in 1991 Larry Summers wrote a Swiftian satirical memo proposing shipping pollution to the third world that was taken seriously by the humorless babies that man the ramparts of the left.
There are legitimate reasons to criticize Summers, but fake or moronic indignation over his 1991 memo makes me hope evil humorist Al Franken loses his Senate recount just so a couple of these people realize what they have become.
These outbursts, from the right and the left, are just the blurt of some bad brass heralding the coming onslaught. Having run a two year gauntlet to the presidency, America's first black president now has to run a two month gauntlet of screaming complaints on issues ranging from the inane to the insane.
All too often when the future is realized it fails to live up to its promise, but sometimes it's our dreary world that just wants to hate the flying car.
- Zack "Geist Editor" Parsons
It's the shiny, some might say naïve, optimism of the future that is difficult to obtain. The far-fetched, world-changing innovations like the electric highway, cold fusion, sex robots, and the flying car are always just out of reach.
Yet here we are. Against all odds we have somehow seized the future and we have elected a black man. Barack Obama.
Cooked up in a Frankenstein's lab filled with strange silver spheres crackling with electricity. Alchemically mixed from vials and test-tubes of bubbling liquids labeled "Kenyan Dad" and "Grandma's Bomber Assembly Line." Even his race seems futuristic.
He is a demographically sensible best-case scenario of blackness, the sort of black that listens to NPR, but doesn't host a show on NPR. He is the sort of black that appreciates hip-hop "for the stories it can tell," but shakes his head disapprovingly when Jay-Z says "bitch."
Obama was raised by sensible whites who instilled in him all of the wizardly knowledge of white greatness and then he unleashed his magic on the chocolate streets of Chicago, levitating the downtrodden and scrying a better tomorrow.
As Master Yoda sobbed, just another face in the crowd of millions, Obama took to the stage in Grant Park and reminded the world that we can still catch up to the future. Two days later, we have been repeatedly reminded by the media and by political activists, that the future is the ultimate Christmas present: once opened it will never be as magical as it was during the unwrapping.
The inevitable disillusionment is already beginning to creep into the more liberal supporters of Barack Obama. Next to the bottled tears of vanquished republicans, the sweetest liqueur is distilled from the liquid eye-farts of the far left. Lefties are as perpetually aggrieved as evangelical Christians and as self-righteous as the flag-sucking dimwits who organize counter protests whenever there is a rally against war.
Lefties have a PETA-like commitment to making you despise what might otherwise be a rational cause.
Take for example, Ralph Nader, who once again placed his thumb on the scales of the neoconservatives and their beloved wars in his misguided narcissism to prove a point about the two-party system in America. Having tipped a couple peripheral states like Missouri away from Obama in what was otherwise a landslide, Nader was eager to gain the spotlight and provide a cold bucket of water for anyone enamored with their new flying car.
Nader, America's purity troll, hauled his droopy stroke face in front of the Fox News cameras and slurred out a defense of his accusation that Obama is an "Uncle Tom" for aligning himself with the "corporatists."
This prompted breathless indignation from Fox host Shepard Smith, who has probably sat smiling while Tom Delay referred to a milquetoast democrat as, "The gibbering sub-humanoid result of a failed abortion raised by rats living in a medical waste dumpster." Shep scoffed at Nader after the segment ended and shook his head like Obama hearing the word "nigger" slip from the rhymes of Nas.
"Why would he end his career like that?" Shep wondered. He was apparently unaware of the old adage that, "The arc of Nader is long but it bends toward LaRouche."
Paroxysms of anger are de rigueur among the peripheral right and the left of the political spectrum. After a momentary flash of joy at Obama's election the melodramatic cretins on TV and on the blogs began to gnash their teeth that Obama had chosen Rahm Emmanuel as his chief of staff.
Republicans, who moments earlier had clasped their flag pins and acted as if they were a part of the beautiful America that had elected the first black president, viciously turned on Obama and pointed to Emmanuel as proof that Obama was no bipartisan healer.
A simultaneous cry went up from the baby's first president coalition in the blogosphere. They were enraged that Obama selected a filthy member of Clinton's Democratic Leadership Council. Emmanuel once said mean things to Howard Dean, their patron saint of ideological purity and abject failure, and thus he was persona non grata.
When word was leaked that economist Larry Summers was in contention for an Obama treasury appointment the liberal blogs practically rioted. Do you know why? Because in 1991 Larry Summers wrote a Swiftian satirical memo proposing shipping pollution to the third world that was taken seriously by the humorless babies that man the ramparts of the left.
There are legitimate reasons to criticize Summers, but fake or moronic indignation over his 1991 memo makes me hope evil humorist Al Franken loses his Senate recount just so a couple of these people realize what they have become.
These outbursts, from the right and the left, are just the blurt of some bad brass heralding the coming onslaught. Having run a two year gauntlet to the presidency, America's first black president now has to run a two month gauntlet of screaming complaints on issues ranging from the inane to the insane.
All too often when the future is realized it fails to live up to its promise, but sometimes it's our dreary world that just wants to hate the flying car.
- Zack "Geist Editor" Parsons