Obama's Last Hundred Days

It's always the same with our culture. Some fad or person or cultural artifact becomes disgustingly popular way too fast. He or she or it is on everyone's tongues, their name is repeated relentlessly on television until it's drilled in to our heads. Inevitably, this mass popularity translates into profit and consumerism, either by way of a tell-all book, a made-for-TV movie or of course, the T-shirt.

Just as inevitably as the snowballing rise of popularity of these fads, there comes the backlash. One moment, The Matrix is the biggest, coolest, most must-see movie ever. The next, you have eight year-olds scoring points with their friends by doing Neo or Agent Smith impressions. "What good is a...phone call if you are .... unable ... to speak?" For the media, as well as for our own sick voyeuristic pleasures, nothing's better than the rise of something new than that new thing's tragic fall. See Britney Spears.

In any case, to get to the forever delayed subject of this article, I turn to the number one celebrity in the world, the all-but-crowned Democratic Presidential candidate and junior Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama. Mr. Obama has, through his natural charms, his team of brilliant strategists and his sheer political wits, delayed a backlash against his volcanic rise to international prominence.

A mere seven months prior, Mr. Obama was a long shot for the Iowa primaries. Senator Hillary Clinton of New York (remember her?) had been pencilled in by the elites and the experts as the front-runner for President for years. He was a nobody, a guy who had made one good speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention in Boston amd who had been on Oprah a few times touting his books and who was sort of liked by the few political observers who knew of him.

Jump ahead to last week where this very American politician managed to attract a throng of 200,000 people to a speech...in Germany. Mr. Obama's tour of Europe and the Middle East involved one-on-one meetings with the most powerful men and one woman (Ms. Merkel) in the world. These supposed world leaders, from British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Jordanian Monarch King Abdullah, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, amongst others, all seemed to jump at the chance to shake the hands of 'the One,' as Mr. Obama's opponent, Senator John McCain of Arizona, privately refers to him.

The world tour was the peak of fame for a man who would save America and restore it to its rightful place as former President Reagan's proverbial 'shining city on a hill.' And so, as with all things from Icarus to a frisbee flung by a child, what goes up, must come down.

Over the next three months, Mr. Obama faces his toughest challenge on the path to succeeding George W. Bush. How can he translate his vast media presence and his fevered grip on the imaginations of millions into political victory? It's one thing for doe-eyed reporters and twenty-something college students to love the man and wear t-shirts of his face. It's entirely another to score a victory on Election Day, November 4, 2008.

Chief amongst Mr. Obama's obstacles is to maintain his aura as Great American Hero and delay the backlash against his persona. Already, there has begun a steady patter of arrows being launched towards his direction. Accusations of elitism, of being a weak-kneed Liberal are being spoken by Obama's natural opponents, the Republican Party.

However, we're still in the stage where a lot of the accusations are still far-fetched, or just flat-out wrong. Die-hard Hillary supporters fault him for being a man. Daily followers of he news cycles have begun tagging him with the dreaded 'flip-flopper' pejorative, a term which eventually helped to do in Mr. Obama's predecessor, the Senator from Massachusetts, John Kerry. Cynics chastise him for being too 'perfect', too clean-cut and popular for his own good. Religious fundamentalists think he's really a Muslim (God forbid) in disguise. Closet racists of course, we know why they're not going to cast their ballot for him.

The question becomes, how to dispel all these potential threats when Mr. Obama has less than a hundred days left until the big day?

The answer is multi-faceted. Mr. Obama must, above all else, ensure his priority over the coming weeks is to assure the American housewife. This statement is yes, a little simplistic, but what I mean is that the vast centre of the American political spectrum is comprised of working-class Americans. It is these Americans who spend their time taking care of their families, their savings accounts, paying their bills and working endlessly who always have the last say in Presidental elections. Modern day observers like to ponder how an incompetent dreg like W won two elections for himself and secured the Presidency for eight years, but the answer is really as simple as W managed to appeal to the average American. He made the housewife feel secure. Setting aside his differences with the current Commander-in-Chief, Mr. Obama ought to take some lessons from W and learn how to appear as just a regular guy and not as he still portrayed; an exotic usurper with mysterious intentions and a sometimes off-putting personality cult.

If anything, Americans are not as dumb as we like to make them out to be. Furthermore, they are generally suspicious of anyone who can summon the kinds of hyperbolic praise that Mr. Obama has done. He knows he has the young left, the Democrats and the true believers in his pocket. The real trick for the Senator is going to be how to destroy his 'messianic' media image while still calling upon the very talent and charisma that built this image to attract regular voters.

Can a Harvard-educated Constitutional Law professor come off as a barbeque-eating, beer-drinking average Joe? No. He doesn't have to. What he does have to do is to convince those who do subscribe to this stereotype that he is going to to be President just as much for them than for the marijuana-smoking liberal arts college student.

Secondly, Mr. Obama has to make a mistake. Something as simple as making a public error, and then recovering from it, would go a long way towards convincing people that the man is human. His previous problems with Reverend Wright, Hillary Clinton and Tony Rezko all involved the mistakes of others. Now he himself must learn the brittle art of fucking up on a national scale and then apologizing for it. Nothing reinforces a relationship like a little bit of make-up sex, if I may make use of such a crude metaphor.

Finally, Mr. Obama has to make the case that his opponent is not a feeble, out-of-touch old man with nary a chance of winning. Americans love underdogs and so does the press. If Mr. Obama continues to come across as the Heir Apparent before a single ballot has been cast, Americans will have yet another reason to resent him as being haughty, arrogant and presumptuous. Again, it's a tricky balance of making Mr. McCain (who doesn't have a shot in hell to win by the way) appear as if he could win and that such a possibility would spell disaster for the already beleaguered union, all the while continuing to promote his own strengths.

This election cannot remain simply a question of whether Mr. Obama is worthy of the Oval Office or not. It's got to become what elections were originally supposed to be - a contest between two individuals to decide who will be the better person for the job. If Mr. Obama and his skilled team of strategists can refocus the fickle media's attention on making a comparison between the two men rather than just on him, then there will be no contest.

A hundred days is a long time to predict a final outcome. Anything can happen in that time. On November 4th, we'll know what the next four years for the American people, and by extension, the world, will hold. Until then, go play GTA4.

=//Turnquest

Out of Touch

Out of Touch

This is months, *months* too late to even begin to bring up and talk about but I really don't give a shit.

"Umbrella." Yeah, that song. You know it, know doubt. Even if you somehow can't associate the name of the song with its singer Rihanna, you've probably heard it several times on the radio, in a club, on the telly, usually without knowing its name.

Here's a link to the video to refresh your memory:



This column is not about that song however.

It's about the state of music overall. This particular track (dats the industee lingo y'all) was a huge megahit with people all over the world. It was Rihanna's breakthrough after a string of smaller hit singles that generally ripped off from Soft Cell and New Order, among other acts. Umbrella got Grammy nominations, almost universal critical applause (it was Entertainment Weekly's track of the year, and #3 on RollingStone's list) and it generated extraordinary buzz in an era when, frankly, it's virtually impossible to establish common cultural touchstones.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The way I see it, North American culture is deeply fractured. Everyone is divided into neat, marketable categories that makes it easy for giant media conglomerates to sell things to. Subcultures and genres define so much of who you are, what you do and what others think of you that it seems almost impossible to not be lumped into one of these categories.

Let me illustrate this for you. Imagine your typical city bus. It's around 3:30 in the afternoon, school's out, the bus is loaded with kids going home or to their friends' houses. All good so far? Look closer.

Here on this bus, you got emo kids listening to Red Jumpsuit Apparatus and Saves The Day who have absolutely no connection culturally with the new rave kids sitting next to them who are kicking "D.A.N.C.E." by Justice. Neither of them give two f*cks about the long-haired stoner digging "Sweet Leaf" by Black Sabbath, circa 1971. His slightly less metal-loving buddy, also a long-haired stoner is kicking it progressive and busting Alan Parsons Project.

In the back of the bus, you got the black kids listening to Jay-Z and T-Pain. In the front, you've got the tweens singing along in unison to Britney and Gwen. The one Muslim chick in the front stares blankly ahead, not listening to anything.

Nobody on the bus is listening to the Bruce Springsteen album that hit #1 on the Billboard charts. Nobody on the bus even knows who Bruce Springsteen is.

What's the point I'm trying to make with this overlong analogy? It's not that everyone is listening to different things. That's fine. I think it'd would be creepy and fascist to hope that all these kids with all their different backgrounds would be listening to the same music.

My problem is that all those bands and songs that I listed are not just different genres; for these kids, they may as well be different planets.

A kid who listens to rap has no clue about the sorts of things that go through the head a kid who listens to classic rock who has no relation or commonality with another kid who listens to indie rock.

It's a glaring fissure in the bedrock of what makes us in the West a society, rather than just a bunch of people who happen to be stuck in the same city. Back in the days, when an artist like Nirvana, or Michael Jackson or The Beatles released a new song, it was an event that transcended age, preference and cultural boundaries. People of all backgrounds and demographics gathered around television sets to watch them. Kids talked about them to each other at school and joined the fan club. Co-workers mentioned them at lunch and everyone would nod. They were known. It was common knowledge. It was just, y'know, it.

Now, we have a hundred radio stations, a thousand satellite channels, and trillions of websites, and no-one knows what anyone else is talking about. You have a nation of cliques and circles. Suddenly, everything is an in-joke. Patterns of speech and vocabulary are limited to whatever you and your six other friends talk like. When one has to, usually under work or school-related circumsutances, actually try and communicate with others, what happens is a total breakdown. The 42 year-old white supervisor or the 62 year-old Pakistani professor is not going to have one clue what the 19 year-old punk or hip-hopper is saying when they tries to talk to them. What ends up happening is either, misinterpretation, offense taken from one of the two parties or a sort of broken, pared-down version of language. The kind you use when you're talking to someone from Japan or Sudan.

This goes beyond just communicating. Slang and common reference points are esoteric enough as it is. A few awkward conversations are tolerable in our land of multiculturalism.

The problem is thus.

Culture ends up having no centre, no meeting point, no town square where people can come together. Without this necessary social utility, people have no place to discuss, to interact nor to share in the experience and reality of being neighbours, schoolmates, citizens, humans.

And I'll take this concern one step further and call it what it is.

Cultural segregation.

It's cultural segregation that is going to have effects and repercussions that we as a culture will face in the future. You're talking about trying to bring people together and trying to make them connect when they have absolutely nothing to even begin to talk about. You have relationships between people from the same cultural category and no exposure or interaction to other ways of living.

Understand the offense I take from this situation is because there is in fact, a reason that this phenomenon has occurred. The populace is being deliberately carved up and classified for one reason, and one reason only: to be marketed to.

It's easier to tailor your ads hocking shoes and accessories to a specific stereotypical category than it is to a broad demographic that is educated, informed and technologically savvy. You will buy more from ads with people who look like you, talk like you and with bands that you listen to.

Furthermore, you end up with heavily restricted social mobility. Sorry to get all Marx on you but, the poor end up staying poor because that's all they know. The rich stay rich, because they don't care about the poor. The middle doesn't know what's what, except whatever their telly says it is.

Pretty much, from the age of 10, you're being pressured into making a choice. Indie? Arty? Freak? Geek? Emo? Punk? Stoner? Jock? Prep? Hip-hopper? F.O.B.? Take your pick. They're all the same as the other ones.

All it's going to change is whether you're going to buy the pair of Dickies work pants or the environmentaly-friendly organic bamboo skirt...all at the same mall.

The illusion of choice.

Well, that and your friends, your school, your career paths, cultural preferences and a whole host of other things are all decided by a simple thing like what you choose to associate with. Or what you listen to.

Pointe finale: Fuck Umbrella.

Rihanna and Jay-z should both die.

=//Turnquest

The Question of Iran

There's been a recent surge (no pun intended) of chatter in the mainstream media concerning a possible invasion/air-strike/surgical bombing of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The thought has been buzzing around in the background of policy circles in Washington (and Tel Aviv for that matter) for a while, certainly at least since W's State of the Union address on January 29, 2002 where he made his infamous "axis-of-evil" remark.

Of course, nowadays we can joke about that strange, aberrant era, the time of W and neo-cons, of the "war against terror," "orange alerts" and "dirty bombs." And though we still have with us some of the proponents of pre-emptive strikes and jingoism like Coulter, Rush and Mike Evans, other more temperate voices like Gore, Olbermann and Carter have risen to reclaim territory in the public sphere. The far-right is on the retreat.

Need more proof? Go and take a look at the candidates for the 2008 Presidential race. Not one of the at least 5 supposed frontrunners on the GOP side has broken through as a clear winner yet. All bets are off. Average Republicans are splintered in their choice to back a candidate and a considerable percentage have yet to declare their allegiance to anyone.

Left-wing or right, looking at the GOP and Democratic debates, it's two totally different worldviews. One side seems stuck on the September 12, 2001 mentality of "gotta find those terrrorists, smoke 'em out, get those varmints on the run, gotta defend America." The other is making once-taboo topics like universal health care, diplomacy and multilateralism, ending the occupation of Iraq and seriously fighting global warming the centre of political discussion. On the ground, in the small towns, in the living rooms of America, the people are not worrying about an invisible invasion of bearded Muslamo-Nazi goons. They care about their kids going to a good school, about being paid fairly for their hard work and about building a decent savings for retirement. Come to think of it, that doesn't sound too different from what most Iranians, Iraqis or anyone else wants.

So why so much Iran-this, Iran-that talk? Honestly, it's pretty simple. War talk hijacks the debate. It is a red herring, as they say in fiction. A random, false lead that interrupts the story and sends the pursuer of truth down the wrong path. It halts the relentless tide of progress and all of a sudden, we find ourselves back in 2002 talking about WMDs and the imminent threat of Iraq and Saddam.

It irks me greatly that so many of America's supposedly finest journalists and politicians continue to confuse the two distinct nations of Iraq and Iran. I shudder to think if we start mixing up the two Koreas, or Australia and Austria, or Israel and Palestine.

The W age is fast coming to a close. Some lefties say it's already done, that anything W says is irrelevant and a joke and that no-one trusts him anymore anyway. His approval ratings have been slumming around in the record-lows for more than a year. A popularly-supported military offensive by the U.S. or its surrogate instrument Israel is unthinkable now. The move has no support amongst regular people, moderate politicians nor, most importantly, with rank-and-file military commanders.

The worst part about this whole sideshow is that while we waste newspaper and website space on empty Iran talk, the blood of the children of Iraq still spills every day.

Iraq (with a *q*) is the real issue, and has been, for four, going on five, long years. May God have mercy on those suffering people.

=//Turnquest

Of Dictators and Dissent

Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t. Why should we?
- Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles in the film “The Third Man” (1949)

Two enfolding foreign events are happening as I type this. They are seemingly unrelated but equally abhorrent to me. Their seeds had been growing for many years, yet both seem to be germinating within days of each other. Unrelated in perhaps quantitative terms, yet they both elicit the same amount of fury and indignation from I. Dictators, despots, tyrants, call them what you will, but they are one and the same: the worst of beings. Those who were blessed with power, influence and indeed intelligence, but who chose to use their gifts for mass suffering and corruption. Though of all their faults, the sin of Vanity is their ultimate demise, as it is with so many people of political power.

Robert Mugabe and Pervez Musharraf, Presidents of Zimbabwe and Pakistan respectively, have probably never met. I’m not sure quite myself. Yet what a grand conversation they would have if one of them decided to give the other a call today.

Mugabe, improbably 83 years old, has been running Zimbabwe for twenty-seven years now. I say improbably because while he has managed to live to an age even most of us healthy Canadians may not get to, his people won’t. According to the World Health Organization they have a life expectancy of 34. That means most college students would be well over the hill if they happened to be born in Zimbabwe. Just ten years ago, it was 63. Inflation in the country is estimated to be somewhere north of 1000%. A loaf of bread costs the average Zimbabwean $80,000 in their currency. Dysentery and cholera are rampant in the capital of Harare, because their tap water is drawn from a source downstream from their sewer outlets. Unemployment hovers around 70%.

Yet Mr. Mugabe hardly thinks his government, nor God forbid himself, ought to take any responsibility. According to him, it’s the foreigners who are responsible. Blame it on the Brits, or the Americans, whichever, he says.

President-General Musharraf, who rose to power in a coup d’etat back in 1999, has ruled Pakistan since. He’s been courted by all the bosses of the world establishment. In a whirlwind tour at one point, the man met with, in succession: Jacques Chirac of France, Gerhard Schroder of Germany, Tony Blair of the United Kingdom and George W. Bush of the United States. Next time you are planning a visit, see if you can make an appointment with any one of these men’s secretaries.

Musharraf’s great contribution to intellectual debate has been his promotion of the doctrine of “enlightened moderation,” Newspeak meaning some sort of balancing of hardline religious extremists and Western secularism. His country has been going nowhere fast pretty much since its independence in 1947. No Pakistani Prime Minister has managed to complete a term in office without being deposed, shot, hanged or experiencing some other gruesome fate. An old joke about Pakistan says that while most countries rule an army, here is one where an army rules a country. For it is the Pakistan Army that truly pulls the strings in that nation. The rest of the pretend government is not much more than an illusion, and a bad one at that.

Recently though, both dictators have managed to get themselves in a bind. Mugabe, in typically thuggish style, had police first arrest, then beat opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai. The assault left him with a fractured skull. Mugabe has also made threats against anyone else who objects to his rule. The country has since been plunged into the brink of emergency as opponents have taken the incident as the last straw in the series of Mugabe’s disgraces. Rebellion has begun.

Musharraf, in a drunken state of hubris, decided that he just did not like Chief Justice of Pakistan’s Supreme Court Iftikhar M. Chaudhry and decided to not only oust him from his seat (an unconstitutional act in itself) but also place him and his family under house arrest. His phonelines, both land and mobile, were blocked, as were his television and newspaper services. Reaction was swift from the country’s lawyers, of all people, who united, and despite facing savage opposition from police shock troops, went on strike and took to the streets.

Both countries are now in the midst of upheaval. On its face, revolt and political protest of this nature can be ugly. But underneath the surface, there is something rather beautiful and indeed, sacred. In even the dark corners of the Earth where the dawn of justice and popular will has not broken, there are those who would risk life, limb and property, without guarantee of success, to do what is right. To fight the best fight human beings can fight; that is, against tyranny and oppression.

Islam, to take an example of the major religions, forbids violent action against even an unjust government. Yet when that government begins to oppress, it has a crossed a line that unfortunately only action can restore. These two men have crossed that line.

=//Turnquest

Happy B-Day, Mr. Bin Laden

Last Saturday, March 10, the world’s most famous fugitive and face of international terrorism, Osama Bin Muhammed bin Awad bin Laden, celebrated his 50th birthday. Assuming of course, he is still alive.

For the purposes of this column, we shall assume he is. The logic behind this presumption is that until the “breaking news” photos of his corpse are splashed across television screens and newspapers as proof of his ultimate demise, he is as good as alive, and able to elicit the same amount of fear regardless. The United States military, in order mostly to pre-empt conspiracy theorists, made no effort to hide the grisly pictures of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi or Uday and Qusay Hussein, sons of the late Saddam Hussein who himself received a televised video death.

But I digress. Bin Laden remains the symbolic figurehead for the shadowy Al-Qaeda group, even though those in the know will tell you that he has almost no authority anymore, considering his unknown location. It has been more than five years since he’s gone on the run, most likely changing hiding spots in the mountainous border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan. It was one of these hiding spots, the infamous Tora Bora mountains, where U.S. troops came closest to capturing him back in 2001. Alas, he escaped and the rest of the story has been left to hazy speculation on the part of bored political junkies.

As many have pointed out, he has also been unusually quiet recently. There haven’t been any of the once-frequent audiotapes since early last year. The last known video was even farther back, in October of 2004. One of the last times he spoke though, he offered an uncharacteristic truce to the Americans, which of course was swiftly refused. Yet his silence hasn’t kept some in the Bush administration from relentlessly reminding people that he is still out there, maybe just around the street corner, lurking in a dark place, ready to pounce out like a masked 90s horror villain. Other more cynical attitudes say he’s just being kept in a box in the President’s closet, ready to be brought out to invigorate a failing legacy.

This columnist would go as far as to state the number one driving political force in all of American politics for the last few years has been the fear of Bin Laden. More so than right-left friction, more than the Iraq War fallout, more than even the general dislike for President Bush. It is that chronic fear of another attack, another day waking up to breaking news on CNN and panicked phone calls from relatives that has shaped the voting patterns of the electorate and politicians alike. Bush may have his finger on the nuclear button, but Bin Laden has his on the nerves of every American old enough to watch the news.

There is, one would imagine, a different kind of fear on the part of U.S. military forces. What if Bin Laden has already died of natural causes? Certainly that would be anti-climactic, denying them the glory of a final gunbattle with him and his bodyguards and the satisfaction of finally catching their man. As well, it would once and for all end this fear of the ever-potent bogeyman in the public. Such a consequence would only make way for politicians to declare the War on Terror at an end and dilute any arguments for further military action in Middle East countries. Sure, they could dig up some other creepy bearded man and say that he’s the real bad guy (and they will), but it would still mark the end of an era.

What kind of man could elude the pursuit of the most powerful nation on Earth for five years with a $25 million bounty on his head, “dead or alive”? A man who competes only with the President of the United States for being the most famous living human being? He’s described as soft-spoken and even charming in person. A multi-millionaire through inheritance and the 17th of maybe as many as 55 children, few could have imagined this soccer-playing Saudi could have gained the notoriety that he did. Regardless of how the rest of his life plays out, Bin Laden has scorched a place in the history books if for no other reason than being the first Emmanuel Goldstein of the 21st century.


=//Turnquest