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

The Folly of a Lunatic State

For what seems like the ten-thousandth time, the sovereign nation of Israel has threatened the Islamic Republic of Iran with military action. Israel over the past few years has made repeated threats of attack against Iran for reasons it states as Iran's covert program to construct an arsenal of nuclear warheads. The llatest round of sabre-rattling has stirred up new fears of a widespread conflict that could engulf the Middle East. Israel as recently as last month conducted major war games in the Mediterranean to seemingly send a strong signal to Iran about any rash moves.

Firstly, the thought of an Iran-Israel war at this current moment in time for the region is unthinkable. The consequences would be nothing short of catastrophic, with the very real possibility of nuclear action, United States or Russian involvement and thousands of civilian casualties all not out of the realm of possibility.

From an examination of the current news cycle, the weight and culpability of such a doomsday scenario is almost entirely on Iran. Iran's president, the ever-prominent Mahmoud Ahmadinjead, has had his quotes and opinions on Israel repeated and analyzed ad nauseum. Flickering pictures of marching, emotionless Iranian troops have been blasted relentlessly at unsuspecting television and internet users for years now.

But in the finest traditions of polemics, let's take a look at the situation in a different way.

How many wars, invasions, attacks on foreign and occupied territories, border skirmishes, political assassinations and condemnations from the UN has Israel initiated over the last twenty years? Quite a few. Iran? Including the nuclear issue of the past few years, comparatively little. Which nation deserves the reputation as the lunatic state?

Since the ugly mess of the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, which cost the lives of over a million people, Iran has been at peace with its neighbours. Israel meanwhile, for reasons far too labyrinthine, convoluted and numerous to list, has been virtually at a state of war with, at the least, Lebanon, Syria and the Palestinian Territories. This does not count the attack on Iraq's nuclear facilities in 1981, its strike against alleged Syrian nuclear facilities last year, nor its constant threats against Iran. Israel continues to insist on a capital city that is not recognized by the United Nations. It continues to occupy foreign territory claimed in wars fought decades ago such as the Shebaa Farms and the Golaan Heights.

And somehow, thanks to our media conglomerates and their first-rate news services, the debate over this latest round of tensions has been framed in precisely the opposite fashion of what the facts state. Iran, not Israel, is the upstart, the rogue state, the barely predictable firebrand nation with its finger on the trigger. Iran is the defiant, isolated nation thirsty for blood and contemptuous for the West. And if there is war, it will have been Iran forcing Israel's hand to attack it.

Everything being hurled at the public from the top-down media has been based on this fundamentally false premise. Iran and its president have stated numerous times that they have no intention of building offensive or defense nuclear weapons. They have allowed International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors to visit their nuclear sites many times. And frankly, nothing in Iran's history gives any reason to not take them at their word.

On the other hand, Israel has never allowed an inspector at its nuclear sites at Dimona. It has never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It has never confirmed nor denied it has nuclear weapons, though most everyone in the intelligence community and in positions of strategic influence throughout the world acts on the running premise that it does. And finally, unlike every nation that does possess a nuclear arsenal, it has never come right out and stated that its nukes are for defensive purposes only, precisely because they refuse to even admit they have these weapons. This is a thought that should make us all shudder.

The unused word throughout this article has been 'double standard.'

I won't mince words any further. What we have here is a Jewish state with historic ties to the world's only superpower and one of the world's best-funded, best-organized lobbyist operations portrayed as an ally under threat while an Islamic nation with no record of initiating war, two decades of peace with its neighbors and strong bilateral and multilateral ties is made out to be the enemy. One is our ally and one is our enemy and an effort is being made to portray the aggressor as victim. They say, black is white, up is down.

The real tragedy is that Iran finds itself in the unfortunate role of being the latest great evil to threaten the constantly at threat West. Terrorists. Muslims. Immigrants. Communists. Soviets. Fascism. Suffragettes. Blacks. Aboriginal heathens. The list goes on.

When oh when I ask, will this chain of false threats be broken? Does it take a black President with Kenyan and Muslim heritage to ensure that our media and political leaders will stop vilifying 'the other,' regardless of their choice of faith, political beliefs or spiritual beliefs?

=//Turnquest

MoDo Sunday

Have I expressed my undying eternal admiration of the Times' own Irish-Catholic post-feminist rebel Maureen Dowd? Here's a taste of this foxy columnist's incomparable work:

Excerepted from
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/opinion/06dowd.html

An Ideal Husband

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: July 6, 2008

This weekend, we celebrate our great American pastime: messy celebrity divorces.

There’s the Christie Brinkley/Peter Cook fireworks on Long Island and the Madonna/Guy Ritchie/A-Rod Roman candle in New York.

So how do you avoid a relationship where you end up saying, “The man who I was living with, I just didn’t know who he was” — as Brinkley did in court when talking about her husband’s $3,000-a-month Internet porn and swinger site habit? (Not to mention the 18-year-old mistress/assistant.)

Father Pat Connor, a 79-year-old Catholic priest born in Australia and based in Bordentown, N.J., has spent his celibate life — including nine years as a missionary in India — mulling connubial bliss. His decades of marriage counseling led him to distill some “mostly common sense” advice about how to dodge mates who would maul your happiness.

“Hollywood says you can be deeply in love with someone and then your marriage will work,” the twinkly eyed, white-haired priest says. “But you can be deeply in love with someone to whom you cannot be successfully married.”

For 40 years, he has been giving a lecture — “Whom Not to Marry” — to high school seniors, mostly girls because they’re more interested.

“It’s important to do it before they fall seriously in love, because then it will be too late,” he explains. “Infatuation trumps judgment.”

I asked him to summarize his talk:

“Never marry a man who has no friends,” he starts. “This usually means that he will be incapable of the intimacy that marriage demands. I am always amazed at the number of men I have counseled who have no friends. Since, as the Hebrew Scriptures say, ‘Iron shapes iron and friend shapes friend,’ what are his friends like? What do your friends and family members think of him? Sometimes, your friends can’t render an impartial judgment because they are envious that you are beating them in the race to the altar. Envy beclouds judgment.

“Does he use money responsibly? Is he stingy? Most marriages that founder do so because of money — she’s thrifty, he’s on his 10th credit card.

“Steer clear of someone whose life you can run, who never makes demands counter to yours. It’s good to have a doormat in the home, but not if it’s your husband.

“Is he overly attached to his mother and her mythical apron strings? When he wants to make a decision, say, about where you should go on your honeymoon, he doesn’t consult you, he consults his mother. (I’ve known cases where the mother accompanies the couple on their honeymoon!)

“Does he have a sense of humor? That covers a multitude of sins. My mother was once asked how she managed to live harmoniously with three men — my father, brother and me. Her answer, delivered with awesome arrogance, was: ‘You simply operate on the assumption that no man matures after the age of 11.’ My father fell about laughing.

“A therapist friend insists that ‘more marriages are killed by silence than by violence.’ The strong, silent type can be charming but ultimately destructive. That world-class misogynist, Paul of Tarsus, got it right when he said, ‘In all your dealings with one another, speak the truth to one another in love that you may grow up.’

“Don’t marry a problem character thinking you will change him. He’s a heavy drinker, or some other kind of addict, but if he marries a good woman, he’ll settle down. People are the same after marriage as before, only more so.

“Take a good, unsentimental look at his family — you’ll learn a lot about him and his attitude towards women. Kay made a monstrous mistake marrying Michael Corleone! Is there a history of divorce in the family? An atmosphere of racism, sexism or prejudice in his home? Are his goals and deepest beliefs worthy and similar to yours? I remember counseling a pious Catholic woman that it might not be prudent to marry a pious Muslim, whose attitude about women was very different. Love trumped prudence; the annulment process was instigated by her six months later.

“Imagine a religious fundamentalist married to an agnostic. One would have to pray that the fundamentalist doesn’t open the Bible and hit the page in which Abraham is willing to obey God and slit his son’s throat.

“Finally: Does he possess those character traits that add up to a good human being — the willingness to forgive, praise, be courteous? Or is he inclined to be a fibber, to fits of rage, to be a control freak, to be envious of you, to be secretive?

“After I regale a group with this talk, the despairing cry goes up: ‘But you’ve eliminated everyone!’ Life is unfair.”

=//Turnquest

What does a 40-year old single woman really want?

An interesting excerpt from Marry Him! by Lori Gottlieb, accessible here:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/single-marry

Of course we'd be loath to admit it in this day and age, but ask any soul-baring 40-year-old single heterosexual woman what she most longs for in life and she probably won't tell you it's a better career or a smaller waistline or a bigger apartment. Most likely, she'll say what she really wants is a husband – and, by extension, a child.”

=//Turnquest

The Starbucksization of Montreal

This is gonna be a 3-piece, uh, piece written over three days. Being truly a native son of this beloved city, having both been born here and living most of my life here, including all of my formative coming-of-age years, Montreal a fairly personal subject. So prepare for long-winded, full-of-digression prose (including long-winded introductions and amusing anecdotes). But hey, if you read this blog, you're used to all that shit.

Including curt, droll segues.

Anyway.

1st part

This past May, once up-and-coming underground concert venue Black Dot, located on Rue St-Laurent, was shut down by the cops. Police officials and the venue's organizers declared that a fatal mix of complaints, lack of regulation and failure to meet irrelevant safety standards had conspired to bring about the demise of Black Dot.

Here is just one of a hundred stories that have been written in Montreal over the past five years. I chose this one because it strikes specifically at the issues and ideas that are imposing themselves on the city like a straightjacket on a mental patient. Black Dot was representative of a certain kind of lifestyle and subculture that thrives in Montreal. It was a symbol of the city's punk, metal, bohemian and Do-It-Yourself communities. While hardly the only venue for such kinds of music, it was unique in its unpretentious, all-ages-allowed way of business. It's this subculture that is under direct attack.

The closing of Black Dot illustrates the ongoing and time-tested conflict between a city's underground counterculture and its authourity figures. This is a battle that's been going on since the 1960s, when the shit really started. It, inevitably, will continue for the foreseeable future.

You can trace a direct link from the closing of Black Dot to the more abstract but just as relevant issue of gentrification. Black Dot wasn't one of the countless designer, brand-name, big-box and entirely corporate storefronts opening along the Main and other boulevards in the city. Therefore it had to go. The kinds of people who shop and solicit those kinds of establishments (naming names, Second Cup, H&M, Pizza Pizza) don't feel that public transit is something that meshes well with their socio-economic status. They'd rather drive cars.

This brings us to the the massive amounts of costly and mostly futile road construction plugging up the major thoroughfares throughout the island. Sure, blame winter all you want on our third-world, Cambodian countryside quality roads, but last I checked, winter is not a new phenomenon in Montreal. What is new though are the tens of thousands of new people moving to the city, having kids, and yes, adding their automobiles to the roads. The infrastructure we rely on today was meant for a different era with a different size population: the 1960s.

The other obvious side effect of more cars: less gas. Supply and demand decides that prices go up. People pay more. Disposable income goes down. And people are a lot more pissed off than usual. The energy and big oil companies know that we don't have another option. They know that the people will take being sodomized at the pump everyday, and ask for seconds because what are people going to do, stop driving? Yeeeahh.

Oh, global warming too. Another side effect.

Road construction is not the only kind of construction happening around town. All those Ontarians, MBAs, entry-level programmers, career chasers and leased-car, good-credit, white shirt young professionals need a place to live. They can't possibly be expected to take up a modestly-priced flat with hardwood floors and the kind of wonderful charm that a dwelling built in the 1950s has. No, they need condominiums.

All these issues and problems the city is facing offer insight into the deeper and more uniquely Montreal-specific war going on right this minute. What we're seeing is the direct consequence of the failure of the 60s counterculture movement against the forces of urban redevelopment, capitalist plutocracy, gentrification and yuppeism, red tape and bureaucracy, sinister marketing and advertising and the overall rise of the money-fueled culture. These forces have united into a single anomalous movement:

Starbucksization.

It's real, it's happening. And it has the power to kill Montreal. To kill the city we live in and that most of us grew up in.

We as citizens of this city are in the thick of this wave and therefore unable to really grasp the grand picture of what is going on. But make no mistake, we are most certainly in it and it is changing the way we live.

In the coming series of posts, I'll talk about Griffintown and its impending razing and destruction, the disgraceful roads, hospitals, police services and xenophobic/ethnically fractured culture that plague Montreal. I'll try and offer explanations, or at least some of the root causes of all the wack things around town, and offer two opposing visions for the city in say, ten years.

Stay tuned, fookpoppers.

=//Turnquest

Excerpt from the Economist

The Economist ran a good story briefly bioing (newword) all the various bigshots in President-Elect Obama's master campaign. The key figures seem to be a Mr. David Axelrod, strategist and Mr. David Plouffe, campaign manager who have overseen a stunning victory over the practically-anointed Mrs. Clinton, as well as the masterminding of a movement that rose from nothing and has become quite literally, the mainstream in every walk of American life. Anyway, concerning that movement, I found this closing paragraph particularly insightful and thought-provoking:

The ambition of Mr Obama's team is exciting, but in office it could be dangerous. In 1993 the clever Clintons tripped up very quickly. What if Congress doesn't care for the finely-tuned policies of Mr Obama's top-notch economists? Or if Mr Obama finds he can't pull out of Iraq as planned? Or if Americans tire of his charisma and he stops being able to attract adoring crowds tens of thousands strong? The lynchpin of his campaign has been a faith, almost messianic, in his personal excellence. If that fades, then the whole operation could collapse in frustration and disillusionment.

That is perhaps the best question the media's offered since it crowned Obama the President-Elect. What happens when this wave of good will and national adoration for Mr. Obama breaks on the shores of a country facing global scorn, irrelevance, economic and military castration and climate change?

Read the whole article here:
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11551686

=//Turnquest

Pale Blue Eyes

It's been a while, but a man's got to work.
P.S. The Velvet Underground will change your life.

***

Sometimes I feel so happy,
Sometimes I feel so sad.
Sometimes I feel so happy,
But mostly you just make me mad.
Baby, you just make me mad.
Linger on, your pale blue eyes.
Linger on, your pale blue eyes.

Thought of you as my mountain top,
Thought of you as my peak.
Thought of you as everything,
I've had but couldn't keep.
I've had but couldn't keep.
Linger on, your pale blue eyes.
Linger on, your pale blue eyes.

If I could make the world as pure and strange as what I see,
I'd put you in the mirror,
I put in front of me.
I put in front of me.
Linger on, your pale blue eyes.
Linger on, your pale blue eyes.

Skip a life completely.
Stuff it in a cup.
She said, Money is like us in time,
It lies, but can't stand up.
Down for you is up."
Linger on, your pale blue eyes.
Linger on, your pale blue eyes.

It was good what we did yesterday.
And I'd do it once again.
The fact that you are married,
Only proves, you're my best friend.
But it's truly, truly a sin.
Linger on, your pale blue eyes.
Linger on, your pale blue eyes.

=//Turnquest