POTUS’s victory speech was the best he has ever delivered IMHO. Two things stand out for me. Both were near the end. They were, “Be nice” and “Let’s Get to Work.”
The gist of “be nice” has two variants. One is done in the way one places the silverware precisely on the place setting. The other is “nice to the hilt.” Id est, be ever so nice until you get the ‘other’ precisely and inescapably in the line of delivery of the dagger. The former is, at best, precursor to the latter and always poor cultural conditioning. Being ‘nice’ to the loser is an insipid bit of propriety. It is perilous silliness non pareil.
Obama’s speech remarking as to the wonderful qualities of Romney and his family invites the knock at the door that reveals not the policeman come to warn you a serial killer is about but the serial killer himself whom you are too embarassed to confront directly so you invite him in for a drink. He accepts and you cannot help but think that when he finishes that drink he is going to slaughter your entire family. So, “just how long?” you ask the God of Etiquette, “must I be nice?”
Why not be nice to the voters, Dear POTUS, and simply say, “I think we have learned a lot from this political battle. The most important thing I learned came suddenly in the first debate. I learned I had been conditioned to be nice all my life. And there I was in a world wide arena in a battle to the death. I was being nice and he was shifting for a position to slit my throat in the approved Mormon ritual blood oath manner. I have studied that moment of realization at length and I have come to the conclusion that Mitt Romney is a psychopath, without remorse, without guilt, without conscience, incapable of compassion, incapable of fairness, determined to be deadly. And I am telling you now, dear voter, we have escaped death by a hair and we have come too close to losing all that we hold dear.”
Had the election gone the other way we would not have noticed immediately that the dagger had pierced the skin but with each denuding of a layer of our rights we would grok a little more that the aim of the psychopath’s dagger was to plunge to the hilt leaving us not a fig leaf to cover the core of our legitimate propriety. And then demand we pay for our own burial.
I am really not being so hyperbolic here. Cults are or become superlatively plotted. Romney’s bunch is historically more dangerous than Scientology (Dianetics). The plotting is on a more visceral, animal cunning, level and perpetrated by a far less educated bunch.
In the year prior to the Mountain Meadows Massacre, Brigham Young executed an incomparable reign of terror in Deseret (Utah)which by the way was part of Mexico when the Mormons settled there. Young’s gestapo hunted down and slit the throats of any Mormons who decided to opt out, especially those who tried to leave Utah. The year following the massacre the Mormons, like overcrowded rats were so crazed they were anxious to attack the US military that was being sent to straighten things out.
The treatment of women and the thorough conditioning, compare the number of GOP women voting for Romney, had to be a major reason for the women of my novel, Nine Elevens to develop as strong minded capable, women of reason in each of the settings spanning 1100 plus years. They taught me a thing or two and I am so pleased with them.
Let’s get to work.
I have probably written as much relative to the 2012 election of BH Obama as I wrote relative to the 2008 election of the president.
Since the election of 2008 I have criticised the president a great deal. Those criticisms are not forgotten. It is now time to freshen them and try to ensure they are considered.
In 2008 I was just getting to know the president. The unfavorable things about his personality were at that time just guesses.
By 2012 I know far more and some of my guesses became frighteningly real.
But, it is well worth taking a breath and appreciating the difference between a psychopath and a person of tremendous executive capability who is, I trust, willing to learn.
Some books helped me to understand some things.
If the demagogues waving the “he ain’t amurrican” flags had read [not likely] Janny Scott’s A Singular Woman they would have learned enough about Obama and his heritage to know that challenging his birth rights, loyalties, and capabilities were consummately silly, tawdry, and unnecessary and would ultimately fail and turn to rotten eggs in their faces. The book taught me a lot. Having spent some time in Indonesia myself I understood Obama’s mama and thus Obama himself a lot better.
Recently I have been reading Ron Suskind’s Confidence Men. The president had his hands full at first not knowing and then trying to resolve the problems he had with some bad choices in selecting his administration. He was fortunate that not quite all of his choices were men. Suskind get’s down to detail born of incredibly patient and painstaking research in illustrating how much those choices had to affect his growth as our national CEO.
Michael Lewis’s description of Obama’s decision making processes are significant and ‘right on’, a term that certainly came along before Lewis’s time and Obama’s too. But, I think that term is the correct one.
Much of what Obama needs to do he already understands and must have on his calendar. He has learned a lot. He was serious when he said, “Let’s get to work.”
I’m ready. Are You? I am sharpening my criticisms on my side and I hope the president is evolving action responses that make an old man look like a second childhood amateur.
