Against a sea of troubles

Streams of consciousness...

It's from Hamlet's soliloquy, but you already knew that. The Bard of Avon certainly possessed a fine poetic gift. A "sea of troubles." No one could have topped Shakespeare's metaphor for a euphonious and evocative image of overwhelming adversity.

In his soliloquy, which was actually an early form of blogging when you think about it, the Prince was trying to figure out whether living was really worth all the trouble. He laid great weight on the fear of death, and the uncertainties of the "afterlife," if any, suggesting that the decision to live, and to act, was more a matter of compulsion than desire. Anyway, Hamlet was paralyzed by indecision, by the gnawing sense that action was futile in any case, an attitude presaging other great literary ditherers such as Dostoevsky's anti-hero in "Notes from the Underground" and Camus's Meursault in "L'Etranger."

Politicians aren't like that. They are congenital can-do types, which is good, because whoever becomes the next leader of this country will certainly encounter a sea of troubles. I suspect that American life will need a new paradigm in order to thrive, and for that I think Barack Obama is probably the best situated candidate in terms of his age, outlook and sense of the moment. Roger Cohen wrote another smart column yesterday in the New York Times about Obama's mastery of the Internet style of campaigning. Hillary Clinton is mired in older forms of connectivity, which is why she found herself outflanked by Obama in the early part of the primary season. By the time she realized what had happened to her, she had spent all the money she thought she was going to need to lock up the nomination and was playing catch-up. She was banking on her "inevitability," but in the computer age these images can change very quickly. Her habit of saying stupid and erroneous things (such as lying about her accomplishments) which can be easily refuted by Googling and YouTubing set her up for failure. Her gaffes go viral and her composite image takes another pounding. She's never figured that one out. Slowly but surely, she has Photoshopped herself into a grasping, desperate, unhinged harridan whom the hip crowd want nothing to do with. She's the first casualty of the new on-line style of campaigning.

In many forms of game-playing, such as politics, the person who knows the applicable rules better often wins, and the way you raise money nowadays is by small donations solicited through the Internet. I read that Obama now has 1.2 million individual donors, making small, repetitive donations. That's an astounding number. Money, that mother's milk of politics, is never going to be a problem for Barry, and it acts as a counterweight to lobbyist money. McCain and Clinton struggle along with the old school style of fund raisers and high-end cocktail parties, where they rub elbows with all the rich people they've met in their years of whoring out their souls. I have no doubt Obama has done much of the same thing, but he's allowed also this lofty superiority because of his direct connection with common folk. Very smart in these class-riven times.

If McCain is elected, I think the USA will go into a devolutionary phase. It will be disastrous. McCain is one of those guys who was programmed early to think of himself as a great leader with a great mission, but he's actually just a dumb old fart with no ideas who will not be able to implement any changes in the American way of life. He can't; he's not smart enough, flexible enough, informed enough. I'm surprised that people aren't more horrified by his ignorance about sectarian divides in Islam, for example, particularly when he's so casual about threatening to bomb Iran. When he claimed that Sunni al-Qaeda traveled to Shiite Iran for training and support, the press treated it as a "slip-up." If he had been talking about the American Civil War and had said that Robert E. Lee frequently traveled to Washington to consult with Abrahama Lincoln about men and materiel, we would have realized that McCain was a mouth-breathing idiot. His mistake was comparable, yet his error was attributed to some age-related malady like a transient ischemic attack or the stress of travel. Didn't I just see this movie?

McCain skims along the surface of issues and takes mildly "contrarian" positions (compared to Republican orthdoxy) which have earned him a "maverick" reputation without substance. Fundamentally, he thinks of the United States as on a fixed course determined by its World War II mission. His ideas are about 63 years out of date, in other words. If the U.S. continues to bankrupt itself by playing its Globo-Cop role, it's over. What Chalmers Johnson calls "Nemesis," our propensity for maintaining an empire without the means to do it, will finish us off. I doubt, however, that most people see that. If they had, we would not just have had eight years of George W. Bush.