A Semi-Charmed Kinda Life>>

Back in high school, I knew a poser. This poser was handsome, charismatic, and utterly fake. He wasn’t a jock, but a competitor at what I do online. Despite his talentlessness, he was christened with endless honors. His pictorial style was a dime a dozen, but it won him aplomb. He had a perfect white smile and goofy laugh that I just knew was a put-on. He even went so far as to mystify his work in order to pick up chicks, not unlike that kid in American Beauty. He wasn’t really “moved” by that videotaped bag in the breeze.

Despite being adored by girls, favorited by teachers, and liked by everyone, he had my deepest contempt in ways that a Christian should not keep. I felt like an Ayn Rand protagonist looking in from outside as my agreeable professional alter ego feasted by the player’s hearth. Everybody has known a poser, and nothing is more painful than watching them rocket to the top.

Every year, a gaggle of like-minded elitists convene to announce who gets a star on their project...or a Nobel. These are the same people who ascribe sanctity to a “mother earth,” tell you that spanking your kids is child abuse, and suggest that each student should get a star for attendance and effort. See a correlation? I’m glad we could make President Obama feel better about himself, walking away limp and crestfallen from Copenhagen in Olympic failure.

A prize based on potential would be better spent on the groundbreaking potential AIDS vaccine and the researchers spearheading the effort. That would bring lasting stability to certain parts of Africa racked and obliterated by AIDS. As far as tangibles, why not simply award the US Soldier or the industrial architects of Europe’s missile defense shield? No. Screw that action. This goes to something deeper. Crats, and for that matter Eurosocialists, are so desperate for their collectivist utopia that they need to crown it on the world stage. Enter Obama, stage left.

Now I don’t want to evoke this, and I fear the repercussions of it. So know that I’m venturing into uncharted territory. You see, I have heard a very small minority conservatives aver that Obama was head of the Harvard Law Review on account of his blackness, his presence evidencing the need for a shoe-in token minority. I have heard Ann Coulter go so far as to state the best accomplishment and blessing of Barack Obama’s career has been his being born black. I even dismissed Rush Limbaugh’s hypothesis that Colin Powell endorsed candidate Obama because he was black (when everyone knows it was because Powell voted for Jimmy Carter, JFK, LBJ, is pro-choice, pro-gun control, pro-affirmative action, and shrugs of government growth as “inevitable.”) While I knew that Obama would get several plus points, red carpets rolled, and rose petals strewn in his path as part of his charmed life as the idyllic, black, Liberal golden boy, I never thought that his “semi-charmed life” would draw such fawning in the late innings. I seriously thought that the MSM drum circle would have died down by now. And I even avoided the racial favoritism insinuations, as they tend to surrender our appearance to racial bomb throwers like Janeanne Garafalo who suggest we resent his blackness with no other policy root. No we don’t. But some resent the unending and unearned privileges it confers. While I have slowly come to believe that he does in fact get leg-ups on the behalf of his polychromatic image, I think there are more reasons to it. In the mind of the democratic socialists of Europe who granted the award in an obvious attempt to re-colonize America through steering our dialog, Obama represents a cosmopolite citizen of the world who does not believe in American Exceptionalism, who represents the sort of equality that must be forced if it does not emerge naturally.  I now believe it’s his identity and personal narrative, of which his race is only a visual component. But it is a factor.

So now the Nobel Prize is Obama's and Arafat’s, not Ghandi’s. Dolce et decorum est? Not hardly. Obama risks looking like Louis XVI, heaped in honors so increasingly vague and meaningless, while his populous is roasting their bootstraps for broth. Could it be that not only the domestic liberals seek to make his administration a cakewalk on account of what he represents, but that European bakeries are toiling ‘round the clock to the same end?

No, I’m not going to say “he got there because he’s a black guy and for no other reason,” as the pastiche of affirmative action and shared accomplishment in the public schools, now buttressing a global New Deal figurehead,  is all simply too much for me right now. More ironic still is that the term “cakewalk” is derived from a 19th century slave dance. But the tongue-in-cheek antacid that neutralizes the word origin is that the president’s ancestors never practiced a plantation dance, as his African line never directly experienced slavery. That said, Obama himself had a whiter upbringing than I ever got. He seems to have learned his race as a credo, later on during his intellectually formative years—probably the worst time to do so.

POSER!!!

Ok…I am tired of explaining my initial skepticism over race being a factor in Obama’s favor, and then my gradual switch to admitting it plays a sizable role. I’ve just joined a rank of more vociferous opinioneers who are less abashed about saying what most conservatives secretly pine to express. I don’t know quite yet how to take the transition… I wanna talk about something else.

In an unrelated side note, I have considered purchasing gold as a stable asset. I have trepidation, as a physical product could fall prey to home burglary without FDIC backing. And in some small iota I get the vibe I’m selling my country out by contributing to the dollar’s demise. Then again, DC is not looking out for me, so why should I return the favor? You see, part of me thinks the dollar, which reads IN GOD WE TRUST, may represent something more cherished than our nation’s capital alone, although it may be born there. It’s the virtue of our name, the solidarity of our pledge, and the fact that such dollars, with their holy epitaph, risk being printed on Quilted Charmin. Maybe God doesn’t belong on that federal note anymore. Maybe the Atheists should remove it, and then chase God with their firefly nets elsewhere.

Personal update: as of late, I’ve been drinking too much coffee, drawing too many cartoons, staying up too late, and not sleeping properly. I cuss too much and don’t pray enough. I eat too little and don’t run enough. My unclear income and visual hobbies have ineluctably steered me into the life of an itinerant monk. It may be a blessing in disguise, as it focuses my energy on what I love. I guess I am drawing a weak parallel between myself and a newer beautiful poser on yet a higher echelon still, hoping for an ugly fall to slake my envy. I was never anyone’s golden boy, and few of us are. Is it just plain jealousy that he gets a Nobel Prize and I get a Past Due on my car insurance? Democrats live in constant envy of their betters; why can’t I? At any rate, I am dang sure that there are plenty of grownups who would like to stuff me in a locker or shank me with an atomic wedgie like freshman year. Optimistically, I have beheld a few scattered sunbeams here and there, albethey tenuous ones. God has His way and I have to trust that. And so should you.

But overall, I think I’ve slid into becoming more “tin foil hat” in the past year.  Yet maybe gold foil would kill two birds with one stone. After all, according to German physicist Hans Geiger, gold foil does deflect alpha particles. I’ll look into it. >>

Music courtesy of Thievery Corporation and Third Eye Blind.