A cult is born: they believe in him
I found this video through a link at Pajamas Media, where it was dubbed “the creepiest Obama tribute video ever.”
If that’s hyperbole and there’s a creepier one, I hope I never see it. This one is bad enough. It borders on the truly frightening: the rhythmic chant, the glow in the eyes, the platitudes, the utter absence of anything that could be described as thought.
And if you think that’s bad, try reading some of the comments from viewers and Obama supporters underneath and to the right. The level of discourse is pretty much on the order of a line from the video, “I believe in Obama because he believes in us.”
Obama didn’t make this video, but his approach to the campaign not only encourages but relies on this sort of cult worship. And not only does he seem unashamed of that fact, he appears to share his followers’ (worshippers’?) high opinion of his own powers.
The video somehow put me in mind of the song, “I Believe In You,” from the 1962 musical “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.” Impish Broadway actor Bobby Morse sang that inspirational tribute (“You have the cool, clear eyes of a seeker of wisdom and truth/Yet with that upturned chin and the grin of impetuous youth/Oh I believe in you….”) to—himself, all the while gazing enraptured at his own (imaginary) reflection in the men’s room mirror.
And thanks to the magic of You Tube, here he is (the song starts about 30 seconds into the clip. And please watch the Obama video first):
Ah, the massed chants in the background. The glazed eyes. The worship. The slickness. The slowly gathering masses.
When’s the last time we saw this kind of popular delusion take hold of crowds?
Neo, thank you for this post.
You are the sun and the moon and the future of hope and change in the blogosphere that we crave!
NEO! NEO! NEO! NEO! NEO! NEO! NEO! NEO! NEO! NEO! NEO! NEO! NEO! NEO! NEO! NEO! NEO! NEO!
Speaking of creepy videos (not to mention “when was the last time”, etc.), I don’t think it’s over the top to bring up this one.
I’m with “Neo” on this: the O-ba-ma! worshipers give me the creeps. His willingness to ride that wave of worship likewise gives me the creeps. I consider it a matter of civic duty to make sure that the video is also seen by others likely to have the creeps; as many as possible.
Like HRC’s sleeping child and telephone ad, I suspect this is another bit of self-centered hubris that could damage Obama significantly if team McCain have the courage to move it into the right media markets. There are a great many places in this country where the sort of people who appear in this video are thoroughly despised, and their self identification with O-ba-ma! is a negative for him, not a positive.
Wow. And for a minute I thought it was going to be a RickRoll.
All it needed was Jimmy Kimmel, Matt Damon, and Ben Affleck.
Sally, spot on.
Is this our future? To live among mind numbed perpetual adolescents? This isn’t just creepy. Its horrific in its implications.
Sometime after Labor Day, these kids will wake up with a terrible hangover and realize how badly they’ve been suckered. They’ll see this video and be overcome with self loathing and shame. They’ll see the revolting stupidity, the utter inanity, and then they’ll be pissed.
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I love the comments to the video.
Dannie says: To improve a country, and improve the lives of its citizens the best leader you can choose, is one that can inspire. One that can speak to the hearts of people and awaken the “better angels of ourselves” (in the words of Barack Obama. This way, you change a country from the inside out, and the rest will follow. Barack Obama has proven not only to be a better organiser of people and manager of money (1 million donors, consistent message – read his books and you’ll know this) vs Hillary (firing staff, changing tactics, running out of campagn money) but a visionary leader, speaking from the heart. If I was an American, the choice of vote would be an easy one for me.
I always suspected and believed that Democrats the world over wanted someone to make them better than they themselves could be. That hidden white guilt about colonial and imperial history combined with race guilt over African slaves and Native Indians would be quite debilitating without these opiates for the masses.
They want to become better people, but they just can’t do it, you see, without an organization. They want to belong. Which is the same reason why Islam is growing so fast; Islam provides you with a iron core identity of who you are and where you and your fellows are going. Tomorrow is the promised land.
I fought in Afghanistan and felt betrayed when our government waged a new war using the precious resources needed to win the first war.
I felt betrayed when the management used up precious resources for their new projects, instead of on what I wanted. Indeed, I felt betrayed when the sun rose in the East, instead of the North where I wanted it to rise.
In the end, these folks are spoiled children. They feel betrayed because their parents didn’t give them the toys they wanted.
What’s fracking hilarious is that these people who once bought into the Democrat corruption machine called the Clinton years, are now discarding the Clintons and buying into Obama, all the while believing that this is something new they are doing. No, it is not new. Not anymore new than the battered wife leaving her husband and getting hooked up with another wife beater.
Clinton the first black President was good enough for them then, but it ain’t good enough for them now.
This is how tools behave. They keep doing the same thing because that is all they were ever designed to do.
i am 12 and not old enough to vote, but i saw him speak last november in harlem. i cant believe it, im getting so teary-eyed. it was the most amazing day of my life. he just gets it. i am from a very political family… my dad worked for president clinton, my moms company did some of obama’s ads. he is like a message from god.
I guess we know now what happens when a nation adopts Atheism as its national religion. These Democrats, which is what they are based upon their own admissions, keep getting manipulated, bought, and sold like slaves. From one political family to another. It would be ridiculous if lives and national destinies didn’t depend upon these people making wise decisions.
At this rate, the next generation of Iraqis will be tougher, wiser, and more virtuous than Americans. Which will be very ironic.
MAMAJ Says: This reminds me of the intentions of my generation, somehow lost and forgotten until now. May the new generation bring peace and love to the world, going forth with the right leader – instead of having to march against the wrong leader.
These folks are not against leadership or being lead or being told what to do or even made to do what they are told to do. They are just rather particular about who will be their masters. They are not independent, they are not unbiased, and they certainly aren’t skeptics.
Our young people have been sent into a war that has become a fiasco, and if anyone objects, they are labeled “unpatriotic.” Our soldiers have been used as cheap labor in a war based on lies. It’s outrageous, and criminal. They can’t respond to this with any degree of legitimacy, so they attack.
There are two aspects to people like this. The aspect concerning their resistance to propaganda, which is about nill if you think about it. Secondly, the aspect concerning their ability to conduct propaganda on targets of their choosing.
The more weak you are in the former, the more you become simply a tool. But even if you could achieve the ability to do propaganda effectively, it still does not mean you have built up any resistance to it. For one thing, people repeating propaganda lines are doing propaganda, but they didn’t necessarily come up with those lines themselves. Because creating propaganda lines and thoughts require that you be resistant to propagand and thus know it for what it is.
So when people repeat the propaganda line about young people sent as cannon fodder into a fiasco of a war, they are just repeating what they have been told and what they heard. They are inconsequential to the top level planners and strategists. But they sure as heck are an annoyance and obstacle at the bottom layers where we reside.
Near the end, a woman says:
“He’s almost like a revival for a lot of peoples’ souls.”
Yeech.
“I want to live in a world without fear.”
Good luck with that. You might consider being thankful for fear. It enables you to identify love.
“Basically I just want the war to end.”
Diverting: the purpose/necessity of the WOT is difficult to effectively and concisely communicate.
IMO, defining the purpose/necessity of the WOT(or lack of same) will determine the November elections.
I have not been able to communicate the purpose/necessity well and concisely. However, after years of effort, I think this is pretty good:
The war will end when Jihadi Culture is resoundingly discredited amongst Muslims. Until then, Jihadis will continuously try to kill enough of us to scare the rest of us into submission.
If the Obama video lady (who just wants the war to end) knows of a better way to resoundingly discredit Jihadi Culture (other than democracy and rule of Constitutional law), then she would help us all by sharing it.
That video is creepy. Elmer Gantry. My sensiblity is the same as the commenter who said it is an anti-Obama video. Maybe McCain should purchase air time for it. Run it continuously on television: over and over and over. Such a stunt might do Obama in.
I want to add a consideration here that people should give some thought to. We saw in the American Civil War what happens when there are divided loyalties. General Lee graduated from West Point, but in the end he felt more loyal to his own state than to the Union. It did not invalidate his loyalties, it simply conflicted them. One was given more priority than the other, you may say.
You see this all the time around your life. Where groups or families are working at cross purposes to each other when they should be pulling together for a common cause. The situation becomes dysfunctional when one individual wants A, but another individual wants B, and they both have to work together. Unfortunately A and B are mutually exclusive, so teamwork breaks down and problems now occur. If an individual prizes what he wants or what he is loyal to, above the greater loyalty to a higher purpose that connects the team together, then you will get a fragmenting of the team into disparate and disharmonious parts. Where every individual is out for themselves and in direct competition with other family members or team members.
Whether it is money or the love of a parent or status or whatever. The ultimate bond that connects a team or a family, things such as love or loyalty to a greater purpose, are dissolved once individuals are out for themselves or place a higher priority on what they want instead of what is good for the group.
I observe this in Kerry’s convention and the Obama video. These people say that this will be a good change and thing for America, but I have noticed that they only frame this “change” as what would benefit themselves. They are the ones that now feel pride in America. As if the state of America is based upon their personal happiness. They say “we are Americans”, as if by improving themselves, it automatically improves America. As if believing in Obama is a good thing for them, thus it must be a good thing for America.
Their loyalty does not go to America as a first priority. Their loyalty goes to themselves first and Obama second. America is not even a distant third. They say they want to feel appreciated again, for their nation to be respected again. But when have they ever cared for their “nation”, full of people they have never met? Iraq is full of people they also have never met, and they don’t give a damn for those people either. So why would these Obama supporters give a damn what the rest of the world thinks of an America full of strangers? The simplest explanation is that they care because whatever the world thinks of America, is also what the world thinks of them. And that matters, quite a lot actually, to them.
Mass rallies and stoking up the emotion of the mob are time honored and timeless traditions of artistry and political manipulation that humanity has engaged in for quite awhile now. Unlike what Democrats or Obama supporters believe, there is nothing new under the sun concerning Obama’s words or actions.
In the end, Democrats when they go to their nominee’s convention, shout the name of the nominee, for their loyalties are more to the person called Kerry or Obama than to America as a whole. At the Republican convention in 2004, I distinctly remembered that the chant was U S A, not B U S H.
On such small differences do empires fall and nations break apart.
Thanks for posting this and helping peel back the Obama veneer. The worst that can happen is that all his supporters are seeing their therapists in November. A lot worse can happen if he’s elected.
It reminded me of Triumph des Willens. A pacifist version perhaps, but primitive, idolatrous and fascistic.
Maybe that anti-Christian bumper sticker so favored by Progressives is correct after all… “Fascism will come to America wrapped in the flag and bearing a cross”, except the flag will be rainbow and the cross will be Liberation Theology…
Oh ye of little faith, the cult was born some time ago.
You take dash of non accomplishment, a pinch of needing others to define you who you are, and a cup full of envy for those who live without such issues. You get an Obamist.
The NYT had a story today about free lunch programs for the poor in San Francisco (where else?) that were not being used. The poor kids didn’t want to be uncool. Had my mother ever caught me making fun of someone for being poor, I would have been sent to school every day with a half of a baloney sandwich on dry bread. The SF school board plans instead to fix the system for a million or so. I think this illustrates how Obamaites are nurtured.
Wow, the Obama vid is straight out of the bowels of the Nuremberg arena. Wooo
I left this comment there
Vince P Says:
on March 1st, 2008 at 5:38 pm
I know the Jihadis are HOPING Obama wins. Once we lay off the pressure on them, they’re be back .. trying to establish their Khalifah. Once that happens, the world will CHANGE. Wake up fools! You think your great-grandparents were singing songs about Hope and Change during the Great Depression as Hilter and Japan loomed ominiously from overseas? The evil of Jihad is spreading around the world.. we either stand firm now or face an impossible situation later.
I couldn’t resist.. I posted this one too:
Beatrice claims Obama is fresh air. That’s a laugh. A Democratic Party politican from Cook County/Chicago, who is deeply involved with the usual corruption , who refuses to talk in specifics, who talks only in emotional platitudues, who is the most Left-wing voter in the Senate is fresh air?
Where are you from? Beijing? Well your white guilt speaks otherwise.
What’s this nonsense about “there is a segment of America that would like to be joined together whatever our racial makeup is?” The only reason you like him is because he’s black… a start contradiction. Anyway you have described me.. I dont care what his ethnic background is..
He’s a demagoge of the first order, and fools like you are lapping it up.
You cannot escape the world. I know that’s what is behind your desperatation, but you can’t escape from it. Voting for the empty suit with ties to a corrupt Syrian (Tony Rezko), who has Nation of Islam members working on his staff, who has volunteers that adore the murderer Che is not hope or change.
Hope and change should NOTHING to do with electing the President. There will never be top-down change in this country unless it’s a dictatorship.
If you want change.. then start where you live. if everyone does that , then you wont need some charlaton to tell you that he’s “Change”.
The Constitution was designed to make the Federal Government be as ineffectient and incapible of radical changes in the population as possible.
His whole campaign is designed to take advantage of your emotions and stupidity.
I’m watching Puppet Masters right now. Oddly enough, that invasion began slowly in Iowa.
B Hussein Obama is the most dangerous con man to come along since Hitler. Maybe he’s one of the boys from Brazil.
“Ask Europe for advise and do the opposite”.
I don`t know who said it, but this quote seems fitting, when i assume, that 90% of all european people would vote for Obama.
Obama is a populist who gives his audience the feeling, that he could bring heaven to earth. But i have no doubt, that such an experiment would fail like similar attempts in the past.
Obamania is more a compensation for religious believes than a serious political ralley. No wonder that reason didn`t play an important role in this movement. They demand salvation and not a debate about the possibilities and limits of politics in a complex world.
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Holy crap, the man and his devotees begin to remind me of something out of a Steven King novel. Who will stand up as the anti-Obama?
Here’s another Obama video very nearly as creepy.
This one is, essentially, an Obama speech set to music. It’s moving, uplifting, and empty.
Sally is spot-on with the “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” clip from Cabaret.
Ack, it looks like my link didn’t take; here it is again:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHEO_fG3mm4
Normal politics is about rational choice. When it becomes soul-searching quasi-religion, we get totalitarism, like communism of fascism.
“we are building a religion”
I’ve been reading Eric Hoffer’s seminal book _The True Believer_, and it’s downright scary how well it describes the Obamites. I’m normally wary of drawing historical parallels, but we have a mass movement with a charismatic leader arising at a time of economic uncertainty and global instability… not a good combination.
The only thing that keeps me from total panic is my certainty that the American people are a lot smarter and tougher than their “leaders” give them credit for being.
Obama appears to have much in common with Hitler. The brown shirts of his followers are already attacking those in the so called democratic party who would not kowtow to Obama’s program of ultra-leftist way.
We are seeing that Hitler can happen here and I await with trepidation the Obama salute.
While watching the comment thread on the latest Obama video, the following came to mind:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrHsLv3SJ8s
Next thing you know, we’ll see a video where his plane circles above an adoring crowd, then it lands and the great leader emerges to give a speech.
Then they’ll call the video “The Triumph of Hope.”
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Barack Hussein Obama= Thulsa Doom
Danie said that Obama said “… the better angels of ourselves”.
I liked it better when Lincoln said it at the end of his first inaugural address, “… The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
There is nothing origi\nal about Senator Obama. He is riding a wave of ignorance.
It can be that to save the republic, US have to curb democracy – by rising minimal age of voters, for example, or reserving voting rights only for taxpayers and excluding those on government dole.
Creepy. Really creepy. How can these people not see it? I voted for Bush, I think he is a good man, but for Chrisake…my eyes don’t glaze over, I don’t drool and I don’t chant.
It appears that we, once again, need to have the “Carter” experience. However this time, rather than granting the Islamists the environment to grow, we are a nation under attack by them. The emptiness of “just wanting the war to end” is mind boggling. Obama and the Democrat party has the way to end TWOT – simply submit. These kids are about to be taught a horrific lesson.
or reserving voting rights only for taxpayers and excluding those on government dole.
I proposed exactly that at Bookworm Room.
I agree with Neo-Neocon that this video is creepy and it’s also scary too. What’s missing, for now, is an extended arm salute and words like “Sieg Heil Obama” because that’ll be coming next. The video is portraying Obama as the Messiah and his wife is portraying him as the person who’ll save our souls and make us all better!
This is getting nuts. It’s another example of how it could happen here!
I found the video creepy, too. But I think people are over-reacting with the pre-Nazi frenzy analogies. If he is elected, I doubt the 100 days of grace will be over before people start awakening from the dream and demanding actions and deeds, not words and promises of Shangri-La. Before long, he will be cut down to measure and then we will know what he is really made of.
Americans have fallen in love with Obama and display the usual symptoms of such an emotional state. It’s what Stendhal called “crystallization”, the process in which an ordinary new love has become a luminous figure, her rather mediocre charms encrusted with what seem like diamonds of divine beauty:
“In the salt mines, nearing the end of the winter season, the miners will throw a leafless wintry bough into one of the abandoned workings. Two or three months later, through the effects of the waters saturated with salt which soak the bough and then let it dry as they recede, the miners find it covered with a shining deposit of crystals. The tiniest twigs no bigger than a tom-tit’s claw are encrusted with an infinity of little crystals scintillating and dazzling. The original little bough is no longer recognizable; it has become a child’s plaything very pretty to see. When the sun is shining and the air is perfectly dry the miners of Hallein seize the opportunity of offering these diamond-studded boughs to travellers preparing to go down to the mine.”
“Ah, the massed chants in the background. The glazed eyes. The worship. The slickness. The slowly gathering masses.
When’s the last time we saw this kind of popular delusion take hold of crowds?”
Nuremberg 1934,according to my grandfather (he wasn’t in attendance,he was camping near by,and went over to tell them to keep the noise down,but you get the gist of my point…)
I would suggest for a little tongue in cheek amusement,someone set an Obama campaign video to the music of ‘Laibach’ preferably the “Geburt einer Nation” track (Birth of a nation)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YE_j0xIsJA
For those of you not in the know,Laibach:
“Laibach’s method is extremely simple, effective and horribly open to misinterpretation. First of all, they absorb the mannerisms of the enemy, adopting all the seductive trappings and symbols of state power, and then they exaggerate everything to the edge of parody… Next they turn their focus to highly charged issues – the West’s fear of immigrants from Eastern Europe, the power games of the EU, the analogies between Western democracy and totalitarianism. [Wolfson, 2003]”
Sit back and enjoy the faux outrage.
O
Bah
Ma
O Bah Ma, O Bah Ma…
Il
Duh
Che
Il Duce, Il Duce…
I suggest anyone thinking of sitting out the election read this article at:
Asia Times Online Obama’s women reveal his secret
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/JB26Aa01.html
Sieg Heil!!
This has been said elsewhere before, but I am trying to get someone to sneak in the Who song “I’m a Sensation” from Tommy at the next Obama rally and see if anybody gets it 🙂
I overwhelm as I approach you
Make your lungs hold breath inside!
Lovers break caresses for me
Love enhanced when Ive gone by.
Youll feel me coming,
A new vibration
from afar youll see me
Im a sensation.
They worship me and all I touch
Hazy eyed they catch my glance,
Pleasant shudders shake their senses
My warm momentum throws their stance.
Etc.
Hopefully by the end of the campaign, people will identify more with “We’re Not Gonna Take It”
The interest part was how they would nod their heads in synch with Obama. It’s like they are praying.
O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma! Zeig Heil! Zeig Heil! One country, one party, one fueher!
These obamaniacs are scary. His wife is saying that the federal government and specifically the president of the United States has to produce a “fundamentally different kind of leadership,” one that challenges people to be different, and better to one another. And that, she said to critics who say it is not his time, cannot wait.” This is scary stuff. Who does she think Obama is – Jesus? Is he a god, a prophet, a man of such moral values that he tops all the American people? Seriously, this is moral elitism and snobism unprecedented – or more precisely, this girl is stupidly arrogant and cannot hide it. Every American should be very afraid of anyone who believes in his absolute moral superiority and that he has to be put in the position of awesome power over hundreds of millions of people. If you think Obama will limit himself to lecturing us to become better, you are very mistaken. The man will use government powers – the use or the threat of use of violence against those who are not good enough for him, let alone openly disagree with him. Is liberal fascism coming to America? It may well be so.
As Englishmen used to say in British colonies, Obama “went native”, betraying rationalism of Western civilization in seeking dynamism, voluntarism and raw emotion of primitives as substitutes for this heritage. This motive was a powerful impulse behind German national romanticism, Nietsche teaching and many decadent movements in European culture, culminating in Nazi rising to power. I see in Obama cultists the same dynamics. It has its appeal for teenagers and never maturing adults permanently blocked at this stage of personality development.
in other news
Well, it might actually be on topic. Obama is the backlash to 8 years of the current administration. You reap what you sow.
Backlash to what? I have heard all sorts of leftists claim that Bush is too religious, he is aloof and yet look at Obama…he is a religion. He does not need to answer to anyone.
Backlash to reality. The idiotic supporters of Obama think they can escape reality and history by voting for this chump.
They’re make the mistake we did in the 1990s… escaping from history to focus on a false economy.
See how well that ended?
Thanks for the very interesting link, North Coast Mike.
We need to hold our noses, and vote for McCain, come November. Sorry, the stakes are quite high here, and, no, this time, we can’t just wait and hope that a bad Obama presidency will galvanize the conservative movement, or that the Republicans will actually fight Obama’s programs, whereas they won’t fight those of a Republican president, etc. (You know all the arguments.)
(If, G-d forbid, Obama is elected, he’s going to have such a halo of goodness and messiah-ship glowing around him, I suspect Republicans are going to be too cowed to oppose him in any way. After all, how can you resist G-d? Hillary they’d fight against—Obama, I don’t think they will.)
So vote for McCain. I’m actually beginning to see orneriness, unpopularity and contentiousness as good things in a political candidate! Look at it this way! Nobody, even those who support McCain, think of him as the second coming; there are no videos of zombie-like McCainites dancing and chanting, “Mah-Kain! Mah-Kain! Mah-Kain!” And his wife is sander than Mrs. Obama, and doesn’t make whining speeches about how much she hates America.
Vote McCain.
Why are we surprised? We raised these morons. They’ve been told from the cradle that they’re God and their farts are perfume. And I second Kamel.
Mah-Kain, Mah-Kain….Jes we Can! (I am seriously supporting McCain at this point) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCn5SwkxbtQ
Creepy is right. Pretty much a chronicle of a thought-free zone.
The question is what’s going to happen if (or as I think, when) he loses? A lot of starry-eyed idealists are going to be crushed, and embittered. Once agian we’ll have the accusations of illegitimacy and “stolen elections.” Ultimately, I suspect that Obama’s loss will trigger another spasm of domestic terrorism similar to the Weather Underground 40 years ago, as some decide to take “direct action” (their term, not mine).
Why will Obama lose? He represents a triumph of form over substance. Sure, he can galvanize Hollywood, adolescents, and other hapless nitwits with this vaporous pronouncements. But, ultimately, he’ll have to say something substantive (in, e.g., a Presidential debate).
Then we can look forward to a few more clangers such as his notion that we should invade Pakistan. A couple of those puppies and he’ll be in McGovern territory in November, God willing.
I think the German original had better production quality.