All hail paterfamilias Obama!

Masquerading as eudemonistic soothsayers, the soon to be Obama administration strike me of late as condescending autocrats with noble intentions yet a dismal view of the citizens they aim to save. America voted for a president, yet unwittingly appointed a pontifex maximus. President elect Barack Obama has a demonstrated a chilling predilection towards paternalism. And of all the varieties, his seems to be the worst brand; not the comparatively benign demonstrative variety that most politicians trend towards, but rather the dangerous and miasmic type predicated on disimpassioned utilitarian calculations. He believes He is helping the plebeian masses, because only He - The Chosen One - can comprehend the complex world that swirls around and confounds us hoi polloi. He must protect us from ourselves, because left to our own machinations we will surely flounder. Cigarettes are terrible (it's OK for dad to smoke, but best not let the kids), so He will help us all quit by raising the already sizable taxes. (Am I the only one whose first inclination was to draw parallels between this and Kim Jung Il’s dictate that when he quit smoking, everyone in North Korea must also quit?) Trillion dollar deficits? No worries, who better to spend future generation’s monies than His team of the best and the brightest, all under the patria potestas of paterfamilias Obama. He has crunched the numbers – He used focus groups and survey data to pitch his stimulus plan to congress. Mark Twain once opined “there are three types of lies: lies, dirty lies, and statistics.” The governance of the next four years will be strikingly different from that of the last eight, if for no other reason through a shift in tactics from the first two varieties of obfuscation to the third type. Get ready to witness the world when a team of self-anointed Cassandra’s (this time with statistics!) takes charge. Perhaps if we are lucky, they can spare Troy from destruction.

That is so classist (classless)

“You had a library in your house? That’s so bourgeois and snobbish of your family.”

“You honestly think so? You know, if this was a TV room we were talking about no one would bat a lash at its mention.”

“No one here is creating a fuss.”

“No, hear me out. It is completely acceptable to spend thousands of dollars every four or five years to have brand new state of the art televisions and hundreds more on speakers and cables, and DVD players, and God-knows-what-else, et cetera, et cetera. And then add on top of that a thousand dollars a year for the satellite hookup and TIVO subscription, and movies at $20 a pop…and all that extravagance is completely non-elitist, non-snobbish, kosher middle class values but when my family decides to spend an equivalent, or perhaps even lesser sum of money on properly and adequately storing our books all of a sudden it's snobbish. That is downright classist when you say that. Now I’m not accusing you of being malicious, but subconsciously all this disaffected middle class propaganda has definitely infected you, turned you against us.”

“Wait, you think there is some sort of middle-class war on the rich?”

“Not against the rich per se, but against upper-class intellectualism. It’s these same people that turned the words elite and elitism into pejoratives in the first half of this last century. And do you ever watch TV? Remember Frasier? The whole premise was let’s have viewers laugh at these two upstanding brothers because they are well educated and have modicum of refinement. Or on Law & Order, it is always some rich old-moneyed type who is involved in some heinous crime. It is all right there.”

“Wait, I thought your family didn’t have a TV room?”

“No - of course we have a TV room, but that's immaterial here.”

I was so much older then, I am younger than that now...

I have become convinced that the American soul is incredibly undernourished and see this as one of the most pressing policy concerns of the coming decades, if not the most pressing policy concern. I do not think hundreds of channels of TV or the proliferation of i-pods is going to do it. And no number of youtube videos or blogs can make up the deficit. We need a system over-hall. Jesus, I already sound like an old man. Maybe, but I see no other truth.

Prediction

Election day prediction: the candidate that spent the most money will win (again).