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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=3></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=3></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=3>"Brand Obama" my foot. The
article-writer below worked 2 decades for "Brand New York Times"
-- while Obama helped poor people and taught constitutional law.
Let's wait and see who turns out to be the better man. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=3></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=3>Given his humanitarian-saturated upbringing, what
Obama's probably doing is duct-taping some societal structures for the
short-term so that they collapse (as they must) SLOWLY, instead of suddenly
and catastrophically -- and maneuvering to prevent his assassination, which
would certainly occur if he just fired all the nazis outright, like JFK
did.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=3></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=3>If you were in office, and if you were smart, you
would proceed in the same way.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=3></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=3>I myself have been immune to being a fan of
ANYBODY. As a young newspaper reporter immediately out of school, I spent
time with celebrities like The Doors and The Lettermen and Robert
Goulet and a number of others who had big followings, but it was so clear
to me they were "just people" that I've forever been immune to any kind of
charisma. However, I am attracted to good character. (And that
has panned out very well in my life -- I am apparently a good judge of
it.)</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=3></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=3>And I've never been susceptible to brand-names OF
or ON anything -- only interested in the <EM>quality</EM> "of the
product." Obama's character and quality have been clear and consistent
(consistent as humanly possible) since first observing him here in Illinois
politics in 1997. He is obviously <EM>not</EM> a product nor a brand, but a
well-rounded and highly intelligent human being.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=3>The criticisms of him strike me as
short-sighted knee-jerk reactions to a ship's captain who has had to take
over AFTER the Titanic struck the iceberg. The wobbly emergency
efforts to keep us from suddenly sinking, and a <EM>long, slow turn</EM>
(instead of an immediate shift of the helm and a tip-over as a
result) are scary but possibly wise moves -- possibly the only
<EM>relatively</EM> safe ones that can be made. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=3></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=3>When the pilot headed the commercial airliner for
the Hudson River in January, it seemed like a horrible move -- especially to
everyone on board! But he did the best that could be done under
the extreme circumstances. There were some injuries, but the job was very,
VERY well done. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=3></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=3>I predict that Obama's wisdom-beyond-his-years will
eventually bring us to the softest landing possible. And I feel it's
really ignorant of people who are not in the cockpit of this
out-of-control country to attack him when he's doing all he CAN do
-- for this nation and for the world. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=3></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=3>That sense of service is where he came from and
that's where he will take us -- with the injuries that do occur obviously
being the fall-out from the previous NON-wise, NON-intelligent,
NON-service-oriented assholes who ruled and wrecked since the turn of the
century. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=3></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=3>Those years of long and horrendous momentum
CANNOT just be brought to a screeching halt in only 3 months!</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=3></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=3>Connie</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=3></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=3></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=3></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=3></FONT> </DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE
style="PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #000000 2px solid; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- Original Message ----- </DIV>
<DIV
style="BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; FONT: 10pt arial; font-color: black"><B>From:</B>
<A title=aroyboy44@hotmail.com href="mailto:aroyboy44@hotmail.com">andrew
ritter</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>To:</B> <A
title=citizenstruth@six.pairlist.net
href="mailto:citizenstruth@six.pairlist.net">truth seekers</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Sent:</B> Monday, May 04, 2009 8:44 PM</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Subject:</B> [CitizensTruth] Buying Brand
Obama</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<H1 class=title>Buying Brand Obama</H1>
<DIV id=node-header>
<P class=author>by Chris Hedges</P></DIV>Barack Obama is a brand. And the
Obama brand is designed to make us feel good about our government while
corporate overlords loot the Treasury, our elected officials continue to have
their palms greased by armies of corporate lobbyists, our corporate media
diverts us with gossip and trivia and our imperial wars expand in the Middle
East. Brand Obama is about being happy consumers. We are entertained. We feel
hopeful. We like our president. We believe he is like us. But like all branded
products spun out from the manipulative world of corporate advertising, we are
being duped into doing and supporting a lot of things that are not in our
interest.<BR>What, for all our faith and hope, has the Obama brand given us?
His administration has spent, lent or guaranteed $12.8 trillion in taxpayer
dollars to Wall Street and insolvent banks in a doomed effort to reinflate the
bubble economy, a tactic that at best forestalls catastrophe and will leave us
broke in a time of profound crisis. Brand Obama has allocated nearly $1
trillion in defense-related spending and the continuation of our doomed
imperial projects in Iraq, where military planners now estimate that 70,000
troops will remain for the next 15 to 20 years. Brand Obama has expanded the
war in Afghanistan, including the use of drones sent on cross-border bombing
runs into Pakistan that have doubled the number of civilians killed over the
past three months. Brand Obama has refused to ease restrictions so workers can
organize and will not consider single-payer, not-for-profit health care for
all Americans. And Brand Obama will not prosecute the Bush administration for
war crimes, including the use of torture, and has refused to dismantle Bush's
secrecy laws or restore habeas corpus. <BR>Brand Obama offers us an
image that appears radically individualistic and new. It inoculates us from
seeing that the old engines of corporate power and the vast
military-industrial complex continue to plunder the country. Corporations,
which control our politics, no longer produce products that are essentially
different, but brands that are different. Brand Obama does not threaten the
core of the corporate state any more than did Brand George W. Bush. The Bush
brand collapsed. We became immune to its studied folksiness. We saw through
its artifice. This is a common deflation in the world of advertising. So we
have been given a new Obama brand with an exciting and faintly erotic appeal.
Benetton and Calvin Klein were the precursors to the Obama brand, using ads to
associate themselves with risqué art and progressive politics. It gave their
products an edge. But the goal, as with all brands, was to make passive
consumers mistake a brand with an experience. <BR>"The abandonment of
the radical economic foundations of the women's and civil-rights movements by
the conflation of causes that came to be called political correctness
successfully trained a generation of activists in the politics of image, not
action," Naomi Klein wrote in "No Logo."<BR>Obama, who has become a global
celebrity, was molded easily into a brand. He had almost no experience, other
than two years in the Senate, lacked any moral core and could be painted as
all things to all people. His brief Senate voting record was a miserable
surrender to corporate interests. He was happy to promote nuclear power as
"green" energy. He voted to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He
reauthorized the Patriot Act. He would not back a bill designed to cap
predatory credit card interest rates. He opposed a bill that would have
reformed the notorious Mining Law of 1872. He refused to support the
single-payer health care bill HR676, sponsored by Reps. Dennis Kucinich and
John Conyers. He supported the death penalty. And he backed a class-action
"reform" bill that was part of a large lobbying effort by financial firms. The
law, known as the Class Action Fairness Act, would effectively shut down state
courts as a venue to hear most class-action lawsuits and deny redress in many
of the courts where these cases have a chance of defying powerful corporate
challenges. <BR>While Gaza was being bombarded and hit with airstrikes
in the weeks before Obama took office, "the Obama team let it be known that it
would not object to the planned resupply of ‘smart bombs' and other hi-tech
ordnance that was already flowing to Israel," according to Seymour Hersh. Even
his one vaunted anti-war speech as a state senator, perhaps his single real
act of defiance, was swiftly reversed. He told the Chicago Tribune on July 27,
2004, that "there's not that much difference between my position and George
Bush's position at this stage. The difference, in my mind, is who's in a
position to execute." And unlike anti-war stalwarts like Kucinich, who gave
hundreds of speeches against the war, Obama then dutifully stood silent until
the Iraq war became unpopular. <BR>Obama's campaign won the vote of hundreds
of marketers, agency heads and marketing-services vendors gathered at the
Association of National Advertisers' annual conference in October. The Obama
campaign was named Advertising Age's marketer of the year for 2008 and edged
out runners-up Apple and Zappos.com. Take it from the professionals. Brand
Obama is a marketer's dream. President Obama does one thing and Brand Obama
gets you to believe another. This is the essence of successful advertising.
You buy or do what the advertiser wants because of how they can make you
feel. <BR>Celebrity culture has leeched into every aspect of our
culture, including politics, to bequeath to us what Benjamin DeMott called
"junk politics." Junk politics does not demand justice or the reparation of
rights. Junk politics personalizes and moralizes issues rather than clarifying
them. "It's impatient with articulated conflict, enthusiastic about America's
optimism and moral character, and heavily dependent on feel-your-pain language
and gesture," DeMott noted. The result of junk politics is that nothing
changes - "meaning zero interruption in the processes and practices that
strengthen existing, interlocking systems of socioeconomic advantage." It
redefines traditional values, tilting "courage toward braggadocio, sympathy
toward mawkishness, humility toward self-disrespect, identification with
ordinary citizens toward distrust of brains." Junk politics "miniaturizes
large, complex problems at home while maximizing threats from abroad. It's
also given to abrupt unexplained reversals of its own public stances, often
spectacularly bloating problems previously miniaturized." And finally, it
"seeks at every turn to obliterate voters' consciousness of socioeconomic and
other differences in their midst." <BR>An image-based culture, one
dominated by junk politics, communicates through narratives, pictures and
carefully orchestrated spectacle and manufactured pseudo-drama. Scandalous
affairs, hurricanes, earthquakes, untimely deaths, lethal new viruses, train
wrecks-these events play well on computer screens and television.
International diplomacy, labor union negotiations and convoluted bailout
packages do not yield exciting personal narratives or stimulating images. A
governor who patronizes call girls becomes a huge news story. A politician who
proposes serious regulatory reform, universal health care or advocates curbing
wasteful spending is boring. Kings, queens and emperors once used their court
conspiracies to divert their subjects. Today cinematic, political and
journalistic celebrities distract us with their personal foibles and scandals.
They create our public mythology. Acting, politics and sports have become, as
they were during the reign of Nero, interchangeable. <BR>In an age of
images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we do
not seek reality. Reality is complicated. Reality is boring. We are incapable
or unwilling to handle its confusion. We ask to be indulged and comforted by
clichés, stereotypes and inspirational messages that tell us we can be whoever
we seek to be, that we live in the greatest country on Earth, that we are
endowed with superior moral and physical qualities, and that our future will
always be glorious and prosperous, either because of our own attributes, or
our national character, or because we are blessed by God. Reality is not
accepted as an impediment to our desires. Reality does not make us feel
good. <BR>In his book "Public Opinion," Walter Lippmann distinguished
between "the world outside and the pictures in our heads." He defined a
"stereotype" as an oversimplified pattern that helps us find meaning in the
world. Lippmann cited examples of the crude "stereotypes we carry about in our
heads" of whole groups of people such as "Germans," "South Europeans,"
"Negroes," "Harvard men," "agitators" and others. These stereotypes, Lippmann
noted, give a reassuring and false consistency to the chaos of existence. They
offer easily grasped explanations of reality and are closer to propaganda
because they simplify rather than complicate. <BR>Pseudo-events-dramatic
productions orchestrated by publicists, political machines, television,
Hollywood or advertisers-however, are very different. They have, as Daniel
Boorstin wrote in "The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America," the
capacity to appear real even though we know they are staged. They are capable,
because they can evoke a powerful emotional response, of overwhelming reality
and replacing reality with a fictional narrative that often becomes accepted
truth. The unmasking of a stereotype damages and often destroys its
credibility. But pseudo-events, whether they show the president in an auto
plant or a soup kitchen or addressing troops in Iraq, are immune to this
deflation. The exposure of the elaborate mechanisms behind the pseudo-event
only adds to its fascination and its power. This is the basis of the
convoluted television reporting on how effectively political campaigns and
politicians have been stage-managed. Reporters, especially those on
television, no longer ask if the message is true but if the pseudo-event
worked or did not work as political theater. Pseudo-events are judged on how
effectively we have been manipulated by illusion. Those events that appear
real are relished and lauded. Those that fail to create a believable illusion
are deemed failures. Truth is irrelevant. Those who succeed in politics, as in
most of the culture, are those who create the brands and pseudo-events that
offer the most convincing fantasies. And this is the art Obama has
mastered.<BR>A public that can no longer distinguish between truth and fiction
is left to interpret reality through illusion. Random facts or obscure bits of
data and trivia are used to bolster illusion and give it credibility or are
discarded if they interfere with the message. The worse reality becomes-the
more, for example, foreclosures and unemployment skyrocket-the more people
seek refuge and comfort in illusions. When opinions cannot be distinguished
from facts, when there is no universal standard to determine truth in law, in
science, in scholarship, or in reporting the events of the day, when the most
valued skill is the ability to entertain, the world becomes a place where lies
become true, where people can believe what they want to believe. This is the
real danger of pseudo-events and why pseudo-events are far more pernicious
than stereotypes. They do not explain reality, as stereotypes attempt to, but
replace reality. Pseudo-events redefine reality by the parameters set by their
creators. These creators, who make massive profits peddling these illusions,
have a vested interest in maintaining the power structures they control.
<BR>The old production-oriented culture demanded what the historian Warren
Susman termed character. The new consumption-oriented culture demands what he
called personality. The shift in values is a shift from a fixed morality to
the artifice of presentation. The old cultural values of thrift and moderation
honored hard work, integrity and courage. The consumption-oriented culture
honors charm, fascination and likability. "The social role demanded of all in
the new culture of personality was that of a performer," Susman wrote. "Every
American was to become a performing self."<BR>The junk politics practiced by
Obama is a consumer fraud. It is about performance. It is about lies. It is
about keeping us in a perpetual state of childishness. But the longer we live
in illusion, the worse reality will be when it finally shatters our fantasies.
Those who do not understand what is happening around them and who are
overwhelmed by a brutal reality they did not expect or foresee search
desperately for saviors. They beg demagogues to come to their rescue. This is
the ultimate danger of the Obama Brand. It effectively masks the wanton
internal destruction and theft being carried out by our corporate state. These
corporations, once they have stolen trillions in taxpayer wealth, will leave
tens of millions of Americans bereft, bewildered and yearning for even more
potent and deadly illusions, ones that could swiftly snuff out what is left of
our diminished open society.<BR>
<DIV class=copyright-info>© 2009 TruthDig.com</DIV><I>Chris Hedges writes a
regular column for <A href="http://www.truthdig.com"
target=_blank>Truthdig.com</A>. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School
and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times.
He is the author of many books, including: <A
href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400034639?ie=UTF8&tag=commondreams-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=1400034639"
target=_blank>War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning</A>, <A
href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0743255127?ie=UTF8&tag=commondreams-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=0743255127"
target=_blank>What Every Person Should Know About War</A>, and <A
href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0743284437?tag=commondreams-20/ref=nosim"
target=_blank>American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on
America.</A> His most recent book, <A
href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1568584377?ie=UTF8&tag=commondreams-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=1568584377"
target=_blank>Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of
Spectacle</A>, will be out in July, but is available for pre-order.</I>
<BR><BR>
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