Just when you'd gotten resigned to the sight of the erstwhile liberal class marching in ovine personality cult lockstep with the Big Sellout, Barack Obama's right-wing side has at last been dented. Literally.
Because, wedge-issue feminist pandering from Democrats notwithstanding, Mother Nature herself is singularly unimpressed and definitely not fooled. Maybe you were smugly assuming that she favors the Blue Team just because she so obligingly pre-empted the first day of the GOP's orgy. But she is plenty pissed that the president, too, has turned out to be such a bellicose arch-conservative. And she is absolutely livid that while she's suffering through the climate change, he seems to have lost interest. So it was no surprise that the massive sand sculpture of Himself being constructed in Charlotte, NC suffered some damage yesterday when a sudden rainstorm hit the Democratic convention city.
The vaunted center of the malleable edifice is carefully protected from above, but the right side was left vulnerable to attack by an angry squall arriving from the left. The wind-driven downpour obliterated the sharp right elbow he'd previously used to jab those marginalized purist ideologues. And although most of the right-sided aspect survived largely intact, the face was dimpled with unsightly pockmarks. And the poetical sneer of cold command remains. As He Himself is so wont to intone, "there's still a lot of work to be done." The sand statue, like the presidency, is being defended as a work in progress. Lots of smoothing over, lots of soothing platitudes, lots of folksy schmoozing with the masses.
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| Look on My Works, Ye Mighty, And Despair! |
Could the storm damage spell payback for the choice of anti-labor North Carolina as the site of the convention? Could it be discontent with the fact that the government is taking extraordinary rendition to a whole new level by proclaiming the convention an "extraordinary event" and squelching protest? Could it be outrage that while a mere statue of Mr. Sandman-Send-Me-a-Dream Obama has a protective roof over its head, millions of ordinary people have lost their homes to foreclosures and mortgage fraud by banks? Could it be disgust that the president will be giving his acceptance speech in Bank of America stadium? (yet another edifice constructed with the ill-gotten gains of the unpunished lords of finance.)
That the Democrats' unscripted Clint Eastwood moment has arrived even before the official start of their propaganda party may well be a harbinger of better things to come. We can only hope. And protest, and resist, and march. It's only natural.
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
