When living for hope fails, people get wise. People get pissed.
While the president is swatting flies in interviews with fawning journalists, people in Iran have gone buck wild. He's not saying anything because he doesn't react, he thinks things up and comes up with a considered position. There's just one problem with that, he's behind events and not defining them. One thing for sure is that when GWBush was the President, everyone in the world was redefining their position in reaction to what they thought Bush was going to do. That initiative is now reversed. Obama seems to be more like the great film critic rather than the actor on center stage. Maybe he thinks he's like Addison DeWitt in 'All About Eve', that he can control everyone because he exposes their weakness and then can dictate terms about how they can maintain their good name. That's not leadership, it's blackmail. First the banks, now the auto industry. Who's next?
One day in the not too distant future, people are going to decide, long before the president wants them to decide, that they don't care about 'hope' and 'change' and all of his excellent speechification. They're going to want to be ugly and mad about things the president will be unable to fix, and they're not going to be patient. He's going to say 'cool it, baby' and they're going to give him the finger. I chuckle for a moment at the irony because whenever I use the phrase 'cool it, baby' I am thinking specifically about Maxine Waters after the outbreak of the LA Riots. She got on TV saying that the president and all those politicians in Washington have no idea what's going on in her community. The people have lost jobs and have lost hope and no amount of pretty words were going to satisfy them. Nobody wanted to hear Maxine Waters say that. One man's riot is another man's rebellion.
Iran reminds us that when very big things get deeply out of sorts in a nation, relatively ugly things don't seem so ugly any longer. Ordinary political corruption that you can ordinarily stand makes you really mad when you can't get away with anything. When unemployment hits 10% nationwide, if one out of ten men want to smash things... ick.
As I watched the video (and I could only take about 4 minutes of it) I kept thinking this man could be hitting a person with that bat. He could be doing his rant and taking it out on a human being, and he's not getting tired. I know that it was an edited and finessed bit of video and the they guy obviously has more than a couple neurons to rub together, and it makes it all the more scary. Because in a down economy lots of smart people are going to be angry, and a lot of angry people are going to wise up.
Scary.
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