O to be superior! The ObamaHeads project their bitterness

National Review, May 19, 2008 by Rob Long

A FEW nights ago, at a party in Hollywood, I overheard the following exchange. A woman in her 30s was explaining to another woman in her 30s what she had been up to recently.

"I've been spending a lot of time getting into Feldenkrais," she said, over the music. The other woman looked at her strangely and said nothing.

"It's been great. Just great," she continued.

No response. Just a kind of baffled halfsmile.

"Have you ever thought about getting into it?" she asked. "It's great for your lower back."

At this point, the other woman suddenly snapped. "Wait," she said. "What is this you're talking about?"

"Feldenkrais," the first woman said.

"Feldenwhat?"

"Krais."

"What?"

"Krais."

"How do you spell it?"

"Well, Felden, like it sounds--f-e-l-de-n, and then krais, k-r-a-i-s."

"Oh," the other woman said, suddenly beaming with relief. "Feldenkrais."

"Right," the first woman said. "It's a set of physical exercises invented by some German guy in 1890 or something. It's really helped my back trouble."

The other woman laughed. "I just misheard you!" she shouted, joyfully. "I thought you were saying something like Fell in Christ, and I just thought, Oh my God, she's becoming some kind of Jesus person, and I was like, Whoa. I was like, How could this happen? I used to like this person!"

And they laughed merrily at the unlikelihood of either one of them becoming, you know, all Jesus-y, and I moved off to get another beer.

Because in certain parts of the country--what we'll call, for the purposes of this discussion, ObamaWorld--it's quite alarming to suddenly discover that one of your circle is becoming religious. Well, a certain kind of religious: Hindu, Kabbalah, radical Wicca--all okay; start getting into Jesus, though, and the alarm bells go off. People start wondering why you feel you need that kind of thing, why you cling to such peculiar superstitions.

God forbid you shoot a deer. Or want to secure the borders. Because then it's an echo chamber of: What are you afraid of? What are you so angry about? Why--to use the language of Barack Obama, speaking recently in San Francisco, the World Headquarters of ObamaWorld--are you so bitter?

For ObamaHeads, though, that's a rhetorical question. They can head-shake and cluck-cluck and nod sadly all night long about what, exactly, the Jesus-'n'-guns-'n'-wall-buildin' crowd is bitter about. "It's obvious, isn't it?" they say to one another over Fair Trade coffee or Rhone-style whites from the Central Coast. They're bitter about lopsided trade deals; about a faltering economy, a weak dollar, a country run by plutocrats. The sticks and thickets just at the edge of ObamaWorld seethe and bubble like a cauldron of fear, hate, and bitterness-and to communicate with them, your words must be honeyed and smooth, calming and unthreatening, and, you know, easy to understand. That's another thing they're bitter about: They're stupid, and they know it.

For the residents of ObamaWorld, the rest of the country--the fat, sad, bitter proles who hang out at the DQ and buy stuff sold on television--is like one big Special Ed class, one giant short bus that needs to be managed, coaxed, head-shrunk into making the right choices. Just as the policy initiatives of the Left have drifted into the realm of therapy and mental rehabilitation (diversity initiatives, sexuality education, hate-speech retraining), so has their outreach strategy. In the really old days, it was going to a lecture and getting pressured by a Red labor organizer; in the old days, it was going to an SDS meeting after class and noticing how promiscuous the girls were; in the recent past, though, it's been one long therapy session: consciousness-raising meetings and purging confessionals ("I feel so guilty about my parents' maid!") and workshops--endless, endless workshops--on odd little topics like "Heteronormative Tropes and How to (Re)Present Them" and "Toward a Green Consciousness" and "Racism in the Academy: Far Still to Go," all of them designed to help the 21st-century Left, which has twisted and tortured itself with its inflexible and expanding list of correct attitudes. When Hillary Clinton--Hillary Clinton!--is deemed by many on the left to be insufficiently lefty, and when Hillary Clinton--Hillary Clinton!--has been out-elited, out-twee'd, out-latte'd by a rival candidate, one thing is clear: The Left has tied itself in knots.

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Meanwhile, the bitter proles are sitting quietly at the Olive Garden, chowing down on breadsticks, or sunning themselves at the NASCAR track, bursting out of their tank tops and swilling beer. They're driving around with the AC blasting, listening to soft-rock or, worse, country music, heading to megachurches and starting small businesses and trying to lay off the bread a little. They're upset, sure; and concerned, of course, about taxes, schools, Iraq, and the economy--who isn't? But the most remarkable thing about America and Americans, at every point in our history, is how cheerful we are, how optimistic, how unbitter. We can be cranky, sure. Even a quick dash out of the ObamaDome, though, would tell you that the churchgoing, deer-blasting, border-patrolling American is a lot of things--heavier than he should be, carrying too many credit cards, etc.--but he isn't bitter.