I am going to attempt to dissect Obamamania. It is always hard to analyze a trend while it is happening, so wish me luck!
What is fueling his popularity? It isn’t just the corporate media. They told us Rudi would be the GOP nominee, and the Republicans made liars of them. It can’t be just his good looks or voice. If looks were everything, Romney would be far ahead of his rivals. Is it his brains? Ha! This is the country that trusted Reagan, because he wasn’t too bright.
Maybe a different line of questioning would help.
What do we, as Democrats, feel most strongly about? That is easy. We hate George W. Bush with a capital H, and we want him out of office, and we want everything he did undone ASAP. Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Wiccan, atheist, agnostic, many of us share one thing in common, something we learned from our Christian cultural forebears----we believe that a Superman will come to slash and burn present corruption, making way for something better, something new.
Before there was Superman, they had a different word for the phenomenon. They called that kind of hero a "messiah".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messiah A messianic figure is a person who is viewed as having a number of the characteristics of the Messiah in the eyes of a particular group. These usually include that the person is charismatic, influential, develops a power base, is appealing to a large group that views itself as oppressed in some way, and appears to offer a way to overthrow that oppression.
“What is to be done, O Moslems? for I do not recognize myself.
I am neither Christian nor Jew nor Gabr nor Moslem.
I am not of the East nor of the West nor of the land nor of the sea.
I am not of Nature’s mint, nor of the circling heavens”
Rumi, From Primitives to Zen Eliade
Jesus said “If your leaders say to you, ‘Look the (Father’s) imperial rule is in the sky’, then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you , ‘It is in the sea’ then the fish will precede you. Rather the (Father’s) imperial rule is inside you and outside you.”
The Gospel of Thomas, The Complete Gospels
Barack Obama’s childhood could easily have been included by Otto Rank in
The Myth of the Birth of the Hero . Son of a White American woman and a Kenyan college student, he was born on Hawaii, an island in the middle of the Pacific. I mention this, because water is important in these legends. His parents separated when he was still a toddler, depriving him of his natural father and his paternal heritage, just as Moses, Cyrus, Hercules and the rest were deprived of their fathers. His mother remarried, this time a man from Indonesia, sending young Barack into exile from his homeland, his seat of power. In Indonesia, he went to school with other Indonesian children and spoke their language, and yet, still he knew that he wanted to grow up to be the president of the United States, just as the child Cyrus knew that he had the qualities needed to be King of the Medes, even though he was being raised by shepherds. At the age of 10, he returned from exile to the United States to live with his mother’s parents and to attend a series of expensive, elite schools---schools fit for the leader he would one day become. The outcast hero had finally been acknowledged, as young Cyrus was acknowledged by the same grandfather who had once tried to have him murdered. Or as the child Jesus was finally accepted back into Nazareth, after years spent in exile in Egypt, on the run from the paranoid wrath of Herod.
Using the same facts, Barack Obama’s childhood could be told in other ways, but none of the stories would be as satisfying. “The myths are not constructed by the hero” Rank wrote “Least of all by the child hero, but they have long been known to be the product of a people of adults. The impetus is evidently supplied by the popular amazement at the apparition of the hero, whose extraordinary life history the people can only imagine as ushered in by a wonderful infancy.”
In
The Hero With a Thousand Faces Joseph Campbell describes the hero as world redeemer. “’ Don’t think I am in the east, south, west or north. The earth is my body. I am there. I am all over. Don’t think I stay only under the earth or up I the sky, or only in the seasons, or in the other side of the waters. These are all my body.”
The hero must become larger than any one human being (with a single human being’s limitations or fears) for his task is to kill a tyrant----or to change the world, to put it in language that Obama supporters will understand. “I come not to send peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34).
The savior figure who eliminates the tyrant father and then himself assumes the crown is (like Oedipus) stepping unto his sire’s stead. To soften the harsh patricide, the legend represents the father as some cruel uncle or usurping Nimrod. Nevertheless, the half-hidden fact remains. Once it is glimpsed, the entire spectacle buckles; the son slays the father, but the son and the father are one. (Campbell)
Stated in direct terms: the work of the hero is to slay the tenacious aspect of the father (dragon, tester, ogre king) and release from its ban the vital energies that will feed the universe. (Campbell)
There is no worse dragon than the Bush/Cheney combo, along with their Neo-Con pals. The “slaying” I am referring to here is all figurative, of course. America, especially its Democrats and Independents wants these men stripped of their power. And it wants it done yesterday, if possible.
The United States has a strong Christian evangelical tradition. Even among agnostics and atheists, there is a tendency to mimic the behavior of our forefathers, especially when we decide that it is time for “out with the old and in with the new.” Let Europe debate and argue and bargain. We like clean, decisive breaks with the past. Therefore, it is no wonder that we have seen Messianic presidencies before during times of political unrest. I can recall two in my lifetime. The most obvious example is Jack Kennedy, who died for our sins, but not before he inspired young people all across America to make different choices than their parents. Ask people what Kennedy’s achievements were, and that last---
inspiration will probably be number one on the list. It might be the only thing on the list, but to many people it is enough to rate him as the all time greatest president.
The second most recent President as messiah is not remembered so fondly, probably because he was crucified through dirty political tricks, not an assassin’s bullets. Jimmy Carter was derided by Gore Vidal for taking his initials too seriously when he was running for president in 1976. Certainly, what he offered the country---change, honesty, morality, compassion---minus any actual experience required a leap of faith from the electorate.
In the wake of the Watergate and Viet Nam, Americans were more than willing to make that leap. They were eager to jump on board the Jimmy Carter band wagon. He could proclaim his outsider status---his hick southern accent, his credentials as a peanut farmer---as proof that
he would never wiretap his political opponents. He admited to lusting after women in his heart, and therefore you just knew that he would never lie to the American people about a matter of national security.
No one cared to know
how he was going to get the job done . It was clear that his status as an outsider, his words attacking the status quo, his promises of change were all that were required—along with enough votes come election day, and that would happen if only the people had enough faith—to bring about redemptive transformation.
Barack Obama is even more qualified than Jimmy Carter, the hick Georgia peanut farmer and Jack Kennedy, the energetic young Catholic, to serve as an agent of change. Like the heroes Rank describes, he fits the model of hero as redeemer to a T. Though clearly a man of the elite now----he has a Harvard law degree, a million dollar home and a job in the U.S. Senate---he has lived the other side of the dream. Broken family, third world exile, nonwhite, non citizen father and stepfather. While other candidates offer up plans or time tables, Obama offers up himself, his life story as sufficient reason to believe. He is Barack Obama, and therefore he can tear down the old, and in its place something new must spring up.
Jesus said “I have cast fire upon the world, and look, I’m guarding it until it blazes.”
Gospel of Thomas , The Complete Gospels
It is not true, as some have said, that Obama offers no specific plans or policies. His campaign website is full of them. Plans and polices are irrelevant to his campaign, and you will not see the corporate media pay much attention to them. The press is fascinated with Obama the Redeemer. With Huckabee spoiling the RNC’s game, I expect that the mainstream media will want to focus even more attention on Obama’s messianic qualities in the days to come, in order to boost McCain’s chances.
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