Swooning over the Obama fantasy figure

Melanie Phillips:

Has everyone lost their marbles? The inauguration of President Obama is being treated like the Second Coming.

The coverage is so gushing we might all drown. Of course it’s a great thing that America, with its history of slavery and segregation still a shockingly recent memory, now has a black President; the palpable joy of African-Americans is entirely understandable and deeply touching. And there’s no doubt that Obama is a highly charismatic and attractive personality.

But what’s more than a wee bit troubling is that the swooning hysteria reflects the fact that people appear to believe that as of today the world will be saved. Swords will be beaten into ploughshares, peace will be brought to the Middle East, Iran will be pacified, every American will have health insurance, poverty will be eliminated and utopia will have arrived.

Sorry to be a party pooper but I’m afraid I must register a small note of dissent. It’s not just that people have projected onto the person of Obama expectations that - especially given the world financial crisis - cannot possibly be met.

I think that the desperate dangerousness and complexity of our world and a profound terror of what properly facing up to its problems would entail have led people to believe a cartoon version of why we’re in such a state - and to have invested their hopes similarly in a fantasy figure of hope, to such an extent that they have shut their ears to some very loud warning bells ringing from his past history.

People believe that Obama represents a renunciation of an America that throws its weight around the world. And they think it’s that ‘war-mongering’ characteristic, represented in particular by President Bush and the war in Iraq, which has caused so much global trouble and resentment.

I believe that’s a dangerously false analysis which fails to grasp the extent to which western civilisation is under attack from a world-wide enemy that intends to destroy it, and which further fails to distinguish between true aggression and true self-defence.

Like the hydra, the enemy now waging war on the west has many heads - but it is one enemy, and it feeds in particular on the perception that the west is weak and is no longer willing to defend itself by military means.

The very reason that so many in the west are so entranced by Obama is thus the very reason why our enemies are today rubbing their hands in satisfaction.

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There is much more.

They are all destined to be disappointed. Obama still has to defend America and if he does not it will be politically disastrous for him and his party. Those that think because he is willing to talk with them that he will be easy to persuade, do not understand him or America. Sometimes he matches the world in that naivete. He thinks he can persuade bigots to quit being bigots by the power of his words.

There is also the false message created about George Bush that is driving this nonsense. Bush was a good President with political enemies who defamed him and his administration and many in the world followed their lead. It was a disgusting thing to watch just as much of the current swooning is disgusting.