Just Saying It Plain

As much as I like taking a weekend to empty my link folder, I still want the blog to carry on as usual - dropping quotes on relevant subjects and having a say in things - so, before I get to the last installment of "TMR's Weekend Linkfest", let me get a few things off my chest right here:

Barack Obama. Don't like him. Except for his 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention, I've neither seen, read, nor heard anything about the man that makes him even remotely likable. Like most conservatives, not being racists, it doesn't matter to me if he's black. Sure, there's historical significance that he's the first black president, but I think he's the wrong guy to be the first black president, so it's kind of a wash.

So why don't I like him? Well, for starters, he's a NewAger. Now, I know, for most people that term implies I think he gazes at crystals and barks at the moon, but that's the superficial view of NewAge. As my regular readers know, I'm interested in anyone who's fallen under the influence of the NewAge Movement - the spiritually and/or politically active groups that many Americans seem to ignore, or don't realize are operational, because they hewn so closely to liberal causes - and, clearly, our president is in there, whether he regularly speaks of things like "healing energy" or not.

So how do I know this? Well, let's start with a quote from Liam Julian, of Stanford's Hoover Institution, regarding our president's way with words:

"Regardless of one’s political proclivities or whether or not one just happens to like the personable Barack Obama, it’s clear that the president relishes the vague metaphor, adores the illogical argumentative sequence, and luxuriates in making words mean what only yesterday they didn’t. He does not merely redefine words, in fact, but on occasion undefines them, wiping them of their meanings — say, by insisting that words such as conservative and liberal are insignificant. The liberal president surely knows better but, as Orwell wrote, 'the great enemy of clear language is insincerity.'"

Now, before I break this down, I'd like to point out there's nothing reflected in that quote to like. But just as with Oprah Winfrey (one of the president's main supporters, and another black, but much-more obvious, NewAger - and one with powerful negatives) the American public, raised on a steady diet of post-60s NewAge nostrums, seems almost compelled to overlook the obvious in order to adore anyone (Paris Hilton?) reflecting vapidity and an extreme lack of focus. That unwillingness - on the part of the public or (more importantly) the press - to pull back the curtain on what these two are up to, ala Toto in "The Wizard of Oz", is, both, Obama and Oprah's main strength.

But back to our quote: Mr. Julian finds that president Obama "relishes the vague metaphor", or what NewAge Godfather Timothy Leary liked to refer to as "thought-stopping language". A perfect example was president Obama's election year claim that "We are the ones we've been waiting for", a phrase with absolutely no meaning but which packed a strong emotional wallop, for those self-involved enough to flatter themselves, but not smart enough to think a politician might contrive the phrase as a way to con them into joining his campaign. I mean, if you're the one you've been waiting for, what were you doing in a Chicago park waiting for him to speak?

Next comes the president's love for "the illogical argumentative sequence", which the critical thinker in me doesn't even want to go into, because - once the word "illogical" appears - I think this nonsensical game should be obvious to anyone. Take president Obama's view on Americans, immigrants, and being bilingual:

"Instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English, they’ll learn English, you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish.
You should be thinking about how can your child become bilingual. We should have every child speaking more than one language. It is embarrassing when Europeans come over here, they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German. And then we go over to Europe and all we can say is merci beacoup, right?”

Talk about an "illogical argumentative sequence"! It seems to have escaped the "Messiah" that if Europeans coming here from across the Atlantic Ocean can speak English, why can't Mexicans from just across the border? Also, those Europeans go back to their countries after their visit, while we're expected to learn Spanish because Mexican illegals are refusing to leave our home. From a cultural context, or any other one for that matter, what the president said makes no sense at all.

And, finally, there's the quote from George Orwell:

"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity."

I shouldn't have to tell anyone that, anytime the great man of "1984" fame steps into the picture, somebody's in trouble. Unfortunately, in this case, that "somebody" is us. Listen to him pontificate on those drawn to president Obama:

"A youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism, or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaler, and often with vegetarian leanings … with a social position he has no intention of forfeiting. … One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist and feminist,..."

He certainly isn't describing anyone that could be called conservative. Or how about John Lennon's take on the personality types now called "Obots":

"I'm sick of all these aggressive hippies or whatever they are, the Now Generation, sort of being very uptight,...you know, either on the street or anywhere, or on the phone, demanding,...as if I owed them something,...They come to the door with a fucking peace symbol and expect to just sort of march around the house or something,...They're under the delusion of awareness,...and that's what I'm sick of. I'm sick of them, they frighten me, a lot of uptight maniacs going around wearing fuckin' peace symbols."

Putting those two descriptions together, let's see what we have here:

A "demanding" group of people who think we "owed them something", who "march around" talking about "Awareness", as they're leaning towards being a "vegetarian", who's into "socialism", enthralled by one or the other "'Nature cure' quack," quite obviously a "pacifist", and a "feminist".

What type of "movement" does all that sound like to you? NewAgers, maybe? And must I remind you - again - that before they marched under the "mind/body/spirit" banner, NewAgers is the term they demanded to be called? But, before that, they were merely known by what they are - "occultists"? All fully enthralled to this one man with the murky past, who possesses a weird way with language, but no credentials to support the exalted position they want him in.

U.S. News and World Report reminds us (in their special issue "Mysteries of History: Secret Societies") that:

"Almost as soon as the Puritans stepped off the Mayflower, Americans began their centuries-long love affair with breakaway sects and cults. In the 19th century, Asian religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism joined the Gnostic, millennialist and esoteric influences that had arrived earlier from Europe. By the 20th century, psychotherapeutic techniques joined the mix, as New Age mystics and messiahs created their own personal religions and cults. As a result, the phenomenon of the "personality cult" became a part of the zeitgeist, sometimes with alarming and even dangerous results."

In the same issue, Phillip Jenkins adds this:

"Though modern observers tend to assume that the idea of cults is relatively modern, in fact it has deep roots in American history. Extreme and bizarre religious ideas are so commonplace it is difficult to speak of them as fringe at all,...Some eras are particularly fertile for religious innovation and, hence, for the formulation of groups a modern observer might describe as cults. The combination of occult, mystical, Masonic and pseudoscientific views with esoteric Christianity would have been instantly comprehensible to Americans of the 1830s, 1880s and 1970s, while as far back as 1730 there were regions where a synthesis of this sort would have been regarded as perfectly familiar, if not already old hat."

So, as has been said many times, there is nothing "new" about this "NewAge" except for how they put the old wine in a new bottle, the means used to disseminate their message - and, of course, hide their intentions.

But those are becoming clearer all the time, aren't they?

(To be continued - maybe,...)