"The rich, churchless, blue-state elites,...are hungry for the kind of secular nirvana Obama is serving up. Obama-mania is a political expression of the same impulse that underlies a broader movement, among the educated rich, towards a post-Christian spirituality, evident in such fetishes as yoga, feng-shui, investment-banker Buddhism, and tennis-set Sufism — the small-is-beautiful and green-is-good crazes.
A potent myth-maker, Obama is also a limited one. His New Age shamanism tells us less about where the country needs to go than about the spiritual emptiness of those among our elites who have been so quick to anoint him a new, secular messiah. The irony is that these same elites have used a draconian reading of the First Amendment to relegate the oldest and richest traditions of our spiritual culture to an obscure corner of the public square, a kind of refuse bin for slightly disreputable hand-me-downs from our benighted ancestors. They now look to the new swami to effect the miraculous regeneration of a spiritual waste land their own policies have helped to create."— Michael Knox Beran, writing in the (conservative*) National Review Online
"The ultimate postmodern irony is today’s strange exchange between the West and the East. At the very moment when, at the level of “economic infrastructure,” Western technology and capitalism are triumphing worldwide, at the level of “ideological superstructure,” the Judeo-Christian legacy is threatened in the West itself by the onslaught of New Age “Asiatic” thought. Such Eastern wisdom, from “Western Buddhism” to Taoism, is establishing itself as the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism. But while Western Buddhism presents itself as the remedy against the stress of capitalism’s dynamics—by allowing us to uncouple and retain some inner peace—it actually functions as the perfect ideological supplement."- Slavoj Žižek, writing for (the liberal*) In These Times
* Right or Left, the view of Western NewAge belief as a waste of time and resources will not be denied. It's a dead-end for America. It's a dead-end for YOU. And it's a dead-end for our children. Stop it. Now. Demand real answers. From everyone. Beginning with Barack and Hillary. Here's a good question to start with:
"Who do you think you're fucking with?"
That's the American way.
This is an election year - now let's get serious,
CMC
P.S.
This was posted while listening to Dorothy Ashby's "Soul Vibrations":
