Reading Haiku in Obamaland
I decided recently to take a much-needed break from my incessant reading of political commentary and turn to something completely different for a change, harkening instead to a limpid, tranquil, and resolutely poetic world. What better reprieve from the troubling news of the day than an immersion in Japanese haiku? And so I found myself leafing through an out-of-print issue of Poetry Tokyo (No. 5), appreciating the delicate technique and deft perceptual subtleties of contemporary Japanese poet Tohta Kaneko, a master of the craft. The idyll didn’t last long. I was shortly jolted back to reality when I came across an entry in a suite called “12 Haikus”:
A red sun
In the child’s drawing —
A snow storm outside
No help for it. The poet may have limned a benign and consoling picture of domestic shelter, but the image that came instantly to mind was Barack Obama, a veritable child on the geopolitical stage, dabbling in bright crayon colors while the world beyond is beset by tempests and convulsions. Was French President Nicolas Sarkozy right when he portrayed Obama as dangerously naive, a man living in a virtual world that does not touch upon the real world even at a tangent? Obama’s recent waffling speech at the UN, touting nuclear disarmament while Iran and North Korea are racing to the nuclear finish line, surely justifies the assumption.
I returned to my reading but another haiku in the sequence gave me further pause:
A slug carrying
Serene sunlight on his back —
A hen nearby
Obama is no slug; nevertheless, despite his nimble rhetoric and whirlwind activity, there is something sluggish about his thinking as he lugs his sunny vision of planetary harmony hither and yon while the predator is poised to devour him whole.
I give it one more try, wanting to avoid the specter of obsession with the enigmatic and disquieting figure who occupies the White House. But the next haiku is no less kind and even crueler in reinforcing my apprehensions:
Deep in the forest
He’s digging away
My secret sanctuary
And that was it for my leisurely encounter with Japanese poetry. For it occurred to me that Obama may not be the naif that Sarkozy has depicted, someone who wishes to do good but invariably does harm, at best a curate’s egg of a president. Rather, Obama may be something far more disturbing, a palpable and deliberate threat to the nation he purportedly governs, as many others have come to believe. Obama seems deeply to resent the country which nourished him and allowed for his undeniable success. We are preoccupied with the menace of Islamic terrorism and indeed a bomb plot, described as “one of the biggest threats since 9/11,” was only recently uncovered and thwarted. But the real, long-term threat to the United States, I am now beginning to suspect, is not any particular terrorist per se; it is not even Osama. The real, long-term threat to the United States is Obama. Do not be deceived by the BS.
I’m glad to see conservative intellectuals like Krauthammer and Solway espousing the view that Obama is not naive. One doesn’t rise to the office of POTUS by being naive. His destruction of America is deliberate. The belief that he is naive is itself naive.
Nor is Obama an empty suit. Inside the red diaper and the royal vestments and messianic crown that adorns his head there is a palpable narcissism dedicated to re-making the world.
I think it’s cool that they gave Obama the gold medal BEFORE the race even started! Now that’s a real change!
The flagrant destruction of America is purposeful, but so outrageous that no one can believe it–not even Limbaugh.
Who ever would have believed that someone like that could become President? But it has happened, alas.
Mr. Solway — this is, in both substance and style — a brilliant piece of writing. The message you convey should frighten every American, and every freedom-loving person on the globe; it certainly frightens me. But it heartens me as well: as long as there are people who think as clearly and write as lucidly as you, there will be hope for Western Civilization. Thank you, sir; you’ve performed a signal service for all of us.
There is a reason why David Solway is considered by many-yes he is-to be one of the best essayists writing today.
Not only does he create magic with his words, but his understanding of our political landscape is second to none.
I have always felt it deep inside my gut-that intuition thing-that Obama knows EXACTLY what he is doing and how he wants to get there, despite his lack of governmental experience per se.
Obama has an agenda and it is decidedly anti-American. He and his fellow comrades have a malevolent plan in place, and they are working assiduously to implement it. Soros is a major string puller in this kabuki dance, his Islamist friends will be the main beneficiaries.
Through their dismantling of the economy; through their takeover of MAJOR companies;through his propping up dictators, AND through weakening the US abroad, Obama is steadily marching the US towards its deconstruction.
Unless one can convince themselves that every destructive thing he is doing is an accident, then there is NO other explanation.
He is by far the most dangerous man on the world stage since Hitler. This is not to say that he will give orders to build killing fields, but this is to say that he is PURPOSEFULLY creating conditions whereby the US will sooner, rather than later, be referred to as the late, great USA.
His goal is to lead a world confederation in one form or another.He is well on his way.
I have no doubt about Obama’s real intent and deliberate action. However, the countermeasures are the same as if he were simply naive. Replace the members of congress [Obama's enablers] with people who have the best interests of America in their hearts.
This is, indeed, very scary stuff. Thanks to Mr. Solway for making my Halloween even more horrifying than I thought possible.
Obama is a menace. He intends to be. To do what he has done in good faith and with good intentions would make him the most abysmally moronic individual ever to be elected to any public office.
The sabotage is not accidental. For Obama, the people who perished in the 9/11 attacks and their families got what was coming to them. For Obama, people who have suffered economically because of his party’s punitive (not incompetent) policies and, more recently, because of his policies, got what was coming to them. Israeli and American victims of Mideast terror groups like Hezbollah and Hamas got what was coming to them. Neda Agha-Soltan got what was coming to her.
You are correct that our newest President does not have alot of experience in foreign affairs. Indeed, as you know he also inherited a disastorous economic meltdown, a couple of wars going the wrong way and the middle east filled with problems caused mainly by two entities that havent learned about building real peace in 2+thousand years. Also, he has a few other continents to the south, east and west of him that are making noises too… so you see, his plate is just a tad full. And is he managing it all?….uhm, yes.
I believe President Obama’s willingness to destroy America will return to him as his precious cult of personality consumes him & destroys him from within & without; I’m just glad Obama is an incompetent boob.
#5.
“Unless one can convince themselves that every destructive thing he is doing is an accident, then there is NO other explanation.”
This insight is the only possibility to me. Obama has shown that he is through and through an agent of unrestrained absolutism. Be it absolute ideology or absolute stupidity, there is not one sincere or reasonable bone in his body…except of course when it comes to feeding his own ego.
…so you see, his plate is just a tad full. And is he managing it all?….uhm, yes.
————–
…uhm, no!
David ….unreconstructed naif completely out of his depth — perhaps the most ingenuous and politically clueless
I’m going with the clueless naif completely out of his depth.
regards
Poor Citizen:
It hurts to think, doesn’t it?
Poor Citizen: If you truly are a poor citizen, you may want to head to the Cobo Arena in Detroit. I hear the Gov’t is handing out cash (stimulus money). Here are actual quotes when interviewed by a reporter (Rogulski) from Detroit’s WJR:
ROGULSKI: Why are you here?
WOMAN #1: To get some money.
ROGULSKI: What kind of money?
WOMAN #1: Obama money.
ROGULSKI: Where’s it coming from?
WOMAN #1: Obama.
ROGULSKI: And where did Obama get it?
WOMAN #1: I don’t know, his stash. I don’t know. (laughter) I don’t know where he got it from, but he givin’ it to us, to help us.
WOMAN #2: And we love him.
WOMAN #1: We love him. That’s why we voted for him!
WOMEN: (chanting) Obama! Obama! Obama! (laughing)
So is this how you save our economy??
In autumn sunlight
A young bird soars
- a pane of glass awaits
Norwegian tin echoes
off late summer winds
rusts before our eyes
Alley cats screeching
hot breath in cold air
purr only when petted
Shadows lengthen
Israel listens
And awaits the dawn
Friends scatter
Enemies gather
Happy New Year
A tiger asked me to dance
November moonlight
Suggested bared teeth were a smile
In the end
Winter comes
to us all
Loons landing
Face first
summer lake
Preening thrushes
Shedding plumage
hope and change-molting
cfbleachers bravo. It’s both heartbreaking and symbolic that we turn to haiku seeking for comfort and insight. Obama could do worse.
Thank you David Solway, cfbleachers and ReNae. Yes. Sadly. Yes.
Who would have thought that the 60′s generation of screaming “flower children” — brainlessly screaming “down with the system” from the comfort of their “system” liberty and prosperity — wouldn’t have grown up?
Instead, they remained infantile and irrational, have diseased the minds of the young in the schools and universities —
Obama is their evil spawn —
and will soon live to see the devastation that they will have brought on their own future generations — and the world — with their pure, unadulterated, all-consuming, stupidity.
It seems they will get their wish.
I hope they live long enough to witness and personally suffer under the ugly results they will have wrought — and with their many millions of dying breaths — have a moment where they can no longer blame and deny — but bitterly — very bitterly — regret.
I have tended to favour the incompetent fool/fantasist over the conspiracy theory. And I am generally averse to “third way” perspectives, these being themselves a mark of a Gnostic fantasist; nonetheless, should we not consider that Obama represents a widespread left-liberal resentment that is only partly incompetent and only partly worldly and intent on “real change” (as opposed to endlessly reproducing the fantasy that they will achieve “real change” by dint of their inherent specialness)? In other words they are the bright students who while “smart” and learned in certain techniques have nonetheless failed, in the end, to be properly initiated into society; they are the privileged drop-outs who have been given affirmative action jobs or media-academic-government sinecures in attempts to make it appear they are not drop outs but part of the system.
Or, in other words, the current secessionists are not the tea-party conservatives but the Wall St.-Washington-media-academic crowd. In their exodus, yes they allow things to fall apart; but ultimately they are not so much able to destroy America from within, as they are not fully within. So what we are now faced with is the curious dynamic of elitist exodus vs. the yet powerless tea party. And you can’t stage a real fight on those terms if the elite are trying to run instead of trying to squash the republicans and thus allowing the fight to take real shape. Mass confusion reigns.