thanks guys 
. the narcissism? this is my take.
genuine insight is as rare as egotism is pervasive. but there is the salon and its accoutrements. the salon is the smart set. people want to be in the salon. they acquire the accoutrements in hopes of admission. the purpose is to gratify their egos, not achieve insight. when met with success, it threatens to become narcissism. the subject believes they wield the authority insight confers.
what are the relevant accoutrements here? 60s soft socialism and the particular decadence attending the civil rights victory. from MLK Jr. we get Malcom X and Elijah Muhammad, whence Louis Farrakhan and Wright. from freedom and discipline we get license and fantasy. the popularity of the views, however inherently idiotic, provides the salon. but we also have the victory of the 60s in the universities, where the victors exploited the university’s previous, earned reputation for excellence and truth – now they have the universities, and therefore truth.
obama has all the credentials and therefore all the accoutrements. but these accoutrements, never mind their glamour, are like dorian gray – beautiful and seductive, but vampiric and ghoulish. this is decadence. and it slipped into decadent because it is in reality narcissism. it is parasitic, not symbiotic. the “reconciliation,” for example, posited by Wright is obviously not a reconciliation – the reconciliation has already taken place, it continues to take place, we live in actual fact in a constant attitude of racial reconciliation. but the conflict is preserved in the black and post-60s intellectual imagination, kept alive by those who require them for the inegrity of their decadent acoutrements, without which they would suddenly realize they are not in a salon, there is no private heroism, their is no glamour. their narcissistic little odyssey of social-heroism-by-affiliation would (probably) collapse. and then they would simply be – bourgeois, capitalists, Americans. the establishment.
just look at Wright – the guy is from a middle or upper-middle class community in Philadelphia. he served in the marines. and then he went to college and divinity school and found that his blackness Really Meant Something. it made him An Apostle. his color was the vindicated stain of injustice corrected. he was the slave in Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, where the slave is wiser and more moral than the master, and is destined to win, has even already won because of this superior insight his mere position confers on him.
and so with obama. it is self-evident that the only thing he is interestd in “transcending” is George Bush and what he represents. clearly his blackness serves him in the same way it serves Wright and others who believe that their race is beatifying – who use the language of reconciliation and overcoming only as a rhetorical stick with which to beat whitey.
obviously this tendency is not as pronounced in obama, but that is the basic aesthetic-intellectual center of gravity in my opinion, and its basis is narcissism.
honestly, i bet obama’s a pretty good guy. it’s not as though most of my friends aren’t like this in one way or another. in fact i probably am too. but i just don’t want this guy to president. this kind of stuff screws up the better natural emotional reaction to things like Islamist aggression and fiscal responsability. and the fact is one of our biggest domestic problems is exactly this kind of race hucksterism, and its biggest victims are black people, for too many of whom it apparently provides too much of an intellectual temptation.
