The most effective community organizer is someone who isn’t perceived to be a community organizer at all. Planting an idea and letting someone else take the credit is important because the only way anything gets done in the real world is by letting other people think they invented your own ideas. Besides, they take the fall if your plan goes bad.
Barack Obama loves the spotlight and it shows. The problem with the media glare, though, is that it can burn up anything it touches. When facing the limelight, it’s wise to wear shades, for it is easy to get blinded by the light. Barack Obama, like any wise politician, wants to be his own man. Yet, if he wanted to be his own man, he should have shunned the crowds and the media glare instead of courting them. The glare of celebrity can effectively turn a man into a prisoner of his own image and a puppet of his own entourage.
On one level, I feel sorry for Barack Obama and what his family is going through. The attention of the crowds, even the attention of enemies, can feel like a drug. It can make a man feel pumped up. It can give a man a false sense of his own importance. And given the dizzying success of his Senate campaign in 2004 and his epic welcome in Kenya two years later, it would take a strong man to not let such hero worship go to his head.
Yet, such adulation itself is dangerous not only to the health of a free republic but especially to Barack Obama himself and the issues he stands for. Barack Obama’s popularity feels like the sea rushing away from the beach, giving the impression that the sea is parting before one’s eyes. This is when I know I should run for the hills, for that is a sure sign of a tsunami soon hitting the shore, sweeping away all of the children picking up seashells and stranded fish on the bank.
Royalism is dangerous. In ancient Sumeria and Babylon, the king or his substitute was sacrificed on New Year’s Day to satisfy Inanna/Ishtar. The historical heart of the royal myth is the man who offers himself up as a sacrifice to satisfy the bloodlust of people who seek someone to blame for all of their problems. Adonis dies, and his sexiness comes from the knowledge that he is condemned to death. By converting Bush hatred into Obama worship, Obama is setting the stage for an orgy of hatred against himself.
While it may be fun for the time being to satirize Barack Obama’s pretensions, the worst pretensions belong not to him but to his worshippers. It may be fun to laugh at the Obama campaign’s silliness, but the joke is on those who cannot control their own emotions. The joke is on those who expect miracles that will not come true.
There are good reasons why the artist known as Prince became a recluse. Celebrity can mean that a man gets warped into a puppet on a string for adulating crowds, a boy toy for star-crazed women, and a cash cow for cynical managers. Perhaps the wisest thing the rockers of KISS ever did was put on makeup. Because of that makeup, the men of KISS could be men in their normal lives instead of getting treated as living gods.
There are joys in living in the shadows.
