Michelle Obama, Stating the Obvious

So, at age 44, Michelle Obama has finally seen something that makes her proud of her country. I'm sure the dust up this is causing is a complete surprise to her; she was relaxed, in her groove, among friends and admirers when she launched into what to her was surely an unexeptionable riff. To the left-leaning audiences she is used to, the notions that America should be spelled Amerika; that Americans are deservedly hated and looked down upon by the rest of the world; that America is the source of all conflict, poverty, and inequality; that our basic culture as a country is racist, sexist, phalleocentric, homophobic, colonialist, imperialist, and worst of all, Christian; that if all those gun-toting tobacco-chewing slack-jawed stump-toothed snake-handling fundamentalists out there in fly over country could just be, you know, silenced, we could move forward and not be so embarrassed in front of our European exemplars; these are among the tacitly held commonplaces that make her candid statement that after all, there is something that is able to redeem this disgrace, this Bushitler wasteland of backwardness and darkness, not seem out of place at all.

And what is it that can redeem such a pathetic wasteland, that allows her to admit, for the first time, she is proud of her country? Why, that people--at least the moth-like creatures drawn to the porchlight eminations of the Obamas--are hoping again! Hope has made a comeback, she says, in the form of the One Who Would Come--and the people are getting it! That is what makes her proud--all the little people out there have been able, with the help of the mesmerizing powers of the Second Coming of JFK (or is it MLK?), to rouse themselves and dare to place their hope in...Him!

The Obama campaign theme--The Audacity of Hope--has been given a new meaning I think.