"ICH BIN EIN BULLSHITTER"

Well, what can one say? Barak Obama, the universal savior of mankind has spoken to the people of Berlin and we are all expected to be impressed. The feeling he engenders in me is one of foreboding. Surely a profound letdown must follow the realization of Obama's mere mortality.

People expect so much of politicians. Democracy in a mass society like ours drives people to believe that somewhere, there simply must be godlike persons like those in movies, unsullied, unsordid people who live out our ideals and guide us. Why these people should be found in the Illinois State Legislature or the legal profession is beyond me.

What the German public made of the quasi-mystical happy talk Obama inflicted on them I don't know. I don't know if Germany has what we call Motivational Speakers. If not, now they know the phenomenon, language used to create a mood of uplift and aspiration totally devoid of context or judgement. Obama is a master of this style of linguistic legerdemain. Like Bill Clinton, he effuses a fog of good feeling that implies bad faith to anyone who would break his spell. This is also the essence of the salesman's and the con man's art. Like most motivational speakers, he is simultaneously an artifact and a tool of the new managerial elite. He is the ultimate expression of how we live now. A multi-cultural man from nowhere, expressing himself in practiced bromides, manipulating the credulity of an increasingly puerile electorate, Obama may be our future.