Roger,

We live under the sign of Celebritocracy. It is one of the many corollaries to the masses ascension to power, as noted by Ortega y Gasset—the erstwhile democrat and republican—in 1930. His “senorito satisfecho” (a Dandy?)lived a life ensnared in rank materialism and endless craving, one bereft of ennobling religious and cultural values. It is into this void existence that the masses project their false gods, their spectral vicars spawned from a vapid subjectivity that is largely the locked stepped result of the industries of his culture. So Obama, the telegenic orator, is an aestheticized product who has been converted by the media, his campaign and other entities into a charismatic figure, a celebrity among a culture of celebrities, a superstar, a phenomenon, an envoy from the divine. Should we expect less?

In Arabic he is like Borges’ Zahir—the apparent, the visible, the obvious, the manifest, the surface, the exoteric, the literal, the mesmerizing, the manifest name of God and the twin of His Concealed name. As such, he emanates an aura of the Charismatic Ones, the Sufic barakah. And by way of the Swahili we thence get the proper name Barack.

Thus, in Obama’s case, we have an instance of a propaganda broadside. Yet, not all propaganda is solely practiced by Arendt’s totalitarians. All political discourse is propagandic insofar as it is an attempt to freeze polysemic signifiers. The terms, Invisible Hand, human rights, freedom, and their kin, are abstract signifiers that must be frozen if intelligible communication is to take place. Many quote Nietzsche’s famous description of truth as a “marching army of metaphors, metonomies….” But omit the last term in the quote “anthropomorphisms”, and yet this process of freezing metaphors and other figures of speech in time is what we must do to communicate with each other.

Adorno characterizes this process in his Aesthetic Theory and elsewhere as the formation of a claim as a determinate negation—that is, in stating that something is the case we negate other claims about what else it may be. These are ideological formations because they are cognitively and affectively valenced and partial prescriptions that define complex terms. Such that when I define freedom to be the elimination of all constraints on my ability to act as I please, I have frozen the meaning of an abstract noun, and this is why it is an anthropomorphism, for it is neither a thought of the gods nor a fact of nature–unless one can unfurl an argument that sustains a metaphysical realism. Thus, in Adorno’s view all such conceptualizations are partial and must be negated upon their formation, for if we take a part for the whole we take illusion over the necessity to press on to the pragmaticd formation of “better” claims. The truth is not “out there” on this view; rather, it is a regulative idea, a norm we strive to achieve, as in early the German Romanticism of Hamann

Following on Adorno’s view of the inconstancy of our terms of thought and discourse, I am conducting in a different venue, what I call an aesthetic reduction wherein the foundations of cultural artefacts are seen as aesthethic artefacts. As in Derrida, but sans his infinite playfulness, the nature of foundational claims in all walks of life oscillate in an infinite dance until we anthropomorhize their foundational figures of speech.

There are severe dangers with any aestheticized politics as Benjamin and even that paladin of the left, Terry Eagleton, advert. The problem lies in the claimed irrationalism that lurks in the aesthetic due to its reliance on feeling and not cognition. From neo-Wagnerian myth we get the perversions of the Nazis. Yet, to paraphrase Kant, and as neuroscience is showing us today (see Damasio and many others): there is no cognition without feeling and no feeling without cognition. That is what makes Adorno’s determinate negations ideological: they are not just feelings for we are conscious of them because they have some cognitive content. We can articulate them. The danger becomes critical when the propaganda becomes naturalized and driven into the unconscious. The deceptions must be exposed for what they are—mere artefacts—before they become sedimented and lost to the conscious mind.

Thus, everyday, all of us are carpet bombed by cultural institutions—from right, left, and center—so that we view the world through their ideological prisms. As Barthes argued years ago, these purveyors naturalize their ideologies where they become homologous with the laws of nature—that is, insofar as we are conscious of them, they are like gravity, a given that is beyond reproach. All are pernicious—but thankfully imperfect– efforts to mold us into automatons, into senoritos satisfechos, into the pawns of culture industries that structure our experiences to fit their purposes.

Because it cannot be otherwise we are being propagandized by the pro-Obama forces. But this is also the case with McCain. It is the unavoidable nature of the poltical to sturcture what we think and how we feel about the issues at hand.

For most issues McCain has to take the lead and he has not yet done so. You will see grappling with the issues when the Republican campaign really kicks off. But here is one issue for you: Does Obama mean to govern according to the move-towards-the-center pronouncements he has been making lately, or according to the nitwit leftist promises he was making during the primary campaign? If you don’t think that is a real issue, you are naive.

It’s not that Obama himself is a Fuhrer wannabe, although he does seem to have an enormously inflated sense of his own worth based on no discernable accomplishments. His devoted followers, however, give off the whiff of the brownshirt. Of course, the New Left and its successors always did give off such a smell.

I’m afraid too much of that public is the product of the “education” Judge Bork describes in the early chapters of Slouching Towards Gomorrah.

It is clear from the context of the clip you referenced in a previous post that Obama was speaking about diplomats and foreign service workers, not a para-military style operation.

I am no Obama supporter — far from it — but these sorts of misrepresentations only serve to *help* Obama’s case, not hinder it.