Obama-as-cult-leader, meet Obama-as-anti-Christ

Some people just won't quit.

In the link above, you'll see a just-published Newsweek column on Barack Obama's similarities to the anti-Christ. Obama-as-anti-Christ, of course, is a sister talking point to the Obama-as-Hitler and Obama-as-cult-leader memes.

Wesley Pruden and the Obama-as-cult-leader meme

Of all the "conceptual scoop" stories from this past election cycle, none offended me more than the Obama-as-cult-leader meme.

Does it ring a bell?

If you recall, this narrative reached its zenith in February, when a slew of conservative and pro-Hillary columnists scrambled to frame Obama's popularity in negative terms. Faced with a candidate adored by millions, a candidate who inspired apathetic young people to become politically engaged, a candidate surging in the national polls against Hillary Clinton, these writers attempted the seemingly impossible: to use Obama's popularity against him.

In a 20-day span, stories exploiting the "cult meme" appeared in:

New York Times (Krugman)
New York Sun (Skenazy)
Washington Post (Krauthammer)
Los Angeles Times (Stein)
Boston Herald (Fitzgerald)
Politico (Lerer)
ABC News (Tapper)
Time (Klein)
Washington Times (Pruden)

This post focuses on that final name, Wesley Pruden. He's the editor emeritus of the Washington Times, a conservative daily with a circulation of about 93,775. Pruden has written a twice-weekly column titled "Pruden on Politics" for the Times since 1993.

From the Iowa caucuses on January 3 to Election Day on November 4, 2008, Pruden published 86 columns in the Washington Times, 84 of which mentioned Barack Obama, according to my search on LexisNexis. I read every single one of these columns -- don't ask me why -- and I can safely say that Wesley Pruden was one of the most ardent advocates of the Obama-as-cult-leader meme.

Here are the numbers:

• Number of stories in which Obama supporters are described as members of a "cult": 7.
• Number of references to Obama as "the Anointed One": 7.
  
• Number of references to Obama supporters as "glassy-eyed": 10.
• Number of references to Obama as "the American Idol": 11.
  
• Number of references to Obama as a "messiah": 16.
  

And this is just a taste. There are countless, less enumerable examples. On July 15, for example, Pruden previewed Obama's Germany address by writing "Soon Obama is off to Berlin in pursuit of a Leni Riefenstahl to duplicate spectacle when he stands before the Brandenburg Gate." Riefenstahl, of course, was Adolf Hitler's propagandist. There's a lot of user-made bullshit online comparing Obama to Hitler (I thought about embedding a YouTube video, but I didn't want to up the view count. Feel free to Google the two men's names for a torrent of Photoshopped images and the like), but for a veteran editor and journalist to use the hateful comparison is astounding.

In his very last column before Election Day, Pruden went all out with an extended comparison between Obama and the Pied Piper. The comparison, he wrote, lied in both men's ability "to identify with children." Obama, thus, sends us impressionable young people into a trance, like the mythical Pied Piper. He elsewhere referred condescendingly to Obama supporters as "robots" and "crazies" who're duped into submission by their "orator Prince."

So what was the harm in all of this? Why have I spent so much time detailing Pruden's attempts to frame Obama as a cult leader and his supporters as cultists?

I have two reasons.

First, I believe writers like Pruden created an environment for this line of attack:



Pruden even linked Obama to Paris Hilton and Brittany Spears a full six months before John McCain's campaign.

Second, and more importantly, I found the Obama-as-cult-leader meme shockingly offensive. I worked as a new media intern for Obama's campaign in Iowa. I met dozens of young Obama supporters, college kids who took semesters off to work for the senator. According to Pruden and other right-wing columnists, we were a group of Kool-Aid-drinking drones. We worshipped Obama as though he were "born in a stable in Bethlehem," as though we were an impressionable mass of Obama Youth.

I can understand wanting to tear down a political opponent, but this line of attack was downright socially irresponsible. We are a country marked by low voter turnout among young people, no one can deny that. My generation, prior to this election, was defined by its apathy. So it is inexcusible for Pruden and other conservatives to have framed young political activism as fanatical and cult-like; their words did nothing but make apathy more appealing to people my age. Plenty of kids I knew internalized the Obama-as-cult-leader meme during this election -- some even cited it to justify their political detachment.

Pruden, more so than any mainstream writer I've come across, pushed this message mercilessly, week after week. Along with every other writer who propelled this opportunistic, destructive attack, he ought to be ashamed of himself.

YES: Video of Malkmus covering "Funk #49"

As I mentioned in my last post, one of the absolute highlights of Stephen Malkmus' Halloween set in Iowa City was a balls-out cover of The James Gang's "Funk #49."

Some good soul in St. Louis managed to do what I should have done that night: Get it on video.



Brilliant.

Stephen Malkmus in Iowa City

It was a perfect storm: Friday night // Halloween // Stephen Malkmus // The Picador.

The night began at about 5pm. I called the Picador to ask about tickets. Only 20 left, I was told. I got in my car, bumped "Black Book," and rushed to the Iowa City staple.

Just as I entered, a man exited the bar, looking eerily like the guy in this video:



I bought my ticket at the bar and neurotically speedwalked up the street. I wanted to prove to myself that it was him. I knew if I didn't, I'd bore friends the rest of the night with my "I think I saw Malkmus, but man, I shoulda said something" stories.

Malkmus, whom I've written about before, wore thick glasses, a plaid shirt, and had a backpack strapped tight up against his back, like a real nerd. A quarter-block up the street he stopped to get something out of his bag. I walked past him and pretended to read a text-message. I was 90 percent sure it was him. I flipped my phone closed and took the ticket out of my shirt pocket. Then we had this exchange:

Me: "I think I just bought a ticket to see you."
Malkmus: "Oh, yeah? Thanks."
Me: "I'm really looking forward to it."
Malkmus: "It should be fun. All the kids'll be in costume."
Me: "Do you have a costume?"
Malkmus: "You know, not yet."
(pause)
Me: "But yeah, I think you guys are great."
Malkmus: "Thanks. You know, Blitzen Trapper's really good, too."
Me: "Yeah, I'm excited to see them, too. I hope you like Iowa City."
Malkmus: "Thanks. It should be a good night."

I can't imagine a better way to get pumped up before a show.

At the Picador, Malkmus performed songs from his four post-Pavement records -- Stephan Malkmus, Pig Lib, Face the Truth, and this year's Real Emotional Trash -- and one left-field cover. He shared the stage with his Jicks: Mike Clark, former Sleater-Kinney drummer Janet Weiss, and former Elliott-Smith-dater Joanna Bolme.

I can't provide a setlist because I didn't know every song they played, but I can tell you a few of the songs he definitely did play (highlights in bold):

Pencil Rot
Freeze the Saints
Church on White
Jenny and the Ess Dog
Hopscotch Willie
Dragon Fly Pie
Real Emotional Trash
Cold Son

And that left-field cover? Just picture Malkmus and the Jicks reemerging for their encore. Then picture the Blitzen Trapper gang trailing behind them. Then picture Malkmus, sans guitar, take the mic off the stand. From a crowded stage erupts a rendition of this:



Malkmus, who operated with relative restraint all evening, belted the lyrics to The James Gang's "Funk #49" while us kids went apeshit. He started busting out moves from the bravado rock 'n' roll playbook -- doing jump-kicks after each chorus, falling onto his back, singing on the floor, etc. It was perhaps the most over-the-top encore I've ever seen.

Exhausted with an uncontrollable grin, I left the bar and struck "Stephan Malkmus" from my list of artists to see before I die.

Sick Byrne: Talking Heads frontman in Cleveland

This past Thursday, I saw David Byrne perform in Cleveland, Ohio, as a part of his current Byrne-Eno collabo tour.

Here's a weird photo montage-thing from the event:


David Byrne, Cleveland, 10.23.08 from John Soeder on Vimeo.

Byrne performed songs from More Songs About Buildings and Food, Fear of Music, Remain in Light, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and this year's Everything that Happens will Happen Today. I've been listening to copious amounts of Talkings Heads and Brian Eno over the last month, and the investment paid off. This was one of the best shows I've seen in the last few years. Byrne busted out a few Stop Making Sense moves, including his running-man dance during "Life During Wartime" and "Burnging Down the House."

Here's a taste, albiet from a different show:



Byrne looked twice as old as anyone else on stage, this is true, but the 56-year-old New Yorker had more than enough vitality to avoid embarassing himself. He geared the set toward his new album, which is easily the worst of the five, but he still managed to play half of Remin in Light(!), arguably the greatest Talking Heads record. Here's the full setlist, with the highlights in bold:

Strange Overtones
I Zimbra
One Fine Day
Help Me Somebody (the set's real stunner)
Houses in Motion
My Big Nurse
My Big Hands
Heaven
Never Thought
The River
Crosseyed and Painless
Life is Long
Once in a Lifetime
Life During Wartime
I Feel My Stuff

Encore I:
Take Me to the River
The Great Curve

Encore II:
Air
Burning Down the House
Everything that Happens

Five Years

"Five years, that's all we've got." -- David Bowie

I was a freshman in college, just 18, when Elliott Smith died on this day five years ago. I remember taking the bus downtown for a 9:30 a.m. class that day. I got off the bus and had about 10 minutes to burn before "Philosophy and Human Nature." This was usual. The way the bus routes worked, I always had about 10-15 minutes to kill in the morning. So I paced to the university library, went up one floor, and found a row of empty computers. If we were in the library now, I could show you the exact spot.

Within three minutes, I hit this. My first response, honestly -- I thought it was a joke. A strange, unprovoked joke. Back then, I visited Sweet Adeline everyday; my fingers spasmed the URL and I waited for the page to load. It took a few seconds. It was like turning a blind corner.

The page appeared, not in its usual layout. An enormous photo of Elliott faded in, tagged "1969-2003." He was smiling. I clicked back to Pitchfork with violence. I read the lead, absorbed the facts in a frenzy. Every detail made the joke go away. Los Angeles, Jennifer Chiba, two-stab wounds to the chest. This was real. He committed suicide, I remember thinking. He finally did it, he actually did it, I never thought he'd ever do it, I never wanted to believe he'd do it, but I knew some day he would, or he might, and now the safety drill is real.

His last written words, scrawled on a Post-It note, made me shut off the computer: "I'm so sorry--love, Elliott. God forgive me."

I called a close friend and spoke words I never thought I'd say. Then I cried in a lecture hall with over 100 students. Then I skipped work and my afternoon classes.

I'm unnerved by how distant that day feels to me now. Five years after the fact, I remember details and breakdowns, but even my most emotionally masochistic impulses can't resusitate how I felt in October 2003. Maybe I was just a bigger feeler at 18 -- my highs higher, my lows lower. I'm not sure.

Elliott Smith left me -- and us -- with five devastating albums, not to mention two posthumous releases. I could dedicate an entire blog to those seven records, if I could conjure up that post-trauma drive to collect, buy, and write about all things Elliott Smith. The kind of drive that led me to buy VHS bootlegs and $45 tee-shirts on eBay; to amass outtakes, b-sides, live covers, and interviews; to create and update everyday a month-long countdown to From a Basement on the Hill's release date on the Sweet Adeline message boards; to care actively and deeply about not forgetting him or his music.

Now, at 23, I've amassed all I'm likely to amass. The unbridled passion is gone; what's left is a lifetime of cherishing the songs and the memories associated with them. I miss him as much as I could miss anyone I've never met. I miss knowing he's alive, knowing the sounds from my speakers are coming from a living human, not a relic from the past.

As Alan Alda said in Crimes and Misdemeanors, "Comedy equals tragedy plus time." Five years later, at least I can laugh.

Laziest review ever: W.

Sorry I've been away. It's been a very busy month. I will write more (much, much more) when the election is over. For now, here is a review of W., presented in bullets of likes and dislikes. Simple and to the point -- just how George W. likes his memos.

Pluses:

• Solid acting. Brolin does a good job of avoiding caricature. Cromwell as Bush senior is just as strong; he keeps the "Daddy Issues" thread from becoming an Oedipal bore.
  
• Structure. I thought the temporal back-and-forth structure of Weiser's script was effective. It accentuated Stone's central goal: to illustrate the shocking transformation of Bush the burnout to Bush the president. Placing the two time periods beside one another created an effective, funny split-screen image of Bush.
  
• Entertaining. Simply, it's a slight film, and slight films don't take much of a toll mentally. The film deserves credit for presenting presidential politics in an engaging way without over-the-top imagery and historical revisionism (see JFK and Nixon) or SNL-style parody.
  

Minuses:

• Though I liked the structure, I can't recall a single sequence in the entire film. Sure, there are scenes, but the film jumps around so much that each moment stands in isolation. Though it might sound trivial, this is a serious flaw. Almost every scene begs for a lead-in or a follow-up, to reveal how Bush prepared for or digested the iconic moments of his presidency. Stone recreates the "Mission Acclompished" moment, which is fine, but imagine how much more revealing that scene would have been if we saw Bush in the aircraft before landing. What was he thinking then? Did he have any feeling that this could be a major political blunder? In another scene, we see Bush speak to injured soliders in a hospital, a not uncommon image within the news media. The scene is meant to be tragic, but it's not much different than seeing the president speak to soldiers on CNN. If we saw how Bush responded emotionally and tempermentally to the image of wounded soldiers, however, that would be something. Would Bush lose sleep, would he be tempted to shift policies, would he care? Those are the questions I had going into the film, and, of course, Stone answered none of them.
• Reliance on "iconic" moments. This goes along with the first point. Perhaps Stone wanted to avoid allegations of overreaching and bias to such a great degree that he decided to focus on what cannot be refuted: the images on TV. Right-wing critics can't say Stone fabricated Colin Powell's UN address or Bush's "Mission Accomplished" address. I think those moments should have been in the film, certainly, but Stone uses them as placeholders for actual insight into his characters.
  
• Most scenes can be boiled down to one simple purpose. This relates to the above two faults. Becuase the film leaps so much in time, Stone essentially forces himself to cram "an important moment" in every scene. Thus, every scene could begin with a title like "Wherein W. decides the oil rigs are not for him," "Wherein W. decides he will become born again," "Wherien W. addresses the State of the Union on Iraq's nuclear ambitions," "Wherein W. is shown as a rusty, inexperienced politician," "Wherein W. decides he will run for president." Simply, W. shows us the dots in George W. Bush's life, but rarely does it connect those dots. It'd be easy to transcribe the film into a bullet-pointed PowerPoint presentation, to strip every scene of the fat to reveal an obvious plotpoint. Though I liked the film's structure chronologically, I didn't like the Crash-style development of plot and character. These moments felt like necessary pitstops in a meaningless tour of the president's life.
  
• Use of Bushism in dialogue. This was just silly. Maybe a viewer 20 years from now will hear Bush's "is our children learning?" line and laugh, but Stone obviously isn't making this film for future audiences. Why else would he rush the production for a pre-election release date? As a 2008 viewer, the Bushisms have an awkward distancing effect. They're artificial and contrived, and they rupture the film's restrained tone, no less.
• The Daddy storyline. While I don't think the Jr./Sr. relationship is an inherently idiotic narrative thread, it lacks complexity and borders on trite. I might have felt differently about this, however, if the film had ended on a different note. (SPOILER FOLLOWS) Had the film ended with W.'s reelection, that would have been narratively satisfying. I wanted a scene between W. and Bush Sr. on the night of Bush's reelection in 2004. Did either of them make explicit that W. had succeeded where his father failed? Was it the elephant in the room? Did W. no longer feel he needed his father's approval because he had done what his father could not -- namely, catch Saddam and get reelected? These elements make for satisfying, ironic closure (ironic given how W.'s second term has gone), but Stone doesn't go there. Instead, the daddy storyline -- like the rest of the film -- just slowly fades away, seemingly arbitrarily.
  

Final grade: B-. I don't regret seeing it. I like the idea of a slight, unambitous film about a divisive president, but the execution was just so off that it'd be a real stretch to call W. anything other than OK.