Thursday, January 22, 2009

Oxybarama's Extras

clipped from www.atimes.com

United States President Barack Obama "signaled a commitment to pragmatism not
just as a governing strategy but as a basic value", according to
unintentionally hilarious inauguration dispatch by the New York Times'
Washington
bureau chief David Sanger. Pragmatism, of course, is not a value,
but rather the triumph of expediency over values. To call pragmatism a "basic
value" is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms, like "studied ignorance", or
"impassioned apathy". Obama had plenty of that today, too.
His melanin carried the meaning, which is
to say that he was judged by the color of his skin rather than the content of
his character, in a precise reversal of Martin Luther King Jr's famous phrase.
The son of a
Kenyan economist and an American anthropologist walked off with the
blood-stained mantle of seven decades of civil rights struggle. If the black
poets and clergy offered a counterfeit of real emotion, it is hard to blame
them. They were just the extras on Obama's stage set.