[reprinted from WOID: a journal of visual language]
There came an astonishing moment in Obama’s victory speech in North Carolina last night when his accent shifted almost imperceptibly from Ivy-League elitist into something unmistakably black: you could tell from the slightly more open ys at the end of his adverbs ("happile" for "happily"), and the lighter pressure on the ng in his gerunds, half-way between "singing" and "singin’. Why, the man sounded positively Jacksonian : Jesse Jacksonian.
The race thing has never been too far from the surface in this election, it’s simply taken forms that are more and more repressed – that is, more and more presented as "not about race." Watching these defenses crumble, one after the other, in these primaries, has been a delight, as when some pinhead got his pun-dick handed to him for his wish-fulfillment thought that Obama wasn’t supported by the "working class," as opposed, I suppose, to the unworking class: you know, like, ummm, black folks.
Unfortunately, as any shrink will tell you, the closer the patient comes to confronting her unconscious defenses, the greater the resistance. My senator will go on, but it’s all a little tragic and sad to watch, like the Madness of Ajax.
Because of course Hillary doesn’t hate blacks, she just has another scenario for them. Like Tonto, Obama’s assigned role was to show that he’s as good and smart and talented as all the rest. Point made. Now die. You’re a better man than I, Gunga Din, but at the end of this movie I’ll be the last one standing. If Rev. Wright provoked such rage among the politicians it’s because he answered the corny old liberal line, "We’re all in this together," with the corny old black activist’s line: "What you mean, ‘we,’ honkie muthafucka?"
The girl can’t help it, she was born that way, politically. What’s at stake now for Hillary isn’t simply her career, it’s the life lessons she learned, sitting on the porch of a New York summer evening whittling wood with that good ol’ college-professor mentor of hers, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. It was Moynihan who taught her all about the "Culture of Poverty," that subtle social pressure that prevents black men who’ve been raised without a strong father figure from achieving their full potential – becoming President of the United States for instance. And when Bill scuttled the Welfare system, how could he know he'd be successful beyond his wildest dreams, forcing underachieving blacks to take Personal Responsibility for themselves? No more excuses, Barack Obama, no more crutches like delegate counts and popular votes.
So most of us have voted, and we chose, not the best of men, but a man who seemed best suited for the job, and we move on. The rest, we don't pay them no mind. That’s just liberal folks' way of talkin’...