Victoria Jackson, the ditz who in the 1980s made a career on Saturday Night Live out of playing a ditz, is the latest celebrity to drop a poorly written broadside against Barack Obama.
On her eponymous blog, right under a click-through ad for her latest album, Ukulele Ditties for Itty Bitty Kiddies, Jackson lets loose a rambling, semi-coherent rant that derides Obama as a relativist and humanist, and cites as evidence the fact that the Bible passages he quotes are too willfully obscure, and thus selected to overtly court Evangelicals. (Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up.) In addition to scattering commas like pitched dice, confusing the word “attribute” with “contribute,” and labeling Obama a communist, racist and liar, Jackson asserts that, “Obama bears traits that resemble
the anti-Christ, and I’m scared to death that un-educated [sic] people will
ignorantly vote him into office.” Yes, she actually types those words, acknowledging that, “I know my stance might keep me from L.A. jobs, since (almost) the whole
town is liberal but… [sometimes] one must stand for what they believe in, and put
truth before popularity.”
So this is an inarguable truth in her mind? That he is the anti-Christ, or merely “bears traits that resemble” him? I guess I’m confused. I’m all for political expression on all sides, really, but I confess I’m both shocked and depressed by the levels of batshit-crazy present in opinion pieces like this — and the much commented upon op-ed from Jon Voight, whose prose reads like his train of thought skipped the rails and plunged off a cliff. Let me bottom-line it: you sound like ignorant rubes, anyone who peddles the most repugnant of this material.
When I hear/read stuff like this, it always comes off as desperate, needy invective from emotional hoarders — people who so feed on others’ insecurities and reactions that they need to try to exercise reverse mind control. It’s never about an intellectual, reasoned response; it’s always about attacking the strength of a feeling, and how this shouldn’t be trusted. Wasn’t that at the heart of Footloose, too?
Particularly with respect to the anti-Christ stuff, if you’re more invested in finding links between outlying scripture and current events to support your worldview, rather than living in the moment and confronting problems in something at least resembling head-on fashion, you’re not living as a Christian concerned with Christian works, with doing good and making the world a better place. You’re living merely to jump-circle defend the status quo, because any advancement in science, technology, social custom or anything else is another brick in the path toward the Great Reckoning. You might as well be living in a cave, honestly, and guarding the tribal flame.
None of this would matter, I guarantee you, if Barack Obama’s name was Barry Johnson. I’m not saying that all of the whackjob-fringe criticism of him falls purely along racial lines, but this isn’t about Obama, this is about people projecting their own uncertainties about the state of this country onto a man they have never met, because they fear the sea changes — racially, culturally, geographically — that this country will undergo in the next two generations. So the guy with the funny name is the easy, most immediate, front-and-center target. And after eight years of bewildering inarticulateness, “speaking well” becomes elitist, and appealing to a sense of hope and optimism becomes a reason to play the great Revelations card. It’s enough to make one mull the benefits of forced sterilization, really.