Karma Chameleon
h/t FJ, Robert Louis Stevenson and um um Boy George
I'm a man without conviction,
I'm a man who doesn't know
how to settle a contradiction.
You come and go, you come and go.
Karma karma karma karma karma chameleon,
you come and go, you come and go.
Loving would be easy if your colours were like my dream,
red gold and green, red gold and green.
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Comment by mos— 2008/08/29 @ 09:02 AM — (Reply)
Comment by mos— 2008/08/29 @ 09:03 AM — (Reply)
Comment by Dugg— 2008/08/29 @ 11:47 AM — (Reply)
the point MOS is that Obama is a chameleon
Comment by Elmers Brother— 2008/08/29 @ 09:49 AM — (Reply)
Jeesh... was it that difficult to grasp the association???
Comment by — 2008/08/30 @ 09:47 AM — (Reply)
Comment by Elmers Brother— 2008/08/30 @ 09:56 AM — (Reply)
Is he a militant liberation theology follower or a man for ALL Americans?
McCain might not know how many homes he owns but he didn't get his house with the help of a convicted housing financier.
Fred Siegel
The Australian
May 5, 2008
POLITICAL campaigning necessarily produces a wide gap between words and deeds. This is the price of bringing together a broad coalition with disparate interests. All effective politicians are at times authentically insincere or sincerely inauthentic. Exaggeration, embellishment, overstatement, doubletalk, deception and lies presented as metaphorical truths are the order of the day.
So, of course, Barack Obama is no different. He exaggerates the credit he deserves for a limited piece of ethics-reform legislation. He embellishes when he presents himself as having had a consistent record on the Iraq war when in fact he's done a fair amount of zigzagging.
He engages in doubletalk when, on free trade and Iraq, he tells the yokels one thing and the policy people another. He overstates when he presents his minimal accomplishments in the Illinois Senate as proof of his stature. He engages in systematic deception when he says he doesn't take money from lobbyists.
He presents a lie as metaphorical truth when he says it was the 1965 bloody Sunday attacks on peaceful civil rights protesters in Selma, Alabama, that inspired his parents to marry. (They had been married for years already.)
All of this is unappealing, but also unexceptional. What makes it different is that there's not just a gap but a chasm between his actions and his professed principles, which would normally kill a candidacy. And because his deeds are so few, the disparity is all the more salient.
Obama, far more than the others, is the "judge me by what I say and not what I do" candidate. He wants to be the conscience of the country without necessarily having one himself.
The disparity between Obama's rhetoric of transcendence and his conventional Chicago racial and patronage politics is a leitmotiv of his political career. In New York, politicians (Al Sharpton excepted) are usually forced to pay at least passing tribute to universal principles and the ideal of clean government.
But Chicago, until recently a city of Lithuanians, blacks and Poles governed by Irishmen on the patronage model of the Italian Christian Democrats, is the city of political and cultural tribalism.
Blacks adapted to the tribalism and the corrupt patronage politics that accompanied it. Historically, one of the ironies of Chicago politics is that the clean-government candidates have been the most racist, while those most open to black aspirations have been the most corrupt. When the young Jesse Jackson received his first audience with then mayor Richard Daley Sr - impervious to the universalism of the civil rights movement in its glory - offered him a job as a toll-taker. Jackson thought the offer demeaning but in time adapted.
In Chicago, racial reform has meant that the incumbent mayor, Richard M. Daley, has been cutting blacks in on the loot. Louis Farrakhan, Jackson, Jeremiah Wright and Obama are all, in part, the expression of that politics. It hasn't always worked for Chicago, which, under the pressure of increasing taxes to pay for bloated government, is losing its middle class. But it has served the city's political class admirably.
For all his Camelot-like rhetoric, Obama is a product, in significant measure, of the political culture that Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass described: "We've had our chief of detectives sent to prison for running the Outfit's (the mob's) jewellery-heist ring. And we've had white guys with Outfit connections get $100 million in affirmative action contracts from their drinking buddy, Mayor Richard Daley ... That's the Chicago way."
At no point did Obama, the would-be saviour of US politics, challenge this corruption, except for face-saving gestures as a legislator. He was, in his own Harvard law way, a product of it.
Why, you may ask, did the operators of Chicago's political machine support Obama? Part of the answer was given long ago by the then boss of Chicago, Jake Arvey.
When asked why he made Adlai Stevenson - a man, as with Obama, more famous for speeches than for accomplishments - his party's gubernatorial candidate in 1948, Arvey is said to have replied that he needed to "perfume the ticket".
Obama first played a perfuming role as a state senator. His mentor, Emil Jones, the machine-made president of the Senate, allowed him to sponsor a minor ethics bill. In return, Obama made sure to send plenty of pork to Jones's district. When asked about pork-barrel spending, Jones famously replied: "Some call it pork; I call it steak."
Obama repaid the generosity. When he had a chance to back clean Democratic candidates for president of the Cook County board of supervisors and Illinois governor, he stayed with the allies of the Outfit. The gubernatorial candidate he backed, Rod Blagojevich, is under federal investigation, in part because of his relationship with Tony Rezko, the man who helped Obama buy his house.
The Chicago way has delivered politically for Obama even this year. Ninety per cent of his popular-vote lead over Hillary Clinton comes from Illinois, and two-thirds of that 90 per cent comes just from Cook County.
Some of this advantage came from the efforts of Obama's political ally, the flame-throwing reverend James Meeks, a political force in his own right. Meeks, who mocks black moderates as "niggers", is an Illinois state senator, the pastor of a mega-church and a strong supporter of Jackson's powerful political operation, which has put its vote-pulling muscle squarely behind the Obama campaign. It was only with Obama's remark about bitter, white, working-class, small-town voters that we saw his difficulties appealing beyond the machine's reach. He won his US Senate race in 2004 not only because his opponents self-destructed but also because of the machine's ability to deliver votes.
In Pennsylvania, he has lacked such assistance and the campaigning has not gone nearly so well. First, Obama pretended to be a tenpin bowler and scored a 37. Then, appearing before a supposedly closed San Francisco audience, he complained that small-town Pennsylvanians "cling to guns or religion or antipathy towards people who aren't like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment, as a way to explain their frustrations". This is the man who belongs to a church built on bitterness, rancour and conspiratorial fear. During the Wright affair, Obama not only repeatedly lied about what he knew and when but violated the spirit of the civil rights movement in its mid-1960s glory.
When, as a young man, I was on the periphery of the movement, there was an unwritten rule that if people told racist jokes or speakers engaged in defamatory rhetoric, you needed to register your immediate disapproval by confronting the speaker or ostentatiously walking out.
Wright's "black theology" is essentially a Christianised version of Malcolm X's ideology of hate.
But for 20 years, Obama, who had planned to run for mayor of Chicago, kept silent about the close, if at times competitive, relationship between Wright, whose 8000-member mega-church gave him his political base, and Farrakhan. His ambition overrode his moral integrity.
As part of his "black value system", Wright attacked whites for their "middle classism", materialism, and "greed in a world of need". Obama sounded similar notes in his recent address at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York, in which he laid the blame for the sub-prime mortgage crisis on those who had "embraced an ethic of greed, corner cutting and inside dealing".
But that's exactly what Obama did in buying his luxurious house. Given the choice of purchasing a less expensive home or getting into bed with his fundraiser-cum-slumlord-cum-fixer Rezko, Obama chose the latter. Then again, the oppressed of Trinity United Church of Christ are building Wright a $US1.6 million ($1.7million), 960sqm home complete with four-car garage, whirlpool and butler's pantry. This house, which backs on to a golf course, is to sit in Tinley Park, a gated community in southwest Chicago that is 93 per cent white.
The Obamas' charitable giving is consistent with Wright's talking Left while living Right. Obama and his wife are quite well off. They had an estimated income of $US1.2 million from 2000 to 2004. But the man who preaches compassion and mutuality gave all of 1 per cent of that income to charity during those years. Most of that went to Wright's church.
There is a similar chasm when it comes to Obama's claim to post-partisanship. His achievements in reaching out to moderate voters are largely proleptic. But words are not deeds and, although Obama has few concrete achievements to his name, his voting record hardly suggests an ability to rise above Left v Right.
In the Illinois Senate, he made a specialty of voting present, but after his first two years in the US Senate, National Journal's analysis of rollcall votes found that he was more liberal than 86 per cent of his colleagues. His voting record has only moved further Left since then. The liberal Americans for Democratic Action gives him a 97.5 per cent rating, while National Journal ranks him the most liberal member of the Senate. By comparison, Clinton, who occasionally votes with the Republicans, ranks 16th.
Obama is such a down-the-line partisan that, according to Congressional Quarterly, in the past two years he has voted with the Democrats more often than did the party's majority leader, Harry Reid.
Likewise, for all his talk of post-racialism, Obama has played, with the contrivance of the press, traditional South Side Chicago racial politics. The day after his surprise loss in New Hampshire, and in anticipation of the South Carolina primary, with its heavily black electorate, South Side congressman Jesse Jackson Jr - Obama's national co-chairman - appeared on MSNBC to argue, in a prepared statement, that Clinton's teary moment on the campaign trail reflected her deep-seated racism.
"Those tears," said Jackson, "have to be analysed ... They have to be looked at very, very carefully in light of Katrina, in light of other things that Mrs Clinton did not cry for, particularly as we head to South Carolina, where 45 per cent of African-Americans will participate in the Democratic contest ... We saw tears in response to her appearance, so that her appearance brought her to tears, but not hurricane Katrina, not other issues."
In other words, whites who are at odds with, or who haven't delivered for, Chicago politicians can be obliquely accused of racism on the flimsiest basis, but pillars of local black politics such as Wright, with his exclusivist racial theology, are beyond criticism.
Liberals love Obama's talk of taking on powerful financial interests. But here , too, he is rather slippery. In his Cooper Union speech, he denounced in no uncertain terms the "special interests" of people on Wall Street (who are well represented among his campaign donors).
He, of course, had an opportunity to push for repealing the privileged tax treatment of private equity firms when that question was before Charles Grassley's Senate subcommittee - but he simply made a pro-forma statement in favour of doing so and disappeared.
Nationally, as in Chicago, Obama the self-styled reformer never crosses swords with any of his putative foes. To pick another example, he has attacked "predatory" sub-prime lenders while taking roughly $US1.3 million in contributions from companies in that line of business.
Obama is the internationalist opposed to free trade. He is the friend of race-baiters who thinks Don Imus deserved to be fired. He is the proponent of courage in the face of powerful interests who lacked the courage to break with Wright (until Wednesday). He is the man who would lead our efforts against terrorism yet was friendly with Bill Ayers, the unrepentant 1960s terrorist. He is the post-racialist supporter of affirmative action. He is the enemy of Big Oil who takes money from executives at Exxon-Mobil, Shell and British Petroleum.
Obama has, in a sense, represented a new version of the invisible man, a candidate whose colour obscures his failings.
But so far, the wild discrepancy between Obama's words and his deeds, and between his enormous ambitions and his minimal accomplishments, doesn't seem to have fazed his core supporters, who apparently suffer from a severe case of cognitive dissonance. Like cultists who rededicate themselves when the cult's prophecies have been falsified, his fans redouble their delusions in the face of his obvious hypocrisy.
That is because Obama, in the imagination of many of his fans in the public and the press, is both a deduction from what was - the failures of the Bush administration and the scandals of the Clintons - and an expression of what should be.
The ideal, the aspiration, is so rhetorically appealing that it has been assumed to be true. They remind one of Woodrow Wilson's answer when asked if his plan for a League of Nations was practicable: "If it won't work, it must be made to work."
Fred Siegel is a contributing editor of City Journal. He teaches at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.
Comment by Elmers Brother— 2008/08/29 @ 10:12 AM — (Reply)
Chameleons are experts on CHANGE.
Comment by kevin— 2008/08/29 @ 10:50 AM — (Reply)
LOL! "Boy Barack!"
Actually, nanc set me off in the "change" direction with her"change of life" comments thinking it would go something like... here's Barack (before) and (after) the life changing event known as a presidential election...
Comment by FJ— 2008/08/29 @ 11:13 AM — (Reply)
Comment by Elmers Brother— 2008/08/29 @ 11:52 AM — (Reply)
Comment by mos— 2008/08/29 @ 11:16 AM — (Reply)
Comment by mos— 2008/08/29 @ 11:18 AM — (Reply)
Prepared for Life Prepared for Death
Comment by Elmers Brother— 2008/08/29 @ 11:53 AM — (Reply)
Comment by jim— 2008/08/29 @ 12:12 PM — (Reply)
Comment by riffran— 2008/08/30 @ 11:25 AM — (Reply)
Comment by Elmers Brother— 2008/08/30 @ 11:37 AM — (Reply)
Comment by riffran— 2008/08/30 @ 11:50 AM — (Reply)
One of my friends (M. Stodghill) from high school used it as the motto for their homeschool...they liked it so much they made tattoos of it
I'm planning a second tattoo with those very words.
Comment by Elmers Brother— 2008/08/29 @ 12:24 PM — (Reply)
Comment by jim— 2008/08/29 @ 02:53 PM — (Reply)
I already have one tattoo, but I would like another one. I guess there isn't any real significance to them. Although I do get to explain what Isaiah 53 says.
Comment by Elmers Brother— 2008/08/30 @ 06:00 AM — (Reply)
Comment by jim— 2008/08/30 @ 10:02 AM — (Reply)
The Hebrew word qa‘aqa‘, translated “tattoo,” appears only once in the Old Testament, in a prohibition: “You shall not make any cuts in your body for the dead nor make any tattoo marks on yourselves: I am the Lord” (Lev. 19:28). Qa‘aqa‘ is commonly defined as a “cut, incision” or “gross cutting of the skin,” yet within this context it most likely refers to painting or scarring of the skin.26 It is unlikely that qa‘aqa‘ refers to self-mutilation, since that concept was already referred to earlier in the verse in the prohibition against cutting one’s body. I believe the cultural context helps explain this prohibition against tattoos. During this period, tattoos signified ownership and devotion, since a common practice in Babylonia and Egypt was to tattoo a slave with his owner’s name or the name of a god. Tattooing and self-mutilation also were religious mourning rites connected with the Canaanite fertility god.27
Tattoos and body piercings are in themselves neither moral nor immoral. In biblical cultures, tattoos and body piercings were symbols of ownership by, devotion to, identification with, and protection by a deity or master. Depending on which deity or master these symbols represent, therefore, tattoos and body piercings either may desecrate or demonstrate the image of God. Believers who are considering tattoos or body piercings first should be led by their consciences, then should consider the effects that such symbols will have on their physical bodies, interpersonal relationships, and spiritual lives.
Theologian Gerhard Kittel explains the idolatrous nature of tattoos in the Israelite culture: “When a person was tattooed he became dedicated to the god and became its servant, as well as came under its protection, so that he should not be harmed.”28 Tattoos, therefore, were associated strongly with idolatry and were prohibited because Yahweh’s exclusive claim of ownership and devotion is incompatible with the false-god cults.
Some rabbinical sources suggest that the prohibition was limited only to heathen, idolatrous, and superstitious tattoos.29 For example, rabbis believed that the master who marks his slave so that he does not run away is exempt from the prohibition in Leviticus 19:28, and the Tosepta records a rabbinic prohibition that only forbids tattooing the name of another god.30
Judging by the number of biblical references, it seems apparent that body piercing was an established custom among the Israelites. These decorations were primarily worn for aesthetic reasons, yet they too represented ownership and status. Royalty, brides, and the nation of Israel are all described as being adorned with nose rings (Gen. 24:47; Isa. 3:21; Ezek. 16:12) and earrings (Isa. 3:19; Ezek. 16:12). These decorations were worn not only by women, but also by men and children (Exod. 32:2; Judg. 8:24).
Similar to tattoos, body piercings may have had an idolatrous connotation. For example, when Jacob renewed the covenant with Yahweh, his household “gave to Jacob all the foreign gods which they had and the rings which were in their ears” (Gen. 35:4). Unlike tattoos that were prohibited in the Pentateuch, however, body piercings were prescribed. Exodus 21:6 and Deuteronomy 15:17 both indicate that a master was to pierce the ear of his slave to symbolize ownership and permanent servitude.
Tattoos and body piercings are not mentioned in the New Testament. In Galatians 6:17, however, Paul exclaims, “From now on let no one cause trouble for me, for I bear on my body the brand-marks of Jesus.” The Greek word translated “brand-mark” is stigma, which was a mark pricked, in or branded on, the body.
Similar to tattoos within the Mesopotamian culture, a stigma denoted ownership and devotion, as well as identification. In the Greco-Roman world, property such as animals, slaves, criminals, and later soldiers carried these marks. Recruits to the Roman army were most likely tattooed on the hand with the abbreviated name of the emperor, whereas criminals and slaves were marked on the forehead with their offense. 31
The meaning of Paul’s “brand-marks” cannot be answered with complete certainty. Historically, a tattoo was a source of imagery and exaggeration in literature. In the fifth century BC, a slave in Aristophanes’ Wasps effectively complains, “I’m being tattooed to death with a stick.” The humor seems to lie within the similarity of a tattoo to the black and blue marks left by a beating.32 Perhaps Paul was using “brand-marks” as a metaphor referring to his bruises, welts, and scars—the visible signs of the mistreatment he received as a slave of Christ (2 Cor. 11:23–29; Acts 14:19).33
Paul’s brand-marks further served as signs of his devotion to, and ownership by, Jesus. Just as tattoos symbolized devotion to, and protection by, a god, no one was able to harm Paul—the slave and property of Jesus—and go unpunished.
Comment by Elmers Brother— 2008/08/30 @ 11:11 AM — (Reply)
Comment by Brooke— 2008/08/29 @ 02:09 PM — (Reply)
Comment by mos— 2008/08/29 @ 02:31 PM — (Reply)
Comment by Elmers Brother— 2008/08/30 @ 11:13 AM — (Reply)
great article, ElBro!
I wish tatts weren't so expensive.
But then again, it does give me pause to take my time and make a wise decision.
As if seven years of waiting isn't a long enough pause.
Comment by Pinky— 2008/08/31 @ 10:19 PM — (Reply)
he reminds me more of the "horse of a different color" in the wizard of oz - don't ask me why...i don't want to hear about change - i want to hear about why some things SHOULD always remain the same!
CHANGE? no thankx - that's for socks and underwear. we've already changed enough. the morph is killing u.s.
I'M BACKKKKKK!
Comment by nanc— 2008/09/01 @ 06:07 PM — (Reply)