Obama-Biden: I don't get it
Just realized that everyone's blogging about this, so it's time to hit the brakes, whirl around and think of something else. Blogging is for the nimble. So, how about this: How Fiction Works by James Wood. It's just been added it to the Rainy Day library so it'll be a while before a more reasoned revue will appear here, but the omens are good. Says Wood on the very first page, "Authorial omniscience, people assume, has had its day, much as that 'vast, moth-eaten musical brocade' called religion has also had its." Whoa!
Deft touch by Wood to dip into Philip Larkin's brilliantly bleak poem about death, Aubade, for that low blow about religion. Said Larkin:
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says no rational being
Can fear a thing it cannot feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear — no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.
Superb! Still don't get Obama-Biden, though. Wasn't Obama for "Change"? Remember? And the big thing was his vote against the Iraq War. The one Biden voted for. And now the two of them are supposed to represent some kind of unity. Bah! Politics is stranger than fiction. Time for another page of James Wood. Oh, this is good. He says here on page...
Comments
Barack needed to pick an old white male for veep.
Old to offset voters' nervousness about his age.
White to offset voters' nervousness about Barack being 1/2 black.
Male because some voters are just not ready to vote for a woman. Male because of Geraldine Ferraro.
"Change" is a strange word.
For anglo and black voters it has only positive connotations.
For hispanic voters is a scary word. They hear change and think back to every Latin American country that has undergone "change" via a nasty revolution.
Posted by: Dave Barnes | August 26, 2008 4:49 PM