Kathleen Parker comes very close... [View All]

[jbm]

I normally am not a Kathleen Parker fan, but I think her column was fairly close to target today. She described the symptoms well, but I disagree that the disease is connected to families or secularism. This leap from Jesus Bush to Jesus Obama is symptomatic of something messed up in the culture though.

http://www.mailtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080222/OPINION/802220314/-1/OPINION0106

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So what is the source of this infatuation with Obama? How to explain the hysteria? The religious fervor? The devotion? The weeping and fainting and utter euphoria surrounding a candidate who had the audacity to run for leader of the free world on a platform of mere hope?

If anthropologists made predictions the way meteorologists do, they might have anticipated Obama's astronomical rise to supernova status in 2008 of the Common Era. Consider the cultural coordinates, and Obama's intersection with history becomes almost inevitable.

To play weatherman for a moment, he is a perfect storm of the culture of narcissism, the cult of celebrity, and a secular society in which fathers (both the holy and the secular) have been increasingly marginalized from the lives of a generation of young Americans.

All of these trends have been gaining momentum the past few decades. Social critic Christopher Lasch named the culture of narcissism a generation ago and cited addiction to celebrity as one of the disease's symptoms — all tied to the decline of the family.

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