You have risen!

Dear George,

You are vindicated! Barack Obama is just another media event entertaining and titillating a public that has sucked on the media teat so long it has forgotten what reality is. The worst of evils is tolerated as long as it is wrapped in an appealing media package. (Your problem, Big Guy, was that your media package lost its appeal when it became tattered and faded.)

A cursory glance at the Sunday New York Times shows that Obama is you repackaged and repositioned.

Two items caught my eye. First, his administration is not going to allow prisoners held at our Bagram air base in Afghanistan to challenge their detention in court (too habeasy corpusy). And the Pentagon is still reluctant to allow photographs of the flag draped coffins of dead soldiers returning home. It seems they are afraid such photos might “politicize” the war, and politics have no place in a corporatized security state.

All the while, the Patriot Act sits quietly in the corner, smirking, while Obama mouths his platitudes to the media as the nation enjoys a feel-good moment because it elected a Black president who bombs brown skins, ignores habeas corpus and pursues two wars of aggression while continuing to buy into the War on Terror fantasy.

That’s the beauty of sin. Once it becomes habit it’s no longer sin.

The crack you heard right after Obama took the oath of office was his moral gyroscope breaking. In that instant, you rose from the dead and began your journey on the road to Emmaus, except, everyone thought they were making the journey with Obama.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones