May 04, 2011

Winner of the Emperor Obama vacuity contest

Books have been published collecting and even analyzing George Bush the Younger's malapropisms and idiocies. I doubt anyone will do it for Emperor Obama. Not because he is any better. But because, as George Bush said, "fool me once, shame on , shame on,..." you, who were fooled. On the occasion of the not-even-judicial execution of the Master Signifier of terror,
“Today we are reminded that as a nation there is nothing we can’t do,” Obama said in a speech Sunday certain to stand as one of his most historical. (Stanford Herald)
So something in America is finally working. Not us. Even if, like every other project managed by the Pentagon, it took decades more than planned, cost billions more that expected, and resulted in "collateral" death in the millions.

This confirms that the best prism of reading that assassination is through Lacan's theory of discourse. It's just pitch perfect. What is the Master? The one who doesn't know what he wants because others know it for him. This is what is being celebrated here. Total, absolute ignorance, not only of the Muslim world but of oneself, and not only as fact, but as vision. For of course we know how false this is, how little is possible right now, when the limits of the possible are subordinate to keeping the bonuses of Wall-Street growing year after year. How there is no money for satisfying the most basic human needs of most people. But at the bargain price of cheering the death of one loathsome man, we can get rid of the knowledge of that gap between desire and reality. If only we accept that killing Bin Laden was our highest aspiration, that having had that there is nothing more that we could possibly want, then we reach blessed ignorance and achieve Nirvana. "We can do anything" means "we don't need to do anything any more." Everybody will either work for us or die. And every American will get the chance to say that to herself on the way to the soup kitchen.


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