Over at Townhall, where there's a central stupidity-conditioning plant maintaining a constant level of stupidity at all times of day and night, someone called Charlie Kirk (Mme Tussaud model pictured above) is talking himself into some serious butthurt over comments by Michelle Obama on the Jimmy Fallon show:
Michelle Obama was asked about the challenge Obamacare faces in not attracting the requisite number of young enrollees. Her response was "A lot of young people think they're invincible, but the truth is young people are knuckleheads”. She went on to add that young people often cut themselves while cooking or injure themselves by dancing on bar stools.
Blogging really is an art form, or able to be an art form, an improvisatory one, and risky in a figurative way--verbally acrobatic: you go up without a net, you may lay a net down while you're in the air. I felt this with what started out to be a shallowly clever post about Clinton the black president and Obama the Jewish president. I wanted a nice link for the Clinton part, found Toni Morrison, and saw something that wasn't shallow, the idea of defining Clinton's metaphorical blackness in terms of his metaphorical persecution, which then applied pari passu to the metaphorically Jewish, persecuted Obama.
None other than Thers, as it happened, was thinking about a related issue, the distinct kinds of hatred projected by right-wingers on the First Ladies, Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama, and these fit a kind of mirror image of the schema: Michelle is hated with the classical anti-black racism, in exclusive terms of her body, and Hillary in the pattern of anti-Semitism, in terms of her supposedly calculating and conspiratorial mind. Now the idea starts to get pretty serious.
A famous idea from structural anthropology is that of the floating signifier, the sign-object detached from its meaning but still pregnant with a kind of meaningfulness that you can't grasp, like the figures in surrealist painting, or clever advertising. Is this a case of a floating signified, a content wandering from expression to expression, racism from race to race?
There is the oddest firestorm blowing up around sites I read over the Obama gossip book by the Times's Jodi Kantor, and the generous excerpts in today's Times dishing out a tale of conflict between Rahm Emanuel and Michelle Obama--between Firebaggers howling over its revelation of Barack's weak moral character (as if a book of this sort could "reveal" much of anything beyond a general pattern of reported movements from room to room, and quotes from those low enough in the hierarchy to be able to speak freely), and Obots screeching over it as part of a whole election-year conspiracy to make Michelle look "unlikeable"--so that the two sides never quite make contact, like King Pellinore and Sir Grummore in their duel in The Sword in the Stone, thwacking away at each other without effect until they both crash into trees and knock themselves out.
I couldn't find a visual of T.H. White's elderly knights, but here is a nice Questing Beast by Arthur Rackham, for someone else's retelling
I don't know if these people are just unfamiliar with gossip, [jump]
