Screwed by Obama

Serendipity works in strange ways. Over the last few days commenters on this blog have drawn my attention to my posts on Camille Paglia, the queen of sexual exuberance. Especially to these two posts: here and here.

Apparently, more than a few serious people are drawn to Paglia's diagnosis of America' sexual malaise, and to her cure. Some of them take serious issue with my call for a return to the Protestant work ethic. They do not agree that we will have to work our way out of our problems. And that we are not going to love or sex our way out.

Then, yesterday, after I wrote a long post about psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, commenter sss seemed to be wondering, implicitly, why I would be bothering to expound at such length on a discipline that is headed to the dustbin of intellectual history.

I responded that even at a time when psychoanalysis as a practice is moribund, Freudian ideas continue to exert considerable influence over the culture. Witness Camille Paglia.

Now, to the serendipitous part. This morning I came across a column by Tunku Varadarajan on The Daily Beast site. In it he argued that Obama's election was based on his ability to seduce multitudes, and that now having lost his sex appeal, he is at a serious loss. Link here.

After all, when your wife abandons you on your birthday to travel to another continent, it does not make  you look like the manliest of men.

According to Varadarajan, Obama lost his sex appeal when he seemed to be impotent to do anything to stop the BP oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico. I am highly sympathetic to this view, though I did not read it as a sexual allegory. I wrote that Obama lost what the Chinese call the Mandate of Heaven. Link here.

In truth, I think that it is a lot easier to regain your potency than to recover the Mandate of Heaven, though Varadarajan approaches my version when he says that Obama is at a point where even Viagra will not help.

More broadly, Varadarajan argues that America's youth was seduced by Barack Obama, not in the Pied Piper sense, but in the erotic sense. Young people were inspired, perhaps because sexual energy is something that they have in larger quantities than do older people. Thus, they understand its use as currency. Better yet, numerous woman journalists revealed that they had cast Obama in a starring role in their sexual fantasies.

It felt like a chapter out of a book by Camille Paglia. Obama was going to be America's savior, because he was going to cure our sexual malaise by liberating us from the endless travail imposed by the Protestant work ethic and bourgeois propriety.

As a demiurge risen from the depths, Obama would lead us to a brave new world where we could all revel in the full expression of our human vitality. Miraculously, this would solve the financial crisis too.

This sexual allegory was saying that nothing was wrong with America that could not be cured by a good screw. Or better, by enough of the right kind of stimulation... or stimulus.

But, people who believe that a good screw will cure all ills usually end up getting screwed.

Most of us picked up on the salvationist rhetoric coming down from camp Obama. Many of us were slower to pick up the sexual allegory that seemed to be behind it.

Varadarajan divides American presidents into two categories: I would call them the ladies' man and the man's man.

Along with John Kennedy and Bill Clinton, Obama falls within the first category. In the second are Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, Reagan, Bush, and Bush.

Needless to say, when a ladies' man turns up impotent, when his claims to sexual prowess prove to be illusory, he has nothing left to fall back on.

In Varadarajan's words: "Twenty months into office, Obama stands exposed as a floundering Man, not a panacea-laden Superman. Even his relationship with his wife has hurt his sex appeal. Uxorious men are never sexy for long."

(Perhaps Bill Clinton's survival skills were based on the fact that he was anything but uxorious.)

So, when people voted for Obama they were voting for a mirage, for what the assumed him to be, for the role that they wanted to cast him in. Blinded by their hatred for Bush, they made him the avatar of a grand Pagliaesque idea.

A man's man does not rely on seduction. He never puts on the mask that would allow him to play the eroticism card. He is who he is, and never pretends to be anyone else. Thus, he has more latitude to fail.

Referring to Obama, Varadarajan writes: "And failure is not sexy. He has given speech after speech to a restless, increasingly irritated nation, like a man trying to 'talk' about the relationship when a girl wants to be ravaged; he has been a preachy, professorial windbag-- in a word charmless. This hasn't merely diminished his sex appeal. It has killed it stone dead."

What strikes me here is how this sexual allegory resonates with our current debate about the economy. How many people believed that size really does matter, and that by injecting funds from a giant stimulus into the economy, we would produce more new jobs?

But when the stimulus did not produce an orgasmic jump start to the economy, and when no new jobs (that is, children) were produced, what did its proponents offer.

Why... more stimulus, greater stimulation, more spending. Keep in mind that in Victorian pornography "spend" was the term used for orgasm.

So says Nobel laureate Paul Krugman. When Krugman rails against the premature removal of economic stimulus, it is not too difficult to find a couple of sexual experiences that would be analogous to what he fears.

But, if the economy has not responded to the giant stimulus she has already received, then perhaps she is no longer in love with the stimulator and is merely waiting for him to get it all over with so she can get on with her life.

Men who persist in the face of manifest female sexual disinterest are not great lovers.

And since we know that there is a difference between being sexually responsive and conceiving a child, we must also mention that the one does not necessarily entail the other. After all, what if the stimulus is shooting blanks? What if it is stimulating with the wrong kind of currency, with borrowed money, money that is not its own.

Of course, no one should be making fiscal policy decisions based on sexual allegories. And yet, couching one's arguments in terms that invoke sexual imagery is a tried and true way to advertise them, to render them cogent and believable to masses of people.

The world is not a sexual allegory. It is not a fiction where copulation is the meaning of life.

In the end the American people bought an illusion, an illusion of competence and eptitude. They were wrong, and thus, they are getting screwed.

[Welcome to those of you who have gotten to this post via Instapundit or Dr. Helen. My thanks to Prof. Glenn Reynolds and Dr. Helen Smith.]