By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog
“What
can be, unburdened by what has been,” Vice President Kamala Harris
recites looking into the cameras, into her teleprompter and into the
glare of the afternoon sunshine in a swing state.
Unburdened by the laws of her economics, her past track record or reality, anything is possible.
The
much mocked phrase has become to her brand what “we are the ones we’ve
been waiting for” was to Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. The twin
statements of faith, their awkward construction of both deliberately
echoing the cadence of old school preachers and new school gurus, are
transformative in very different ways. Where Obama appeared to be
offering his followers the opportunity to participate in a new
revolution, Kamala offers her supporters the rebirth of forgetting that
the old ever existed.
It is easy to see why “we are the ones
we’ve been waiting for” spoke to a man so convinced of his chosenness
that he he was planning to be president even before he came to America.
The only con in the phrase was the “we”. “What can be, unburdened by
what has been,” is equally compelling to Kamala who constantly remakes
herself to the needs of the moment. ‘Kamala for the People’, her 2020
presidential campaign, was launched using her credentials as a
prosecutor only to have her endorse police defunding and freeing all the
criminals once she saw which way the winds were blowing.
Despite
all the unburdening, Kamala in 2024 is much the same way hack she was
in 2020. In 2020 she proposed to wipe out health insurance while in
2024, she proposes price controls that would wipe out private
enterprise. But being unburdened means she does not have to care about
any of that. Now she runs again, unburdened by her past views on banning
fracking and bailing out race rioters. She assents to an arms embargo
on Israel while her spokesmen loudly deny she believes in any such
thing.
Forget being burdened by the past of years past, Kamala isn’t even burdened by the past 5 minutes.
Letting
go of the past is cathartic for Kamala as it must be for a woman who
started her political career as the doxy of an elderly and corrupt urban
mayor and is now her party’s nominee by way of a donor coup against
another old man. Had Biden not turned weak and feeble, she would have
nothing. But that was a few weeks ago and the coup and all the ugly
history around it are another burden to be shed.
Obama and Kamala
are both the children of lost black immigrant fathers, raised abroad
and then brought into the American elite where they realized that they
would have to identify with the blackness of their non-American fathers
rather than with the white and Indian heritage of their mothers to get
ahead in a culture whose biggest political currency was white guilt. But
where Obama made his past and his search for identity into his
autobiographical brand, Kamala makes changeability her identity. Unlike
Obama who pretended to be what he was not, Kamala doesn’t really pretend
to be anything: her identity is too nebulous: a day player who commits
to no single role and will read from any script.
Both “we are the
ones we’ve been waiting for” and “what can be, unburdened by what has
been” are leftist slogans, but where Obama’s slogan is rooted in a past
history, Kamala’s denies it. Obama’s slogan contended that anything was
possible because of the power of history while Kamala’s insists that
anything is possible if we reject history.
Obama was running as
the candidate of change and he was indeed something very different. But
Kamala can only run as a change candidate by ignoring her past time in
the administration. What other slogan could Kamala adopt except one that
contends that the past does not matter because it’s past?
The
Kamala campaign, running on her administration’s accomplishments and
running away from them, championing the economy as both great and
unfair, and the country as both wonderful and broken is rife with
contradictions, but contradictions cannot exist when there is nothing to
compare them to.
It’s a seductive slogan rooted in Oprahness and
the gospel of self-forgiveness. Obama could inspire his followers, but
Kamala is trying to crack the code of fake friend celebrity pop stars
like Taylor Swift who offer fatuous expressions of sympathy, the
pretense of commiseration and counsel moving on from everything.
Kamala’s campaign amounts to little more than aging teen girl snark,
artificial enthusiasm and calls to be gentle with yourself, drink some
white wine and believe that better days are coming.
Obama and
Kamala both speak to guilt but where Obama stood outside the great
national white guilt, and offered atonement for it, Kamala stands inside
it and offers forgetfulness as the solution to all things. Kamala and
her supporters want to forget what they were, what happened and what
they did. They want to move on from all the nameless things like the
pandemic, the riots, the economy and the chaos. They don’t believe in
inspiration anymore, all they want to do is leave it all behind.
It
is the burdened who most want to be unburdened, and to believe that who
we were is not who we are, and that what can be is not in any way
defined by what was. What burdens does Kamala carry and what
fingerprints can be found on her soul? Kamala laughs a fake laugh,
smiles a fake laugh and tells her fans that if they pretend to smile and
laugh that life will be good. Live a lie long enough and you will
forget that you are lying. The performance becomes the actor. And isn’t
that the secret to happiness?
Unburdening is Kamala’s way of
cutting the Gordian knot. In her previous races, Kamala had no real idea
of what people might want from her, but now she has tapped into the
political panic attack of a party that had been spooked into thinking
that it was on the verge of oblivion. But more than that she speaks to
the disappointments of a party that saw little to celebrate about the
last 4 years. Her supporters have struggled to convey what the
administration’s accomplishments were.
But unburdened by what was, that no longer matters.
The
Left has always been bent on erasing the past. Whether it was taking
sledgehammers to statues or rewriting history, the past can be
physically destroyed, or the secular messianism of the right side of
history makes it something to flee, but Kamala transcends history with
the joy of the lie. The past is weird. It’s full of non-DEI approved
ideas. But most of all it makes you sad. And Kamala is never sad.
And that is to say that she is always fleeing her own emptiness and hollowness with artificial joy.
Kamala
is joy incarnate. Laughing with her mouth, not her eyes, with her
throat, not her heart, she banishes sadness through the magical waters
of Lethe. When she looks up at the teleprompter or the sun, she sees
only the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. Unburdened by what has
been, she can promise anything and be anyone, and most of all she can
assure you that living a lie is the next best thing to living a better
life. When you fake everything, Kamala’s life reveals, anything is
possible.
No comments:
Post a Comment