I listen more than I should to Conan O’Brien, whose father once said to him after he had attained great success as a talk show host that the success was based on a condition that might otherwise be “treatable.” His dad, a microbiologist, wasn’t joking. Conan says that in any other era, he would lack the basic talents necessary to live well and prosper. He would be doing grunt labor in fields or factories, and annoying everyone around with his humor. His would be a difficult and short life.
I’ve not been posting much here, and in part it is because I have removed the one topic that I write so easily about, climate change. Indeed I had gotten highly repetitive, and I could put up a climate piece with one hand tied behind my back. Conan has been asked about the current cancel culture and how humor has to be so carefully structured so as not to bring down the wrath of the embedded liberal censors all around us. He says that is a good thing, maybe somewhat overdue, as once upon a time it was too easy to make fun of gays, cross-dressers, trannies and the like.
Having difficulties placed in that path forces comedians to think and work harder to develop good comedy. It is like anything else in life … hardships produce better work. Jerry Seinfeld merely refuses to work campuses anymore, as the culture is too censorious. That’s an easy way out for a well-established and extremely successful aging comedian. Seinfeld has long maintained that comics who do blue material, say for example Sarah Silverman and Liza Schlesinger (he does not name names) have simply not worked their material hard enough.
I named two female comics, and with purpose. I maintain that female comics who want to be successful must 1) be attractive, and 2) be filthy. That’s an interesting dynamic that most male comics do not face. Conan has worked hard over the years, worked clean, and rarely stoops to the level of ridiculing anyone. He also avoids topical humor. That’s a tough row to hoe, but he has succeeded. There is another comic, a woman, who has achieved similar success while working clean and with respect for people … Ellen DeGeneres. It can be done.
_____________
I have removed from view here the topic I wrote most easily and mindlessly about, climate change. I only want to add one thing here, Hurricane Idalia, said to have made landfall at Keaton Beach, Florida with winds of 125 MPH. Just to point out that we live in a culture of lies and lying liars, the weather station in Keaton Beach recorded landfall winds of 61 MPH. Winds of that speed can do damage, including the damage we witnessed on news reporting. Just keep in mind that television and small screens can easily distort events by focusing on a few narrow and disturbing images. Without boots on the ground (as we learned in the Ukraine), the people who bring us “news” can easily lie to us, and do so routinely.
_____________
OK, enough about that. Tomorrow and maybe a couple more days, I am going to tackle a very hard subject, one of the most dangerous men ever to hold high office, Barack Obama. There are degrees of difficulty associated with his public charm, his mindless liberal following that felt so virtuous for (supposedly) electing a black man, that event in Grant Park and those crying faces, and his fake educational accomplishments.
We do not elect presidents, they are given over to us and spotted and groomed years in advance. Bill Clinton was such a man, spotted by Zbignew Brezinski and groomed due to his easy charm, good looks, intelligence and memory. Such a man, as with Obama, could easily fill the role of president, as it is an acting gig. Others, like Ronald Reagan (actor) and George W. Bush, succeeded due to personal charm, GWB lacking any credentials. Others who tried and failed, like Hillary Clinton, lack that charm and come off as annoying and unelectable. Joe Biden is annoying and unelectable, and did not win the popular vote, which is not counted anyway.
But the subject at hand will be Barack Obama, smooth as maple syrup, and a very good actor with a good sense of humor. He needs to be deconstructed, starting with his first “accomplishment” in office, a program constructed and put in place by the health care industry, and for which the man was merely a front: Obamacare. I expect the writing to be tough. It’s about time I took on the challenge.
Piece of Mindful 
Obama-Ball-Game
…here is mr. obama from 1995, likely prior to his NLP coaching. Note the lack of metered speech, back then. After installation of expert patterning, his new delivery afforded him much greater impact; and morphed into the iconic brand we know today…
Vin Scully (game announcer):
“Obama goes into his trademark stac-cato-windup,
and here’s the pitch…”
LikeLiked by 1 person
I was only going to watch for a minute, but I sat through the whole thing. His speech may not be metered, but it’s certainly measured. I was particularly struck by the way he acted out the dialogue, effortlessly sliding into different dialects and cadences and conveying the emotions of different characters. This guy is an actor.
Genuine question: Does it seem plausible that a Harvard Law School student has the time to write, publish and promote his memoirs, doing a book reading at a different college than the one he is attending? His opening remarks about running into Colin Powell were kind of strange to me. I think he’s trying to sound like he’s making a joke when he says Powell was concerned that Obama would attract more attention if the two of them toured the school at the same time, the joke being that Powell was a well-known public figure so of course he would get all the attention. Is Obama saying Powell was making a friendly joke at the unknown law student’s expense? Or that Powell was paying him a compliment on his youthful good looks and charisma? The anecdote and Obama’s delivery of it are kind of cringey. My best guess is that scriptwriters wanted to foreshadow his rise to the presidency, or something… kinda like getting a snapshot of young Bill Clinton shaking JFK’s hand at a political rally.
At any rate, Obama comes off like a young actor playing the role of a young law student who is destined for greatness.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I did what you did, sat through the entire presentation, and I think you are right. This was a trained actor. He was being groomed. I saw this in 2004 when he spoke at the Democratic Convention, how the media swooned over him like barking dogs, setting him up for his 2008 candidacy. He read his lines well, granted, but so do others. This guy was “the one” in 2008 no doubt. He performed well, as did Bill Clinton before him.
I suspect that at any given time there are a number of “the one’s” in line, many are called, few are chosen. John McCain was such a man, given the whole episode as a POW in Vietnam, all of it faked. He was fair-haired and ready to serve, but could only be used as a fall guy for Obama, and he knew it well in advance. He had a temper which did not serve him well. They brought in Sarah Palin, a woman with charisma who could light up a room, which he could not, but in the end, the nod went to Obama. What I don’t understand, maybe never will, is wife Michelle and two perfect kids. Hired actors? It is hard to fathom that they could cast so well. Michelle, like Barack, is slick as syrup on a forum. There are oddities in her past which I will cover, but cannot address with any certainty. It could be real. Maybe they are a genuine couple now retired to their fabulous house on the Massachusetts coast waiting for sea level rise to wipe them out.
LikeLike
Michelle is a he, in my opinion.
An actor of course, like the two “daughters”.
Obama himself has more than once said “Michael” instead of Michelle, once being during an interview where he was walking through a field with a journalist, and again during a speech in front of the Army highest ranks, correcting himself straight away in both occasions.
One thing we know for sure anyway: we’ve never seen photos of a pregnant Michelle, or of her holding her newborn babies; only one badly photoshopped photo of their wedding day has been released in all these years.
Too little for such public figures.
Even the title of Michelle’s book, “Becoming” is a strong hint of what he/she probably really means, although officially I think the book is about her becoming the first black “first lady” in history etc.
For me he/she and Obama are really together and they love each other, they were groomed together to represent the perfect black couple at the White House, but at a price: he (Michael) had to become a she.
Did he really want to transition into Michelle? This we’ll never know, although I don’t think so.
It’s a role. Once home the two of them are back to who they really are: two men who love each other and can not tell americans about that because we all know the consequences.
Without make up, a wig and a dress on the guy can hang around anywhere after all, and nobody will ever recognise Michelle in a middle aged black guy with a baseball cap, jeans and a sweater.
But enough with speculation, looking forward to your article Mark!
LikeLike
Interesting question about whether comedians should be able to adapt to any crowd… Idk.. Comedy relies on these shared unspoken assumptions, or at least the comedian has to know the unspoken assumptions of the audience. If the college audience is so completely alien to his sensibility, I can see why he’d say “who wants to bother.”
I was impressed when Dave Chappelle opened for SNL recently. He had exactly that challenge, to present views that he knew would be abrasive to that audience. It was masterful how he broached sensitive topics, and got the audience on his side, using humor. Not familiar enough with Seinfeld or his act, to know if it’s the kind of thing he could pull off.
LikeLike
Chapelle can indeed take on those subjects and win the audience over, but not without considerable rancor among the liberals. God bless him.
LikeLike
People that pay to see Jerry Seinfeld, know what they are getting, they won’t be mad at Jerry for diving into a few one liners that may be politiaclly incorrect. Most of his schtick seems tojust be “airline experience” and “ya know” type of vibes. Bring the Diceman back that’ll get some attention, not sure if he has already tried or not.
LikeLike
climate
ENOUGH…
adults traumatizing kids?
https://postimg.cc/TLzzqTCW/be5531db
Climb-it change
https://postimg.cc/k63vy3M6
LikeLike
“Does it seem plausible that a Harvard Law School student has the time to write, publish and promote his memoirs, doing a book reading at a different college than the one he is attending?”
According to Wiki he was done with law school by 92 at least, and was attorney/ teacher in Chicago at the time of this video. And he says he worked nights and weekends to write the book. Which imo is plausible enough, sure.
I agree he shows unusual acting/ performance talent, but to me that doesn’t necessarily rule out that he really wrote the book and it’s really based on his life experiences. Is it mutually exclusive that he could be this unusual guy, have those experiences and be deeply reflective about them AND be tapped or groomed to be in the docket as a potential president? Maybe he really wrote the book but also had in mind that his handlers/ mentors whoever, would view it favorably, sort of like kids applying to college and all their dagblamed extracurricular activities.
The humor about Powell.. cringey I guess because he grins too much at his own jokes? Yeah he got better at his delivery later on. But it’s his standard technique to lead with a few jokes, so maybe he did just name-drop Powell and mine it for some humor as part of his schtick.. maybe Powell did see him as a younger man on the make and joke “uh oh I’d better watch out for you” or something. There’s only room for one light skinned well spoken black man around here, kid.. but yeah, plausible imo, not necessarily scripted, ymmv..
LikeLike
You’re right, Tim, I was confused. In the introduction to the video, the guy from 22-City View (apparently a public access cable station) says we’re about to watch a speech from a “Harvard Law student,” which led me to think Obama was supposed to be a student and not yet a graduate of Harvard Law when he wrote the speech. Obama also makes a comment in his opening remarks about Harvard law students –“we don’t get outside very much,” or something like that–and since he spoke in the present tense, I was further confused. But he also says being in a library gave him flashbacks to his Harvard days, so yeah, I missed that.
The book may well be drawn from his actual life experiences, and he may have contributed to the writing of it. JFK could get away with writing about other people’s heroism, but as a black man, Obama would have to profile his own courage if he wanted to sell himself as a once and future king. JFK is said to have contributed to the writing of Profiles in Courage, a book whose Pulitzer Prize gave him a shiny glow of intellectual idealism and, I guess, helped convince a lot of people he should be President. As I understand it, a lot of pop singers who are said to have written their hit songs actually just talk about shit that’s happened in their lives with a songwriter who then uses those experiences to write the songs for them. I would imagine it helps them perform those songs with more passion, commitment and authenticity. That’s kind of what Obama’s performance in this video feels like to me, minus the synthesizers and autotune.
LikeLike
Yeah, very possibly that’s the case. We only have direct evidence of his acting and speaking skill, everything else is open to speculation.
LikeLike