Obama rama rama

The days of bread and circuses have begun. Having unwittingly put myself on the hook for 10,000 words of writing by the end of the month, I couldn’t go to the free We Are One concert featuring Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder and U2 on the National Mall earlier today. But as I sat in a Starbucks, flipping through nearly unmanageable amounts of source material, trying to separate signal from noise, the crowd began streaming in.

As darkness fell, a palpably leftist lesbian couple walked in with an adorable baby girl. One of the moms kept playing with the baby, who was giggling uncontrollably, while chanting “O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma!” For several minutes, she continued, now and then asking the baby “do you hear that?”

And on she chanted, to the beats of two or three consecutive songs on the radio, “O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma!”

It reminded me of a hare krishna mantra, or an old Mel Brooks sketch from the 2000 Year Old Man days, where he acts as a self-infatuated pop personality and sends up the ’60s generation. Holding a guitar on which he plays only one chord — “I get mostly ‘A’ out of it…” — he regales Carl Reiner with a lot of empty talk about the fans and the unparalleled social significance of the moment. “I am them. They are me,” Brooks says. “We are all singing; I have the mouth.”

There’s something hilarious about how gaga otherwise ordinary people have gotten over Obama, but there’s also an undeniably ugly and frightening side to the whole cult of personality that’s sprung up around him. At times, it almost brings to mind the intro sequence to Triumph of the Will, when the immortal Hitler descends from the clouds, and the people accept him as if he were a gift of the heavens.

Maybe there’s something healthy about disliking your president after all.