John Wayne vs. Paris Hilton

July 31: Paris, FR In John McCain's explosive assault on Obama's possibly Middle Eastern "oily" foreignness ("more foreign oil"), his supposed status as "the biggest celebrity in the world" and McCain's pairing of Obama to Paris Hilton, we are erotically hurtled into a re-instigation of Roland Barthes' (in)famous reading of Greta Garbo's face, now, in its postmodern apotheosis, for here we find not "Platonic Idea" vis a vis Barthes'voyeuristic masturbation about/over Garbo, but rather a postmillenium, post-Viagran American impotence and simulacra: the ever-available hotel heiress who is famous for nothing but fame, opulent as a five-star (Hilton) hotel suite and as every bit as unoccupied as well; thus, rather than simply conjuring the frightful, implied taboo of the African-American male (O-bama) coupled with this svelte uber-blonde of American fantasies, McCain's television ad re-draws the strict duality of celebrity within which Americans must operate and ogle: (1) the phallic celebrity (qua the Lacanian Real) that is to say the cowboy-John Wayne-cum-Rambo "real life" male conqueror, and (2) the Lacanian Imaginary celebrity, qua, the blow-dried blonde diva of the "big screen," though, in truth, the "real life warrior" is more often a fiction (cf Ronald Reagan, Dick Cheney, George 'Mission Accomplished' Bush, et al) while the supposedly 'fictional' screen-diva-celebrity (cf Marilyn Monroe, Lindsay Lohan) turns out to have a more empirically, fleshly, existential reality (Paris Hilton's frail frame, Britney's eating disorders). Thus the ad backfires on McCain-the-celebrity-warrior by re-minding viewers of McCain's nebulous VietNam "heroics" (off screen, unseen, imprisoned and fictionalized into the ether by the passing decades of VietNam films) as compared to Obama's much more overt "reality" (Rolling Stone covers, Berlin Wall speech) a celebrity-present, every bit on the order of Paris Hilton in its tall, detached, long-legged and lean Reality and every bit as media-monitored as Britney Spear's own Real campaign(s) of self-rehabilitation.

German Reunification, Part Deux

July 24: Berlin, Germany. Obama's bodily presence (presence-as-distance) in Berlin establishes a non-threatening phallic relation of American president (to be) to the German feminine/vulva/Volvo, clearing the diplomatic boudoir of its earlier profanation via Bush's symbolic rape (presence-as-violation) of Merkel.

Fiction of "Unity"

June 24: Unity, New Hampshire. That which is named as "unified," reveals by its designation that it is not One but only in process of being made into One, or in the process of becoming One: that it is not of One at all, and hence the word "to unify" or "unite" (as in "united" states) by its very nature calls attention to the ongoing schism which it wishes to conceal. -GuyD

Le fantôme et l'ombre blanche: Obama's White Veep-Ghost

June 4: Los Angeles, California. Just as that white Catholic priest Father Plegers mocked Hillary in Obama's once and former "haunted" "black" Trinity church represented a Caucasian re-enactment of Reverend Wright (the white Catholic ghost of Wright) now the relation between black physicality and a white ghosting confronts [l'ombre blanche] the primary's final, literally, its first final, the non-beginning, which is this indeterminate white ending [a suspension of the black marks of Hegelian time] all wrought by Obama's being haunted by Hillary's white face: the once "ready on day one" commander-in-chief/guerrier courageux and would-be assassin of her rival ["we all remember Robert Kennedy was shot in June": her own sort of bitter-white clinging-to-guns] she takes up the mantle/role of the Al Gorean shocked-ghost ["18 million people voted for me!" "I won the popular vote!"] as a soon-to-be-or-I-better-be Vice-President who yet is also (paradoxically) the self-annointed primary winner [cf Terry Macullife bizarrely introducing Hillary in New York last night as "the Nominee of the Democratic party"]. ....thus Obama faces the prospect of this white-Hillary-haunting, a spectral I-am-not-making-any-decision-tonight-white-blonde tyranny, evoking the cake-white faces of the French aristocrats before the storming of the Bastille, the white power/powder like the red-faced white-coif rage of her husband Bill (as he calls a journalist a "scumbag!") OR the sinister white of John McCain's splotchy sun mottled white skin and pale comb-over (doo-wopping "Bomb Iran") OR Dick Cheney's crookedly smiling gray/pale visage ("I have Cheneys on both sides, and I wasn't born in West Virginia"): thus, like LBJ's hand on the Bible just after Dallas confirms, the Vice President's role is none other than a ghosting of the One who Sits in the Oval Office, in this case the specter arriving ahead of time to keep the primary suspended in an awful American present-ness that frustratingly seeks its insomniac relief through 24-hour/pundit shows (a cable TV version of a wake) with their spookily existential straining toward the afterlife (cf, their use of the banner headlines “What’s Next for Hillary?”). It is America that is ghosted by this “next.”

Deux Americas: LL Bean vs. KFC

May 20: Eugene, Oregon LL Bean-Obama of the Woods
Signifies the soy-eating hiker, the woodworking shop-in-the-basement Mac owner; a he/she with a well worn copy of Wallace Stegner and The New Yorker. To this voter, Obama is the promise of the black-friend-one-always-claimed-but-never-actually-had, and of SUVs that run on vegetable oil, environmental policies that increase property value/s.


May 19: Louisville, Kentucky KFC-Eating Hillary at the Mall:
Signifies a fast-food-fat appetite for Dixie, a tee-shirt bulging, southern fried scorn of all things northernly and knowing, this despite (or to spite) the state's Civil War allegiance to the Union; a he or she with a well worn copy of Stephen King and Newsweek. To this voter, Hillary is the promise of a checkbook balancing leader-of-the-household, a stay at home (maison/blanche, white/house) mom who packs a .44.

[West] Virginia?

May 13: Wheeling, West Virginia. "West Virginia is the Virginia that is not truly Virginia, the Blue State that is yet also a Red State, as Hillary's crushing victory here is the loser's victory that marks no success; she is an Apollo without a Hector, a victor without a vanquished, the primary now having become simulacres et simulation of a primary which, if believed, makes a nominee-winner (Hillary) out of a loser (Hillary) and stirs (through its signifying emptiness) simulacres of a general election which-is-not-to-be but which, yet, in its media repetitions and hoped-for-falsity on the heels of this "victory" maybe come to be (Hillary v McCain)"

Obama Waits to Win: The Mirror Stage

May 25: Raleigh, North Carolina The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precitpitated from insufficency to anticipation..- (GD, quoting his former colleague Jacques Lacan)