Manti Te'o and Obama's Second Coming Both Involve Fantasy

Newsweek Magazine has offered up a teasing cover of President Obama, billing him as, “The Second Coming.”  How that must have titillated the magazines editor, Tina Brown.  She is one of those journalists (a title evidently offered anyone who earns a, “gentleman’s C” at college) who get dewy every time she hears the President’s name.  She gets to ridicule religion and deify her man all at the same time.  She thinks she is clever.

            In the mean time, in the parallel universe of sport news, the press loves the story of Mani Te’o and his imaginary girlfriend.  I may be the only person in the United States who feels sorry for this young man.  Whether he was a willing participant in the hoax, a total dupe, or falls somewhere in between, this is a sad tale of people needing attention at any cost.  What makes Te’o even more pathetic, is the fact that all of the older, wiser, heads surrounding him chose hype over due diligence.  The University and the press shamefully used him and his story for their own purposes despite one red flag after another.  Mani Te’o seems desperate for the romance found in drama, media attention and paperback novels.  His imaginary girlfriend makes him “…more to be pitied than censured.”

            I see an odd relationship between the mythical paramour of Manti Te’o’ and the mythical America of President Obama.  Both have a convoluted psychology which produces them from thin air and mistaken assumptions.

            Barack Obama is the victim of his breeding.  We all are.  The important thing is to know that we fall prey to this influence and account for it in our thinking.  The President’s mother and grandmother raised him in an environment that held contempt for their middle class comfort.  One can accept the advantages of being born into a mainstream, middle class, educated America with either gratitude or guilt.  The flip side of gratitude is generosity.  You recognize what you have been given through grace and want to give back.  The flip side of guilt is resentment.  If you don’t feel you deserve what you have been given you hate yourself and that makes you hate the granter of your largesse.

            Obama’s mythical America does not exist, but it is real in his mind.  It is a place where government is the source of all security, all employment, all hope, fear, succor and sustenance.  This man has never fed from anything but the public trough.  To him, the government is the vehicle by which money—all money—is taken from rich people and given to less rich people.  Since he has never had to create, risk, give rein to imagination, or reward those efforts he has no respect for them.  In Obama’s mythical America successful people aren’t smarter, harder working, more talented or disciplined and therefore worthy of their wealth, they are just luckier and subject to a leveling punishment.  That view isn’t right or honest, it isn’t even logical, but it is the reality he sees. 

Obama isn’t the anti-Christ.   His America is more socialistic than capitalistic.  His America is more interested in dependence and less on encouragement.   He is wrong, but it is what he sees.  Like all mediocre talents advanced beyond their ability, he is also hyper-sensitive to criticism and that is his real Achilles heel.   We are going to see a lot of this in his second term, starting with his second inaugural.   Unfortunately, Manti Te’o will recover from his delusion long before America’s voters recover from their’s. 

We can keep the faith for another four years.