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| "...whether to be defined by a wall or whether to tear it down..." |
The Chinese had an expression for it – “the mandate of heaven.” When the Emperor lost the mandate of heaven, the elements of the universe let it be known, signaling to the next pre-ordained dynasty, either through famine, flood, earthquake, or the Yangtze changing its course, to rise up and kick out the incumbent. There was a hint of this when Obama made his "big" Berlin speech the other day.
This was obviously meant to be a lump-in-the-throat, Kennedy-esque, “Ich bin ein Berliner” moment, but with the help of the ultimate source of all life here on the Earth it turned out to be more an “Ich bin ein bin liner” moment. History repeats itself first as tragedy, second as farce, but sometimes it just skips the tragedy and rushes straight to the farce.
This was signaled early on in the speech when Obama went for the ready symbolism of Berlin's famous ex-wall.
“Today, 60 years after they rose up against oppression, we remember the East German heroes of June 17th,” he recited some words put into his speech by a team of researchers who had access to Wikipedia.
“When the wall finally came down, it was their dreams that were fulfilled,” he droned on. “Their strength and their passion, their enduring example remind us that for all the power of militaries, for all the authority of governments, it is citizens who choose whether to be defined by a wall, or whether to tear it down.”
Great! Or it would have been if he hadn’t been so obviously standing behind his own personal bullet-proof wall of glass. Here was a pompous twit talking about falling walls – by which he was also referring to the non-existent wall along America’s much abused Southern border – and here he was blatantly hiding behind his own personal, high security, and very expensive wall!
Whatever need he had for such protection, the symbolism was way off. The man’s a fool, you couldn’t help thinking. Anywhere but here.
These bullet proof glass thingies are designed to be inconspicuous, unless of course someone actually takes a pot shot, but this one wasn’t thanks to the slipping mandate of heaven. With the elements rebelling against the unworthy emperor, the Sun had decided to shine its rays at such an angle and intensity so as to illuminate the large bullet proof fishtank around the president. A plastic castle and a bit of weed would have been perfect.
Not only this, but the Sun had taken a shine to that other glass surface associated with Obama – the teleprompter panels – apparently making them unreadable, and forcing him to rely on his paper notes. This messed up his delivery so much that he came over stilted, awkward, and very unKennedyesque. At times he even sounded like someone reading the back of a cereal packet as he looked shiftily up and down rather than sweepingly from side to side.
The vacuousness of the rhetoric, normally hidden by the slickness of the delivery, was there for all to see. As a final irony, the slanting rays of the German Sun transformed the bullet proof shield into what looked like a large teleprompter panel, with Obama caught there in the reflective glass, like a badly written sentence.
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| Kennedy in Berlin without bullet-proof glass and teleprompter. |
Colin Liddell
Alternative Right
20th June, 2013
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