“The president addressed Congress the other day. I don’t know which was scarier — the speech, or Congress cheering him on. He invoked Lincoln. Whenever a president is going to get us in serious trouble, they always use Lincoln.”
~ Victor Milson, space adviser to the U.S. president, reporting ominous news from home to his friend Dr. Heywood Floyd (who is en route to Jupiter); from the film 2010: The Year We Make Contact
While it cares little for customary piety, our ruling Nomenklatura displays the intolerant fervor of Paradise-bound Jihadis in defending the sanctity of the Almighty State and its avatars. In that pantheon there is none holier than the martyred founder of the Second (or People’s) American Republic — Abraham the Almighty, whose sacred likeness sits in stoic majesty in the Imperial Capital’s most celebrated pagan cathedral.
Despite the fact that the candidate had a background barren of worthwhile accomplishments and a political vita that could be inscribed on the note inside a fortune cookie, Barack Obama’s followers — most likely in the thrall of a campaign-generated meme — routinely compared him to Jesus.
Lincoln, by way of contrast, wasn’t deified in this fashion until after his assassination. Now that he’s scant weeks away from being garlanded with Caesar’s crown and swaddled in the Imperial purple, the media’s image-makers have joined in the chorus of deification, widely and shamelessly anointing him son and heir to Abraham the Divine.
In fact, Obama is the beneficiary of what could be called an affirmative action apotheosis: He’s being sanctified before he’s had an opportunity to do anything. Already, even before the Electoral College has assembled to cast its votes, Obama is being treated as the sitting president: He is conducting business with Congress and state governors, and reporters at press conferences convened by the “Office of the President-Elect” are required to stand as one in solemn, chastened reverence as His Holiness strides to the microphone, presumably hovering an appropriate distance above the ground so as not to be soiled by contact with the mundane.
