Barack, My Personal Jesus?
By Larry Johnson on June 8, 2008 at 11:16 PM in Current Affairs
This stuff just writes itself. I’m talking about an email I received last night from a dear friend who also happens to be a reluctant Barack Obama supporter. My buddy flagged an article written by Mark Morford, columnist of the SF GATE, asking the question, IS OBAMA AN ENLIGHTENED BEING? Now I realize that that San Francisco–home of Jim Jones the death kool aid guy–has a well earned rep for nuttiness, but this paean to the 21st Century Buddha creeped me out.
I don’t know about you, but I sure as well can do without some leftwing version of Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson. But here we have a serious guy (Morford that is) chatting this up without the obligatory wink that he’s blowing smoke up our hindquarters. Nope, the dude is dead serious. He writes:
Barack Obama isn’t really one of us. Not in the normal way, anyway.
This is what I find myself offering up more and more in response to the whiners and the frowners and to those with broken or sadly dysfunctional karmic antennae – or no antennae at all – to all those who just don’t understand and maybe even actively recoil against all this chatter about Obama’s aura and feel and MLK/JFK-like vibe. . . .
No, it’s not merely his youthful vigor, or handsomeness, or even inspiring rhetoric. It is not fresh ideas or cool charisma or the fact that a black president will be historic and revolutionary in about a thousand different ways. It is something more. Even Bill Clinton, with all his effortless, winking charm, didn’t have what Obama has, which is a sort of powerful luminosity, a unique high-vibration integrity.
Dismiss it all you like, but I’ve heard from far too many enormously smart, wise, spiritually attuned people who’ve been intuitively blown away by Obama’s presence – not speeches, not policies, but sheer presence – to say it’s just a clever marketing ploy, a slick gambit carefully orchestrated by hotshot campaign organizers who, once Obama gets into office, will suddenly turn from perky optimists to vile soul-sucking lobbyist whores, with Obama as their suddenly evil, cackling overlord.
Here’s where it gets gooey. Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.
Buddha? Jesus? Mohammed? I want a leader who knows that there are 50 states in America–not 58. I want a President who understands that they speak Pushto and Dari in Afghanistan, not Arabic. I want a Chief Executive who has enough common sense to know that he should not enter into a real estate deal with a crook on the eve of running for President of the United States. I will leave the walking on water, luminous soul, auto-elevation (floating in air for you unenlightened folks) and healing of the sick to hucksters, carnival workers, and Pentecostal ministers. Just give me someone who has enough sense to identify Jeremiah Wright as a race baiter and provocateur early on without sleeping thru 20 years of vile sermons only to awake, like a Rumpelstiltskin, to the belated realization that Wright’s views have no place in the mainstream of American culture.
Don’t save us Barack, save yourself.






















