Douglas Barone
Douglas Barone
A Post-postmodernist with Objectivist leanings, fighting to catch up with his art after serving time as a capitalist oppressor of the people.
Doug Barone retired from corporate life after 20 years in the finance industry and is fooling everyone into thinking he is a writer. Having been a corporate strategist, finance executive, and IT executive he has found almost nothing of use to him from those years except the zany people and crazy stories that no one in their right mind could ever dream up. He uses these real life experiences in his work and this separates him from other writers who never really worked a day in their lives either.
His work, his prose fiction, is focused on power, its entanglement with emotional fulfillment, the impact of institutional concentrations of authority, and our struggles in the space created between. It deals with the ontological-deontological tension of existence in a post-postmodern world, where ideas have re-emerged as vastly powerful things even in the simple acts of everyday life. Sometimes his work allows just a bit of the mystical to cross over into reality, breaking the barriers of perception, heightening a sense of the possible.
Since this is all antithetical to the held narrative of our time, he fully expects to be pilloried by the academic left as well as the religious right, and looks forward to every lashing.
Chameleon In Chief
How could I have said such bad things about President Obama? How could I have said he was the leader of the grow-the-government-at-all-costs liberal wing of the Democratic Party? How could I, like Charlie Krauthammer use the term Social Democrat, even when others were using the more pejorative Socialist? How could I have ever suspected that by taking over the auto industry, trying to take over the banking industry, writing legislation to take over the medical industry that Obama was really the candidate of fiscal responsibility and small government? Federalization? Heck no, we’re all Republicans here, now.
The Left must be in horror watching Obama Reagan, just as the rest of us were when we watched Obama Marx. Jon Stewart is just fit to be tied, brutalizing the once deified savior of activist government, the New York Times is on suicide watch. Lord knows what Jessie is thinking.
But the chameleon in chief knows what the country is saying. Having just lost Teddy Kennedy’s seat to a gulp Republican (“The dream will never die!”), by voters who said in follow on polls they were voting specifically against Obama and ObamaCare, the ex liberal savior may as well have just put on a cowboy hat. He’s gone full Texan.
But as I said back in November, Obama was elected by being an empty vessel, purposefully revealing nothing, specifically stating no policies, having led an eventless professional life so there would be no record to consider during the big game of a national election. He became the place the country poured all its hopes and its dreams regardless of how found-less or various those hopes and dreams might be.
During his first year, when he came out as a radical liberal, federalizing all he could see, feeling all powerful from majorities in both houses of congress, the America people stood back in shock and said, “We didn’t vote for this!” So now Obama is showing his true colors, which is no color except the background of the moment. A meaner person would call that principle-less.
Many saw it coming. With his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, and its definition of the Obama Doctrine, heads started spinning from Obama Dissonance. In a doctrine only an imperialist could love, Obama declared that the U.S. had the right to preemptively and unilaterally invade any country that we determined was “evil.” Wow! There was silence in Stockholm, and that was such a short time after the bowing and scraping tour of global apology he had just finished.
The same feeling is raging through the camps of the American Left today. After the State of the Union speech last night the grand federalizer is now the leader of the small government movement. Wow, wow!
The question you have to ask yourself is do you believe him? Can you believe him? We all want(ed) to believe him in November. But really, how far can you bend your core beliefs before the rest of us say: I’m not so sure you should be in charge of the power of the federal movement anymore, you know, the guys with the guns, because I have no idea what you are going to do with it. A lot of the people on the Right, the core of the tea-party movement, had had enough of him over the summer. It feels like the rest of us are well on the way to getting there to.