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Obama and the Cool Kids


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10836872Chronicles :

Obama and the Cool Kids

By Aaron D. Wolf - SEPTEMBER 08, 2016

 

The world will little remember what Barack Obama said during his disappointing presidency, despite his messianic promise and his reputation as rhetor par excellence. His words were not memorable to begin with. (Try to recall a quotation, apart from his famous campaign slogan.) More significantly, his words were not intended to be remembered. They served a different purpose.

 

Today’s mass audiences, having been cultivated for generations to react instantly to the sounds of hortation and form an immediate impression, did not so much listen to President Obama as feel him. Obama offered listeners a participatory experience designed not to convey truth but rather to engender feelings of approval and affirmation. Bill Clinton tenderly felt our pain. Barack Obama invited us to feel his.

 

Obama understood that his mass audience, cultivated (“educated”) by interactive experiences like kindergarten, college, and Facebook comments, who now receive broken news in the form of tweets, would recoil if directly exposed to the bright light of an incisive, deliberate critique or a well-reasoned, prudential plea. The heat would blister their pale skin, unaccustomed as it is to regular exposure to the sun, were they not slathered in the SPF 30 of greasy ideology, which makes them immune to the actual meaning of words he spoke Scissors-32x32.png

 


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