O-blah-ma

In college, about ten years after The War, I took an abnormal psychology course from a professor who had been an Army interrogator at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. Naturally his book about the experience was the required text.

While he was discussing the various Nazis who had killed so many, and eventually committed suicide, I began to wonder how millions of everyday Germans had allowed such a bloodbath to occur. I understood that Hitler and his designated liar, Joseph Goebbels, were persuasive speakers, and their propagandist, Leni Riefenstahl, made powerful films, but how did they convince so many others to permit the evil that was growing around them?

--Fast forward about fifty years--

Defeated Germany remained at peace, its people were alert to neo-Nazis, and it appeared it wouldn't happen again. The quandry had been put on the back burner. Suddenly, Barack Obama appeared, spouting "hope and change." He was a slick reader of teleprompters, and he held rallies eerily reminiscent of those we saw in Riefenstahl's propaganda masterpiece, "Triumph of the Will." Mind-numbed people gazed adoringly , and absorbed the blah-blah-blah that sounded so good. While Hitler appealed to the hatred of Jews, Obama let people feel good about themselves because, as Joe Biden had said, he was "clean and articulate," and the first black man for whom many people could seriously sublimate their feelings of racism.

While I watched President Obama's recent "Address to the Nation," in which he articulated still more platitudes, I found myself, during the planned applause breaks, raising my arm and intoning, "Seig Heil!" Now, I understand how people can be caught up in the emotion which accompanies the fervent desire for things to be better. Unfortunately, upon reflection, much of what the President espouses is pure socialism/communism, and those philosophies have never improved life anywhere in the world.