Desiring Machine

I know a lot of people are tweaked out because they say that McCain is invoking Obama in the image of the anti-christ in his latest ad.

But I can’t help but laugh when I see this spot. It truly is funny and wickedly sarcastic. In a sense, it is perhaps the most devastating ad I have seen from the McCain camp. To which I say bravo, touche, and thanks for making me laugh in the time of dire darkness. The Obama people would do well to respond with a sense of humor and lightness to these attacks.

Nietzsche, that self proclaimed “anti-christ”, once said

And when I saw my devil, I found him serious, thorough, profound, solemn:
he was the spirit of gravity–through him all things fall.

Not by wrath, but by laughter, do we slay. Come, let us slay the spirit of
gravity!

I am fully in sync with the Obama view of the world, but I worry a bit that the seriousness of the campaign might become too heady and we veer off dangerously into deception. This McCain ad attacks a vulnerability of the self seriousness of the Obama campaign. Lest we succumb to this vulnerability we must rise above it. Unfortunately, the response and tone of some blogs seems to be one of gloom and fear that McCain is invoking the Anti-Christ. This is the wrong approach because it reinforces what the McCain ad so deftly attacks.

No, the right approach would be an acknowledgement of the criticism, and with levity, and a lightness of being declare I am not beyond your reproach or criticism, merely immune to it. I have no doubts that Obama will accomplish this. It is the cultists around him that I worry about. For if you can’t seem to see the irony and humor in this ad then you can’t see the humor and irony that it falsely offers up as pomposity and self absorbtion. We all know that Obama does not see himself as the second coming of Jesus. But perhaps his followers don’t realize that yet.

While some would argue that McCain is speaking code language to the religious right, I think on the surface of it the tone is much more anti-religious. It chastises the very religious rhetoric that has seeped into the political dialog. In this sense I think McCain is authentic on this point. One can tell merely by posture and body language that he is uncomfortable with the religious wackos he must make his political bed with.

McCain rightly so reminds us of the problems of taking things on mere faith alone and mixing that in the political realm. And while the object of this attack (Obama) may be incorrect and misguided, nevertheless this ad seems to attack the very dynamic of faith based politics and charisma. This force of faith is a very dangerous force. And although I would rather see McCain deploy the criticism against the more zealous form of faith in the Bush administration, the criticism still rings true no matter who it is directed at. This superabundance of faith and self certainty can lead to so many crises and a kind of illness. As Nietzsche warns us in his book “The Anti-Christ”:

The fact that faith, under certain circumstances, may work for blessedness, but that this blessedness produced by an idée fixe by no means makes the idea itself true, and the fact that faith actually moves no mountains, but instead raises them up where there were none before: all this is made sufficiently clear by a walk through a lunatic asylum. Not, of course, to a priest: for his instincts prompt him to the lie that sickness is not sickness and lunatic asylums not lunatic asylums. Christianity finds sickness necessary, just as the Greek spirit had need of a superabundance of health—the actual ulterior purpose of the whole system of salvation of the church is to make people ill. And the church itself—doesn’t it set up a Catholic lunatic asylum as the ultimate ideal?—The whole earth as a madhouse?—The sort of religious man that the church wants is a typical décadent; the moment at which a religious crisis dominates a people is always marked by epidemics of nervous disorder; the “inner world” of the religious man is so much like the “inner world” of the overstrung and exhausted that it is difficult to distinguish between them; the “highest” states of mind, held up before mankind by Christianity as of supreme worth, are actually epileptoid in form—the church has granted the name of holy only to lunatics or to gigantic frauds in majorem dei honorem….