who is barack obama?

If I hear one more pundit brandish the term "socialism" I am going to vomit. The contradictions involved in saying that the American worker is the "engine of our economy" one moment, and using "socialist" as the rhetorical equivalent of "terrorist" the next should be painfully apparent. Each time the shell of these concepts is touched, voided of all historical content, the inherent contradiction wants desperately to be revealed. This is a Daily Show segment begging to be aired.

Apparently there is a bias, perhaps even a conspiracy, deep within a mainstream media that investigates Joe the Plumber's status as an actually licensed plumber or a relative of Charles Keating and ignores repeated pleas from the pro-America portions of America to investigate Obama's socialist leanings or his ties to terrorism. On this latter point, there is deeply hidden information, bubbling up in knowing nods and looks from the pro-America portions of America that desperately needs retrieval before socialism reigns and the legacy of a great American is tarnished.

"Think about it," pro-America says.

Not, "look it up." Not, "google it." But, "think about it." This information does not need retrieval. It does not need research. It does not need evidence, since it is already information, given voice and spread like wildfire. It needs only thought.

The significance of the fact that the chosen form of content delivery for conservatives is talk radio cannot be overstated. Radio, the medium of revolutionary politics in the years leading up to the second world war, takes information and provides it with form as a disperse and yet still centralized broadcast content. Sarah Palin will never respond to, and frequently derrides charges from "some blogger." But the information bubbling up on talk radio desperately requires attention and deep thought, before it is too late.

In the face of this unbelievably dangerous and outmoded form of information retrieval, I am forced to espouse the seductive technological determinism of Hans Magnus Enzensberger--poet, essaysit, and author of countless childrens' books about magical encounters with history through technology. In his endlessly provocative essay from 1970, "Constituents of a Theory of the Media," he repeatedly references the politically desirable effects that are "only the natural consequences of technical development."

The new media produce no objects that can be hoarded and auctioned. They do away completely with 'intellectual property' and liquidate the 'heritage,' that is to say, the class-specific passing-on of nonmaterial capital. That does not mean to say that they have no history or that they contribute to the loss of historical consciousness. On the contrary, they make it possible for the first time to record historical material so that it can be reproduced at will. By making this material available for present-day purposes, they make it obvious to anyone using it that the writing of history is always manipulation. But the memory they hold in readiness is not the preserve of a scholarly caste. It is social. The banked information is accessible to anyone, and this accessibility is as instantaneous as its recording.

Think about it.