I think it's time to start preparing to ease the Obamabots back into the real world. The signs are starting to appear here and there, like signs of Spring.
Living, as I do, in The People's Republic of Portland (Hawthorne Soviet, Richmond Collective) I've been in the thick of Obamabot zombieland. During the primaries there were forests of Obama signs strewn about the landscape, houses with three and four signs in the windows, on the lawn, big banners hung across the porch railing. One guy built a lawn housing for his Obama sign, complete with turned columns and a broken pediment on the top, indicating that he intended his sign to last for generations. Shop windows on Hawthorne Blvd. were plastered with Obama signs both before and after the election (“Yes, We Did!”) coffeehouses and taverns held weekly Obama parties – some still do - and there were hordes of Obama canvassers swarming every street corner, I was accosted by six of them in one ten block stretch in the run up to the election.
All last year and well into February of this year, you rarely had a conversation without one or two Obamabots bursting into an impromptu praise-a-thon.
I think that things are beginning to change here on the Left Coast. We've had a, relatively, hard winter – snow on the valley floor several times, once it stuck for more than a week.
A short word here about Portlanders: I like them a lot, I like their weird ways, their optimistic self-reliance, their fundamental courtesy, but you'd think that folks who spend so much time in the rain would know how to drive in it – and snow! They see snowflakes come down and just hafta rush out to drive the old beater with the bald tires to see how many 360's they can do down the hill on their way to the I-5 where they can spin out in front of a oncoming semi. I swear there's a secret prize waiting for the first person to completely block the highway.
Back to the Bots: the signs are far fewer now, one by one they're disappearing, usually in the middle of the night, the cars are showing bumpersticker scraper stigmata, the eager young canvassers are now back to self-righteously assuming you care nothing about starving children or dying whales or evaporating boreal forests. No one advertises Obama block parties in the community newpapers. The “Yes, We Did!” signs have vanished, their spaces sometimes replaced with “Quitting Business” signs. The street buskers are more numerous, they now have turf scuffles with the old familiar beggars who believe they have squatter's rights to prime territory, the corner by the bank, the service doorway of the supermarket...
Late winter reflection time, the gray days when you look in the mirror a lot. I think the Obots are poised at the edge of the abyss, so...
I'm proposing we set up a 12-step recovery group for them – someone's got to do it, we can't have them wandering glassy-eyed about the landscape, arms outstretched, grasping blindly for another hit of the “O-juice”.
First: what to call it? OA is taken, I believe, (Overeaters Anonymous) so I'm proposing OBA (pronounced: obey) for ObamaBots Anonymous.
The ObamaBots Anonymous 12-step Recovery Program:
Step 1 - We admit we are powerless over our Obama addiction - that our lives have become unmanageable and that we are prone to hissy fits and screaming “I don't understand!” at inappropriate moments.
Step 2 – We have come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity but that this Power is NOT Obama.
Step 3 – We have made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of Obama as we understood Him - no, wait, we already did that... we mean we have decided that we will NOT turn our every waking thought over to Obama.
Step 4 – We have made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. We have looked into the mirror and said ”I am a moron who has thrown his/her rational thought processes out the window in favor of mindless adulation of a sociopathic, narcissistic sock-puppet.”
Step 5 – We admit to the world, to ourselves and to another human being – preferably someone who told us we were idiots to support Obama - the exact nature of our wrongs: see Step 4.
Step 6 - We're entirely ready to have a frying pan to the side of the head or a dentist with a high-speed drill or a construction worker with a jackhammer, remove all these defects of character depending on just how dumb we were.
Step 7 – We have humbly asked if there's some kind of capable Power which can remove our shortcomings and return our brains.
Step 8 – We've made a list of all persons we have harmed, and are willing to make amends to them all: you know who we are and we know you know – we prefer cash, please.
Step 9 – We have made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others - you don't get to make these kinds of judgment calls anymore, the evidence shows you're spectacularly bad at it - pay up.
Step 10 – We continue to take personal inventory and when we are wrong promptly admit it. ...we're waiting...
Step 11 – We seek, through prayer and adoration to improve our conscious contact with Obama as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of Obama's will for us and the power to carry out His will... NO, NO, NO! Stop trying to get O's Blackberry address, put down the tripleshot, soy chai latte and remember Steps 1-10... Jeez! Get a grip willya!
Step 12 - Having had a rational thought process re-awakening as the result of these steps, we will carry this message to other Obamabots, and attempt to de-program these poor fools and bring them back to reality.
I think that a whole-hearted embrace of these steps by recovering Obamabots will go a long way toward re-integrating them into the real world again. Of course they'll probably have to go to OBA meetings for a long, long time and we should be as gentle as possible with them, don't shock them by pointing out things like: all O's 'ideas' are stolen in part or as a whole from others (like Hillary) who actually had thought about how to implement their plans. This kind of shock may be too much for OBAs, cases have been known where they go directly into CDS and may require hospitalization.
Remember, they were thinking humans once, with time and care they may become so again – they can Change and there's always Hope.
