The Audacity of Rex Manning Day vs. Barack Hussen Obama Day

Things are going so well; I'm having my own personal Rex Manning Day.  But that could be because Barack Hussen Obama Day was the best day since Rex Manning Day, if not better.  We all love Obama, all 6.2 billion of us.  I got the same feeling on Obama Day that I get at Christmas when I watch the Grinch's heart grow three sizes and break the little heart measuring frame.  It was a day for breakin' all the rules.  A day when the president doesn't have to get all the words right in when being inaugurated, but at least uses words that actually exist.  A day when Tupac would change the lyrics to the song Changes because, "And although it seems heaven sent, the world ain't ready for a black president, uhhh" isn't quite as poingnet now, uhhh?  It is a time for change, and Obama wants to bring about change.

If you read Obama's second book, "The Audacity of Hope," you discover that change, is in fact why hope is audacious - sorry to ruin the ending.  From what I understand, Obama has already helped change the economy by selling popular Obama merchandise, and not just in the US, but on the world market too.  I've seen clever Obama t-shirts here in the UK, but for my contribution to the Obama-nation, I'd like to present the very best in Barak Obama merchandise on the Tanzanian Market.

In Tanzania, people use these large sheets of colorful fabric called kangas for anything they find suitable: a skirt, apron, hat, backpack, towel, banner, to carry a child, as a carry-things-on-your-head-thing, etc.  And the difference between a kanga and a normal piece of fabric is that a kanga has a message printed on it, usually something along the lines of "God gives me strength" or "Never lose hope" but also very specific messages like "Leave my man alone."  My kanga, as pictured above, is a Christmas gift from my friend Emelie and it says, "Love and Peace, He Grants Us Through God" in Kishwali.  Needless to say, this is tremendous.

As for the inauguration, which was equally as tremendous, here are my thoughts:

1.) Chaney looks extra old in his wheelchair.  And while I'm sure he's hell on wheels, this would be a damn scary inauguration if Palin was pushing Chaney to the podium.

2.) It looks cold.  I hope Obama doesn't pull a Harrison, get pneumonia, and die.

3.) Was Martin Luther Kings dream to have a black president?  I need to reread that speech.

4.) I can't decide which name is funnier: Barack Hussen Obama or Yo Yo Ma.

5.) It seems strange that after the inauguration, it's traditional to read poetry.  But keeping with this tradition . . .

America 

by Tony Hoagland

From: What Narcissism Means to Me

Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud

Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison

Whose walls are made of Radio Shacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes

Where you can't tell the show from the commercials,

And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is,

He says that even when he's driving to the mall in his Isuzu

Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over them

Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers, even then he feels

Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds

of the thick satin quilt of America

And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain,

or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade,

And then I remember that when I stapped my father in the dream last night,

It was not blood but money

That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills

Spilling from his wounds, and-this is the weird part-,

He gasped "Thank god-those Ben Franklins were

Clogging up my heart-

And so I perish happily,

Freed from that which kept me from my liberty"-

Which was when I knew it was a dream, since my dad

Would never speak in rhymed couplets,

And I look at the student with his acne and cell phone and phony ghetto clothes

And I think, "I am asleep in America too,

And I don't know how to wake myself either,"

And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life:

"I was listening to the cries of the past,

When I should have been listening to the cries of the future."

But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable

Or what kind of nightmare it might be

When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you

And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river

Even while others are drowning underneath you

And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters

And yet it seems to be your own hand

Which turns the volume higher?

Fact about me #2

I didn't realize Obama's middle name was Hussen.  How'd I miss that?