Obama and Hipsters

Oh, fucking politics. I've just got to learn to shut down my RSS feeds for a few weeks and forget about the fate of the world for awhile if I'm ever going to get any fucking work done.

Anyway, Jennifer over at Shifting Baselines has some shit to say about the whole hipster response to life in general and to Obama in particular. Read the whole thing, but this is the finish.

If punk can be infected by hope, I think hipsters already have been. After Obama's election my hipster and Nietzsche-loving friend even noted: "Maybe Hunter S. Thompson got it all wrong. If he had only waited, he would have seen better days."

So Vice, you've got it all wrong. Or you have your readers all wrong.

When it comes to dos and don'ts, you don't need to steal the limelight and promote the impeachment of a President who has not yet taken office. You don't need to derail or deride the Obama bandwagon. And you don't need to drone on with the same vapid message that nothing changes. Because it does. It just did. In one of the most electric elections in history.

Those eyeglasses are fake. I know the hipsters really do see.

Fuckin' A. This shit really does matter and Obama just might be the Real Deal, the person who can actually lead this country out of the mess we've been in for the last, hell, for the last forty-odd years since the Civil Rights Era. Sure, he's a politician, and politicians are by nature going to betray you and are not going to give you everything you want. But while LBJ gave us the ramped-up Vietnam War, he also gave us the Civil Right Act and ushered in the modern era of liberal government. FDR is villainized by the Right but he found time in between setting in place the modern Social Security system to win World War II.

Yeah, Obama's just a politician, and there's no guarantee that we'll look back on this election in four years and even think his presidency was a good one, much less one on par with the two TLA-idents I mentioned above. But the times can often make the man, and if there is any man who has the opportunity for greatness on the historical stage, it's none other than BHO. If your only response to that is ironic detachment, please shut the fuck up and let the rest of us get to work actually making things better.