Ed Driscoll has found an A-number-1-prime example of drooling worship by someone named John Ridley:

Every president to hold office has espoused some version of Americanism; the truths that we hold self-evident, even when those truths are not always in evidence. But for all their grand rhetoric and mostly good deeds, none was able to seal the deal on the trifecta of equality, plurality and socioeconomic ascendancy. Obama has. Obama is the more perfect union. He is a house united. Obama is the New Generation and the hot light of a dawn that goes way beyond clever talk of morning in America.

Quite simply, quite plainly, just by virtue his being, Obama is America. The first true American to lead our nation.

And never mind that George Washington fellow, or Abraham Lincoln either.

This is "underwear thrown on the stage" stuff. America's press needs an Aika to start screaming hazukashii serifu kinshi tteba!* at them. Or maybe someone with a mop to clean up all the drool.

If Washington, Lincoln, Truman, and Eisenhower don't qualify as "true Americans", then the number of people who do must be vanishingly small.

* "Embarassing dialogue is forbidden! I really mean it!"

UPDATE: One of my readers pointed out to me that tteba is probably better translated as "Like I said!" rather than as "I really mean it!"

UPDATE: Ed was kind enough to link back to me, so I thought I should offer an explanation for the in-joke. It's below the fold.

That's Akari, Alice, and Aika from the anime series Aria: the Animation. They live on a terraformed Mars in the future and work as apprentice gondoliers in the city of Neo-Venizia, a deliberate recreation of Venice which is a major tourist destination.

Akari is hopelessly romantic, sentimental, and upbeat, and constantly spouts amazingly sappy lines. Every time she does, Aika snaps out 恥ずかしい科白禁止 (hazukashii serifu kinshi) which can variously be translated as "Sappy lines are forbidden" or "Embarrassing dialogue is banned". It's a running gag in the series.

Different versions of this running gag manifest at different places in the story. At one point, Aika says, "You're about to say something sappy. I'm preemptively forbidding it." Another time Aika says, "Akari, don't you ever run out of ways of seeing the bright side of things?"

Anyway, since this is primarily an anime blog, and since that series is very popular among anime fans, it was a reference that my regular readers would have picked up. And for anyone who came here through Ed, now you know what I was talking about.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 12:24 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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