Spare the Rod

I know that I am not alone when I say that my consumption of news has trickled to a pittance since the November Revolution. Partly this is due to exhaustion and relief. It is also due to an urge to not have My President's victory cheapened and cliched beyond redemption before he even takes office.

But my self-imposed exile from political news is also because of people like Rod Blagojevich. I had never heard of this douchebag before today, but I knew he existed nonetheless. Still, attributing a face and a few sordid details to the archetype that I knew existed was rather illuminating in a pathetic way.

First of all, LOOK at this guy. He looks like a cross between a 1980's game-show host and the bad guy from a Karate Kid movie. He's just a mess. And I don't mean that in the sense that he is not handsome by our decadent and materialistic standards; I mean that in the sense that you just KNOW this guy is a scumbag.

Scumbags, of course, are commonplace among alpha males, and one might even argue that certain crises can only be effectively managed with a certain dose of scumbaggery. But Blagojevich wasn't even a big-picture scumbag; his ambition was so narrow, and his greed directed towards such pedantic lusts, that I almost would have felt better were he more devious.

This man has the authority to appoint the successor to Barack Obama, who is the most popular human being on the planet at this moment. Now, assuming Blagojevich were purely cynical and ambitious and sociopathic, what would he do? Well, he would look at this purely as an opportunity for personal advancement.

Which is what he did. And which is what, frankly, most politicians would have done. But how did Blagojevich DEFINE personal advancement? On on the one hand, he could have ingratiated himself with the most powerful person on Earth, who would have owed him one. On the other hand, he could risk the ire of that man as well as his freedom, his job, his reputation, and his property for some money in an envelope.

And what did he do? Well, we know what he did. Our system has so much room for legal corruption, that when a politician is caught in such a flagrant act so far out of our corrupted "legal" norms, it is nothing less than an act of ethical pornography. Selling Senate seats. And leaving the house in the morning with that hair.

This is the fragility of Obama. We're all in that secret club now. We feel different. We don't know why exactly, but we know it's real. But I also know that I despise nearly every politician I know of. Obama's revolution cannot survive him. Blagojevich reminds us of the rule to Obama's exception.