{"id":1397,"date":"2008-12-18T00:09:49","date_gmt":"2008-12-18T04:09:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/anglicansamizdat.wordpress.com\/?p=1397"},"modified":"2008-12-18T00:09:49","modified_gmt":"2008-12-18T04:09:49","slug":"adulating-in-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/adulating-in-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Adulating in Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some things are as certain as the sun appearing in the morning, so it surprises no-one that Barack Obama is Time’s man \u2013 sorry \u2013 person of the year 2008<\/a>. It and the inevitable fawning was so predictable that it is almost not irritating. Almost.<\/p>\n

Obama sits down on one of the mesh chairs and launches into a spoken tour of his world of woes. It’s a mind-boggling journey, although he shows no signs of being boggled \u2014 unless you count the increasingly prevalent salt in his salt-and-pepper hair. By now we are all accustomed to that Obi-Wan Kenobi calm, though we may never entirely understand it. In a soothing monotone, he highlights the scariest hairpin turns on his itinerary, the ones that combine difficulty with danger plus a jolt of existential risk.\"Add<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

How could we mere mortals, ever understand what Obi-Wan Kenobi calm is. As it happens, Obi-Wan was apparently<\/a> personally responsible for the death of Darth Maul and General Grievous, and indirectly caused the deaths of Darth Tyranus, Darth Vader, and Darth Sidious. He had a long and tumultuous career that has helped shape the fate of an entire galaxy.<\/p>\n

Doesn\u2019t sound particularly calm to me; of course, the modern equivalent, Obami-Wan, goes out for a quick drag now and again: it\u2019s the only thing that stops him running amok killing numerous and sundry Darths and shaping recalcitrant galaxies.<\/p>\n

And why do we have to have “existential” dropped into everything: a risk that is not existential is non-existent. Just like the impartiality of Time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some things are as certain as the sun appearing in the morning, so it surprises no-one that Barack Obama is Time’s man \u2013 sorry \u2013 person of the year 2008. It and the inevitable fawning was so predictable that it … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[256],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1397"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1397\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}