Illustration by Hawk Krall

On The Radar

Pod People Power :Obama eats America’s brain.

by Steven Wells

This is your brain: Tum te tum te tum. This is your brain on Michael Nutter: Ah yeah yeah yeah yeah. This is your brain on Barack Obama: Whoopy whoo whoo whoo whoo.

What’s going on? Everywhere I look, colleagues, friends and neighbors—sensible, dull, earnest, reasonable people—are drooling like infants, twitching like lunatics, grinning like love-struck teenagers, gazing into the middle distance with the glazed 1,000-yard stare of the shell-shocked and the lobotomized.

The zomboid Nutter fanatics toss their sex-scent-reeking underwear at the mayor’s feet and shriek with nervous laughter every time the Groucho-mask-faced Great One lets slip another dry-as-mummy-dust bon mot in that oh-so-sexy Eddie-Murphy-playing-a-nerdy-white-guy voice.

American adults—looking uncannily like the mindless beehived teenyboppers who screamed themselves hoarse at the Beatles—strain against the crash barriers at every Obama pit stop, weeping with joyful lust over the droning politibot vomiting meaningless fortune-cookie platitudes up on the flag-draped podium.

We’ve been here before. Sorta. A friend of mine tells me she was once in a room full of sneering feminist/Marxist sociology-of-gender majors when Buffalo Bill Clinton walked in and—swoon—every person in the room—male, female, straight, gay—turned into a smitten 14-year-old girl.

Okay, so any one of us could’ve had the same effect with a box of pheromone-sprayed puppies. (Guys, you wanna score in a lesbian bar? Just walk in with a box of pheromone-sprayed puppies. I do it every weekend and it works every time.) But these guys—Nutter, Obama, Clinton, Hitler—it’s like they sweat pheromone-sprayed puppy scent. Awesome.

Okay, so the Hitler comparison is maybe a bit far-fetched. In bad taste, even. It’s actually more like Dead Di week when the royal parasite Diana Princess of Wales got splattered all over a freeway tunnel pillar in Paris and the great British public—instead of celebrating the removal of a useless bloodsucking upper-class waste of space—went on an embarrassing crying jag that lasted months.

It was horrible. A nation once known for its stoicism and stiff upper-lip rended its shirt and beat its chest and wailed like a baby.

It was like Invasion of the Body Snatchers—the Donald Sutherland version. I walked the streets of London pretending to be one of “them” by hiding an onion in my hankie and wailing like a banshee on crack. To no avail. They spotted me. And one by one the pod people turned, pointed and let loose a hideous, soul-withering vegetable scream.

And right here, right now in Philadelphia, surrounded by love-stricken Nutterniks and knicker-wettingly excited Obamaniacs, it’s happening all over again.

Mommy, I’m scared.