Philadelphia Weekly

ARTS AND CULTURE

On The Radar

Pod People Power :Obama eats America's brain.

By Steven Wells

Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted Feb. 27, 2008

Illustration by Hawk Krall

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.