Something much more important than film: "...voteobamavoteobamavoteobamavoteobama..."

Have you seen the music video will.i.am made? It's at www.barackobama.com. He made it because he watched a speech Mr. Obama gave, and was inspired to.

It hits a little corny, but it's still so powerful, the underlying words, that one finds themselves taken aback. It's hard not to get a little emotional about the idea that the future of the entire world is within our hands, right now. We are told this from childhood, but the tangibility of it comes into focus quite suddenly when you listen to Barack Obama speak.

And that itself is, I think, what people are so overwhelmed by. That, in this entirely post-modern, jaded, bored society, something true can still be real. Perhaps it's because we hear the self-empowering message "we can", that Barack's message hits a somewhat abandoned part of us. It's deeply familiar. Like hearing a song for the first time since you were a little kid, when you heard it many times. Or like coming home from a long trip and getting to hear your lover's voice again. It's like resting after a difficult journey.

8 years of learning to filter the president's words into something we can understand, and of trepidatiously watching our own country from afar, because we have no say or control. It starts to become a thick skin. Of course it's cool to be apathetic: there's nothing amazing happening at the helm of our nation. Or planet. Or species. Suddenly, though, there's a prospect that we can not only witness, but help along a positive and basically immediate future... Intelligence is familiar, but forgotten.

Have you ever watched an episode of The West Wing, or Star Trek: The Next Generation, and wondered why real human beings can't lead like President Martin Sheen or Captain Patrick Stewart? They serve as our fairy tales, and give us something to want. But here is a person running for the office of the president, who is as confident and intelligent and focused as those in fiction.

He exudes joy and we look suspiciously on, until we hear his message, and the ease with which he delivers it, and genuinely seems to believe what he is saying, and we suddenly get it. He reminds us that we have the ability to affect change all around us.

That's why I'm going to head over to the caucus today.

=max

If you wanna hear even more political ramblings from the kin, head over to Woodard Bay.