VIII: “Our Souls Are Broken” - Michelle Obama, Postmodern Fascist Ideologue 291The alleged uniqueness of Obama as the indispensable leader recurs again and again: Michelle
Obama also urged the crowd not to overlook the importance of inspiration and hope. “Our souls
are broken,” she said. “And right now we need some inspiration. Inspiration and hope are not
words. Everything begins and ends with hope. And the only person in this race who has a
chance of getting us where we need to be is Barack Obama.”
Sometimes the note of difficulty, sacrifice, and travail becomes more prominent, as here:
“We need a leader who’s going to touch our souls because you see, our souls are broken,”
Michelle Obama said. “The change Barack is talking about is hard, so don’t get too excited
because Barack is going to demand that you too be different.”
In medieval Europe, there was a tradition that a true King could cure diseases such as scrofula
with his mere touch alone: here we see Obama promoted to the level of such a sacral king, without
the benefit of the special ancient unctions which were stored in the French case in the cathedral of
Rheims. As a rule, the dominant notes of hope and change are tempered by many less prominent
references to austerity and sacrifice, leaving no doubt that there is no purgation of the broken soul
without pain:
‘Obama brought her husband’s message of hope and change to a standing-room-only crowd.
“Our souls are broken in this nation, and we need some inspiration and a whole lot of hope,”
she told a packed auditorium.... though Obama’s speaking style is generally more
conversational than that of her husband, she has her own loftier, more rhetorically aspirational
moments. “We need a different leadership because our souls are broken. We need to be
inspired...to make the sacrifices that are needed to push us to a different place,” she said. And,
toward the climax of her speech, she said, “Dreaming does count. You need to dream to realize
your possibilities.’^143
At times, selected surrogates are permitted to join in the paean to Obama the savior, but Michelle
generally plays the role of the high priestess or Pythoness of the mystery cult of Barky. One such
surrogate was Caroline Kennedy, who was used to depict the apostolic succession of Obama from
the martyred Kennedy brothers. As Craig Crawford put it, the Kennedys had no choice but to pass
the torch to Obama, because their own kids were all in rehab. This account evokes such a liturgical
moment:
At UCLA, Caroline Kennedy called Obama a generational figure “who inspires me the way
people say my father inspired them. “It’s rare to have a candidate who can help us believe in
ourselves and tie that belief to the highest ideals,” said Kennedy, who said Obama stands for
“the future of our party and the future of our country.” Michelle Obama declared that her
husband is a needed anecdote to a troubled nation torn by war and struggles for opportunity.
“Before we can fix our problems, we have to fix our souls,” she said. “Our souls are broken in
this nation.”^144
Incredibly enough, the question of broken souls or, more commonly, “wounded souls” is a
commonplace in the psychological and sociological literature about the genesis of mass movements
and their demagogic leaders. The dialectic of such movements commonly involves the promise of
the demagogue to provide solace and healing, or else violent revenge, for the damage suffered by
the battered souls of the rank and file. An example of this sort of thinking can be found in Dr.
Jerrold Post’s book, Leaders and Their Followers in a Dangerous World: The Psychology of
Political Behavior (Psychoanalysis and Social Theory) (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).