So tonight President Obama appeared on Mythbusters, asking Adam and Jamie to revist the Archimedes death ray, which they had tested and busted twice before.
Which is to say, Barack Obama got some of the country’s coolest and most creative people to implement a policy that had already, for known and well established reasons, failed. Twice.
I’m sure it wasn’t meant as a metaphor.
The Edge of the American West 
22 comments
December 9, 2010 at 8:00 am
Don
Ah, anything for publicity. A good politician thrives on publicity. Still, I wonder if 500 shields in the hands of 500 soldiers each might have been slightly convex, thus creating an additional magnifying effect.
December 9, 2010 at 8:54 am
dana
In fairness, the Mythbusters revisit old myths regularly, whenever the audience gets nitpicky.
It could have been worse. They could have been talking about Sisyphus or something.
December 9, 2010 at 9:40 am
politicalfootball
I don’t want to see the Mythbusters episode on Sisyphus. I’m sure they’d conclude that he would give up on that damn rock.
December 9, 2010 at 10:51 am
dana
But then they’d conclude that he wouldn’t have given up if he’d had, like, 4 pounds of C-4 and a blast shield.
December 9, 2010 at 11:14 am
Vance Maverick
So what should he have asked? “Did FDR really end the Great Depression?”
December 9, 2010 at 11:17 am
JP Stormcrow
“Where was I born?”
December 9, 2010 at 12:23 pm
ben
“Does governmental ‘belt-tightening’ ITTET really work?”
December 9, 2010 at 12:36 pm
David
Myths to test:
The US government is an authoritarian conspiracy.
December 9, 2010 at 3:08 pm
paul
I guess the coda wherein The Walrus suggested that the effect may not have been outright destruction of the invaders but fear and disorientation didn’t register?
The parallel story about whether or not a movie stunt from Hellboy could actually happen was far worse. Um, no. It’s a movie stunt, not a myth, rumor, or YouTube viral phenomemon. ‘Course it’s fake.
December 9, 2010 at 6:11 pm
ari
The coda struck me as shameless pandering to the president, actually. And at least the movie stunt had a giant steel fist being dropped on a moving jeep. That was cool.
December 9, 2010 at 9:36 pm
eric
They do “is this movie scene plausible” all the time. Granted, technically not a myth but as ari says, awesome.
December 9, 2010 at 10:06 pm
andrew
It was a simile.
December 10, 2010 at 5:57 pm
SeaSmith
I watched the episode, expecting that Obama would use the “death ray” principle as a segue for renewable electricity generation using solar thermal technology. (Do a google image search for “Ivanpah.”) But, nothing! A missed opportunity, in my opinion.
December 11, 2010 at 10:27 am
Davis X. Machina
The coda struck me as shameless pandering to the president, actually.
The failure to devolve the powers of Head of State and Leader of the Government of the Day onto two different persons rears its ugly head again.
December 13, 2010 at 11:20 am
zhava
At the risk of upsetting the lite-n-polite tone of this thread… Obama is the best thing that has happened to America in a very long time. The problem is Americans and their congenital need to be bandits and global ball busters. Americans don’t like rules… anything that places a higher standard above their alleged “God-given” freedom to fuck the other guy for a few dollars more.
The guy can’t win and every perceived shortcoming, irony, metaphorical aside, foible is grist for the mill – even his wife and kids… especially on the part of Fox hacks and their tea party minions. If you weren’t sure before… after watching the disgraceful crap directed at this Pres… we all now know that American racism is bred in the bone… alive… and prospering.
December 13, 2010 at 5:35 pm
Vance Maverick
At first glance, zhava, the stuff you’re talking about doesn’t help explain, for example, why the Bush tax cuts were extended. But Ishmael Reed connects the dots, concisely and bracingly.
December 13, 2010 at 5:59 pm
zhava
Oh and how do you imagine Obama would ever survive in the snake pit that is American politics without dealing with the devil?
December 13, 2010 at 6:33 pm
zhava
Ishmael Reed: “One progressive commentator played an excerpt from a Harry Truman speech during which Truman screamed about the Republican Party to great applause. He recommended this style to Mr. Obama. If President Obama behaved that way, he’d be dismissed as an angry black militant with a deep hatred of white people. His grade would go from a B- to a D.”
That’s about it. Think those who backed Barrack with respect to his progressive credentials are happy with his compromises and capitulations? Absolutely not. Think we enjoyed watching as he bowed and scraped to the Zionist lobby and made ludicrous promises along the lines of “Jerusalem is Israel’s eternal capital”… no we wanted to throw up. Jerusalem has to be on the table if there is to be any hope for a Palestinian state.
I said Obama was the best thing that has happened to America in a very long time because he’s decent, has the right instincts and looks to broker when he can – and not from a top-down “America is top-dog” position. He is a humanitarian at heart who is willing to set aside ego and hubris in the interests of rapprochement.
The paranoia and hysteria of Americans was tweaked in the early going when he made a gesture in the presence of the Saudi king that looked like a bow and when he spoke from a podium in Egypt, rather than Israel. The bullshit that followed that trip was just a foretaste of the insanity to come.
Americans don’t want a level playing field on the international front, they don’t want universal anything if it emanates from Washington… they are in love with their hubris, and their war machine and their “freedoms” that in practice often boil down to the right-to-pillage… if the recent lessons from the Wall Street meltdown have taught us anything.
As with most things there are degrees… and Obama offered hope that Americans have pissed all over. They never raised him up to do the job, they dragged him down to half- measures and gestures, because deep down he insults their sense of who they are (at least a large percentage of them). Why? Well because in their insular minds they are and should be regarded as numero uno. A delusional world view in itself. Kind of like the “world series” of baseball that isn’t. The football (footie) World Cup is a world cup by any standard because it engages nations around the globe. But Americans hold their own sports fests in their backyard and grace them grandiose terms that can only be viewed without irony by folks who need to get out more.
December 15, 2010 at 1:24 pm
politicalfootball
Reed’s essential point is irrefutable: Obama’s options for self-expression are limited in ways that don’t apply to white politicians.
But this doesn’t say anything at all about Obama’s political positions. In the course of getting elected, Obama remained calm in demeanor, but was directly confrontational in his political positioning. He took many positions that Republicans hated, starting with his public endorsement of his own candidacy.
In fairness, Reed’s essay is limited in scope, discussing superficial appearances and not dealing with substantive political issues at all. He’s rebutting people who want Obama to look angry. But that’s a trivial aspect of the progressive critique of Obama.
But Reed continually chooses to generalize this complaint to “progressives,” and engages in hippie-bashing that ranges from gratuitious to ludicrous. For instance:
I thought of them when I pointed out to a leading progressive that the Tea Party included neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers — and he called me a “bully.” He believes that the Tea Party is a grass-roots uprising against Wall Street
Say what you will about white progressives, but as a group, sympathy for Tea Partiers is not among their faults.
Unlike white progressives, blacks and Latinos are not used to getting it all. They know how it feels to be unemployed and unable to buy your children Christmas presents.
Those white progressives are so spoiled; uniformly wealthy, with no knowledge of financial hardship.
Well, that’s just bullshit.
December 15, 2010 at 3:38 pm
politicalfootball
This from Reed seems especially perverse:
I’ve been thinking recently of all those D’s for deportment on my report cards. I thought of them, for instance, when I read a response to an essay I had written about Mark Twain that appeared in “A New Literary History of America.” One of the country’s leading critics, who writes for a prominent progressive blog, called the essay “rowdy,” which I interpreted to mean “lack of deportment.”
That comment seems to be in reference to this rave review of the volume in which Reed’s piece was published. Reed’s interpretation of it says more about Reed’s peculiar psychology than it does about the review itself.
December 15, 2010 at 4:00 pm
Vance Maverick
You’re right about the progressive-bashing, politicalfootball. But take a look at what Miller actually wrote about Reed:
I count five ways she calls him inappropriate (while implying that’s good entertainment). Just to be clear, I agree that Reed is a provocateur. But he’s also right to notice that his provocations provoke.
December 15, 2010 at 4:24 pm
politicalfootball
Vance, I think you have to read that in context. She had just finished discussing the volume as “masterly” and “magnificent” and “vast, inquisitive, richly surprising and consistently enlightening.” In context, she was discussing Reed’s piece as an example of the virtues of the book.
I’ll grant that had the previous paragraphs been different, then your excerpt would have meant something different. But you realy have to wipe out the context to suggest that she’s calling Reed’s work inappropriate.