Of all the creepy things this administration has done, this may be the creepiest.
Here’s the Twitter commentary.
[Afternoon update]
The life of Julia, under Obama and Romney.
[Update a few minutes later]
More milestones from Julia’s “life”:
21 years: After barely completing her high-school degree in her god-awful school, Julia goes looking for a job. There aren’t many, especially for people without college degrees. Julia kicks around the food-service and hospitality industries for a while, and ends up getting a job as a bartender. Even at her relatively low level of income, she pays a host of direct and indirect taxes to help subsidize Obama donors and supporters at politically connected businesses. She can’t quite figure out why President Obama’s pet millionaires and billionaires need her money more than she does.
22 years: After working in the bar for a while, Julia decides she likes it and wants to open her own place. But she’ll need capital to get that done. Under Obama, there is little or no credit available to small entrepreneurs, because we never got around to fixing the problems in the banking system, instead choosing to futz around with things like the disclosures on credit-card offers and micromanaging swipe fees and grandstanding about bonuses. Julia does not open her new business, and she doesn’t hire any other Julias to build, decorate, supply, or staff it.
23 years: Being a bartender, Julia works late at night. Under Obama, the federal government supports laws that make it difficult or impossible for a private citizen to own a gun in many places. Leaving her bar one night, the defenseless Julia is killed in the street. Ironically, the gun used to kill her was sold to a Mexican drug cartel under a program run by President Obama’s Department of Justice.
And of course, President Obama is president for life.
What a huge juicy target for parody.
[Update a while later]
That only took a few hours: the inevitable I Am Julia parody Twitter account.
[Update a few minutes later]
More thoughts from Yuval Levin:
It’s not just that each of its elements can be easily parodied, it’s that every single one of them is a perfectly common feature of contemporary satire, and the whole thing — right down to the fact that it is a web slideshow that can be very easily aped by countless clever and tech-savvy smart-alecks sitting underemployed in front of computers right now — feels like a joke and yet isn’t.
It’s going to be very very difficult for the purveyors of knowing sarcasm in the hipster-industrial complex to resist this provocation, even though openly mocking Barack Obama will feel uneasy and unnatural at first. And that’s what could make this a genuine misstep for the Obama campaign: Obama’s 2008 campaign was very careful to keep itself on the side of the culture of cool, so that the agents of that culture would turn their guns against John McCain but mostly lay off Obama, even as he offered up embarrassingly vapid nonsense about turning back the oceans. If they begin to make the culture of cool uneasy about Obama, and increasingly comfortable treating him (as it is inclined to treat everyone) as a self-important windbag, they could do serious damage to his standing with precisely the intended audience of the Life of Julia: young liberals, who must turn out in uncharacteristically large numbers if Obama is to have a decent chance of re-election. If those young liberals come to see the president not as a cool modern idealist in on the joke but as a bloviating panderer who buys his own shtick, he’s in big trouble. If you puncture Obama’s balloon, there is not much left of him, and he seems to be running the risk of puncturing that balloon himself.
One can only hope.
[Update a few minutes later]
We learned from the dog dust up that no one in the campaign had actually read Obama’s book (I’m guessing the first time that Obama read it himself was when he did the audio version). Now you have to wonder if any of them read 1984? Or if they read at all?
And people accused Ayn Rand of creating cartoonish, unrealistic collectivists in her novels. As the decades go by, the real-life Left becomes so cartoonish and grotesque that they make Ellsworth Toohey and Wesley Mouch look like characters out of Naturalistic fiction.
As it stands, the Democrats just can’t seems to find any REAL people who are ‘helped’ or who have been ‘helped’ by 50 or 60 or 70 years of Liberal / Progressive Policies and ”help. So they just make up ‘Julia’.
Either they aren’t looking very hard, or their policies really aren’t working very well. I’m torn on this one.
“Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!”
Winston Smith
1984 by George Orwell
Now I’m picturing Sam Kinison as Winston Smith…
I hadn’t made that connection Sj. Good call.
And they’re getting like Big Brother by the day. Lord knows we’re in a war that they keep fighting, but hat they act like it’s un-winnable and keeps going forever.
The Thought Police have been with us for YEARS!
Sadly, many Democrat voters will think Julia is real because they believe everything they read in fiction. When people are reading a piece of fiction where all of their social biases are confirmed, ever wonder if the person writing (making stuff up) had anything to with shaping their perspective?
If ‘progressives’ are the elite intellectuals; who is the audience for this cartoon?
“Now you have to wonder if any of them read 1984?”
Wasn’t that called “The Miracle on Ice?!?” /snark.
I’m pretty sure they’ve read 1984 – they use it as instruction manual. >:-(
My thought exactly, Barbara. They love being the ones in charge of the nightmare. “For our own good.” TM
Except for the Animal Farm bits.
Julia isn’t real enough to be a Second Life avatar.
I came to the conclusion that far too many of our supposed intellectual leaders don’t read long ago. On my last contract position, I worked for three men, each with a MBA. They knew nothing of engineering standards, not to mention the CAD software we used. Every week, it seemed, there were new forms, with hilarious mispellings, to fill out for every task. Worse yet, they were functionally illiterate.
I was told that I used too many “big words” in my daily reports; words such as “challenging”, “alternative”, and “reiterate”. My retired parents, who never progressed past high school, know all of them.
One has to wonder how many of our political leaders, from both parties, are like that as well?
Don,
I too got that big word routine at my last F/T job. Oddly, I was the only one in my department without a degree or an advanced degree.
” I was the only one in my department without a degree or an advanced degree.”
Well, that explains it, DS.
(And I say that as someone with a degree who still knows all those “big” words.)
They don’t teach engineering standards in business school, maybe some in Ops Management or Construction Management. But they do teach team work and communication so it looks like their was some failure to communicate and work as a team. Often the actions of the last person to touch the ball are judged but there is a whole string of events that lead up to that moment that effect the outcome.