Friday, March 21, 2014

Adrift in the Tides of Time~~Random Notes 2

Basic Quest for Closure

XXXIII 
Earth could not answer; nor the Seas that mourn 
In flowing Purple, of their Lord forlorn; 
Nor rolling Heaven, with all his Signs reveal'd 
And hidden by the sleeve of Night and Morn.

~~Omar Khayyam, The Rubaiyat (Tr. Edward Fitzgerald)
While ubiquitous luminaries in punditland, notably Bill O’Reilly and Charles Krauthammer, discombobulate over what they deem ‘psychotic’ wall-to-wall reportage on the hunt for MH370, Jack Shafer and Greta Van Susteren opine the show must go on.  Admittedly, at times the coverage does not include news any longer but stale narratives on recycled events.  Nonetheless, I count myself in the latter camp of continued coverage.

The search for Malaysian Airlines MH370 needs to continue until a point is reached when closure is deemed to have been attained.  Closure, however, is a very relative concept neither arbitrary nor quantifiable.  It is definitely subjective, mentally and emotionally.  It is a reckoning that each individual must calibrate the measure of equilibrium in his/her own soul.

To take a very personal example, I have just attained another degree of closure on the disastrous 11-Sep-01 events (internally I refer to as Jihad911) after I had written about it.  In that disaster I only lost a contract for a consulting engagement, not kith and kin.  And I’m still seething in umbrage that the dead should be properly avenged, any which way we can.

To bury your own dead with respect and deference, if not veneration had been an institutional ritual through time immemorial.  It has been integral to not only the Judeo-Christian ethical mores but also true of pagan societies of antiquity.  If by a plethora of happenstance you find yourself unable to take part in such rites the pangs of frustration and remorse gnaws at the fabric of your soul.

I am somewhat of a foremost authority on the gravity of this predicament.  By a combination of choice and circumstances, mostly of my own making [cf. pp.12~13, op.cit.], I was not able to attend the funerals of both my parents.  Rationalize it as I may, it has remained a heavy burden on my conscience that I’m certain shall stay with me till I retire from this mortal coil and fulfill the promise to [p.105 op.cit.]
. . . donate my cadaver to the Stony Brook University Medical Department, for cute and curious medical students to slice up. I consider it a more desirable arrangement compared to the prospect of being served up as an unwilling if non-resenting victual for ungrateful fat little earthworms.
It is therefore with more than just a generous dose of Verstohlenmitleid that I absorb and personalize the anguish on the faces of the would-be mourners for the 239 victims of the ill-fated MH370.  To the pragmatic in outlook and stoic in disposition, the reality of mourning is not grieving over the departed but over ourselves who are left behind.  The departed have paid their dues and crossed the bar.  Ergo, as Abraham Lincoln famously emphasized
. . . .It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they . . . have thus far so nobly advanced.
Whether or not we prove ourselves equal to the task remains to be seen.  As we venture to find out we can only allow to
Let tears flow free now to our sorrows’ vent
Sad thoughts are lighter made if by tears spent;
Receive the cheers that whosoever sends
Sorrow is lighter made if shared with friends.

~~Asumen, A Note of Consolation [p.158 op.cit.]
Some proponents of continued coverage hasten to justify their advocacy by purporting to “address the human interest elements” of the story.  I prefer the less pretentious angle, namely, that it’s a matter of personal taste.  You pursue whatever tickles your fancy.  It would be flagrantly disingenuous to advance your human interest angle on the story primarily in terms of the number of potential victims.

The specter of two hundred thirty-nine potential victims of an accident whose cause is yet unknown, pales in comparison to other human tragedies routinely taking place in our midst that we don’t even notice.  For instance, on average 3,425 American babies of all races are killed every day by abortion, a practice routinely subsidized by taxpayer dollars.  There are even several advocacy organizations designed to provide financial, logistical and jurisprudential support for the practice.
Western civilization, by default, had planted the seeds of its demise and nurtured it into a formidable instrument of its own destruction:
1.   It has treated reproductive responsibility as a leisurely hobby, producing an average of one designer baby per potential mother at the twilight end of the woman’s fertility years.
2.   It has institutionalized the systematic destruction of the defenseless and most vulnerable of the next generation with abortion on demand.
3.   It has promoted and glamorized conjugal cohabitation not conducive to procreative reproduction.
The result is an aging civilization that does not have much regard for its values to the point that it has grown indifferent to its own procreative perpetuation.  Western culture has effectively consigned custody of The Human Condition, “the problem of reasserting the politics as a valuable realm of human action, praxis, and the world of appearances” to parties unknown, unconcerned, and unaccountable.
This does not in any way denigrate the fate of the 239 souls on board MH370.  Contrariwise, we endeavor to find them because it is for us the living to account for what may have occurred.

We need closure for our own edification, peace of mind and tranquility of soul.  We need to know whether their demise needs to be avenged.  If so, by who?  Failing this most basic obligation to the departed would be tantamount to surrendering to the Barbarians at the Gates the rites of presiding over our civilizational funeral pyre.

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Adrift in the Tides of Time~~Random Thoughts 1

Drab, Desolate, and Deserted


It just occurred to me that since I can’t remember way back when, I have been the only one posting on the walls of this “closed group.”  So had I not been gallivanting hereabouts, could this thread have been utterly empty?  Or if I would drop dead tomorrow or sooner, this thread would be completely empty and nobody would have even noticed it.

The opposite view needs to be examined: If I were not here would the thread be teeming with Clanspersons aching to share their anguish on something or another?  It should be worth finding out.  But how so?

It has an eerily unsettling feeling akin to watching one of those old episodes of “The Twilight Zone,” where the place appears to be ghastly abandoned as a ghost town and everything seems out of kilter.
Gee, it’s so miserable to be so important.  It gives me more than enough motivation to quit, while I’m ahead, that is.

I looked much further back and I finally found on Eya Nemusa’s wall two picture-posts of 1-Feb-14.  Misery certainly loves company.

Two questions immediately came to mind: (1) What am I doing here, practically all by myself? And (2) has my presence actually driven people away from here?

The second question is rather difficult to find the answer to.  It simply is not that easy for me to find who had come by after I had left the place.  This is maybe a fitting argument to get myself a remote monitoring setup.

The next (to last) ‘not me’-category post was by Ruffneil Asumen Cayron on 4-Dec-13 ~~showing a charming picture of MARY RUTCHANE ASUMEN CAYRON for Miss SWU (Cebu) 2014.

Next in the anomalies roster is Shiela Mae Asumen’s wall of 23-Oct-13 on Random Acts of Senseless Violence.

If memory serves me correctly, this group (and its attendant thread) was established as a forum in an attempt to reach a consensus on how best to dispose of the Clan inheritance in a manner consistent with and abiding by the spirit and letter of Mother’s published Last Will and Testament.  But as it behooves any Clan in traditions immemorial, instead of resonating in harmony, we uncovered discordance too poignant to discard and disregard.

Grievances were exchanged.  Feathers were rumpled.  And egos were bruised.  The question remains: why am I still here?  Who else cares?

The temptation is deliciously irresistible to just follow the bidding of Brenda Lee and with her, sing along:
Walk away and live a life that's full
With no regrets
And don't look back at it, just try to forget
Why build a dream that cannot come true
So be stronger touch the stars now
Walk away walk on
Alternately, I might try to channel Frank Sinatra’s Angel Eyes and take to heart the very last line:
Pardon me but I got to run
The fact's uncommonly clear
I got to find who's now the number one
And why my angel eyes ain't here
Excuse me while I disappear
Only time could tell if we still find anything worth coming home to.  A short sabbatical may very well be what the doctor would order.  Then I may yet share in substance the guarded optimism of Dr. Jose Rizal:
Then will oblivion bring to me no care 
As over thy vales and plains I sweep;
Throbbing and cleansed in thy space and air 
With color and light, with song and lament I fare, 
Ever repeating the faith that I keep.

~~ Jose Rizal, My Last Farewell (Trans. Charles Derbyshire)

Sunday, March 16, 2014

Ameliorating Rites of Spring~~Cardinals’ Rituals

Ameliorating Rites of Spring~~Cardinals’ Rituals
VII 
Come, fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring 
Your Winter-garment of Repentance fling: 
The Bird of Time has but a little way 
To flutter--and the Bird is on the Wing. 
~~Omar Khayyam, The Rubaiyat

Just like the rooster who harbors the delusion that he brings in the daybreak with his crewing, a foggy understanding of one’s interactive relationship with the ambient environs may deal a non-too-trivial blow to the ego.  Such has been the nature and extent of my relationship with our holly-dwelling neighbor cardinals.
When I was first made aware of their living in our luxuriant evergreen holly, I harbored the delusion that it was the aura of our good-naturedness as a household that made them pick our tree in particular as their abode.  It made me feel warm and fuzzily radiant with an inner glow to think of the arrangement that way.  The fact that the branches were delectably laden with red berries all winter long ready for the picking hardly factored into my grasp of the situation.
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One breezy sunny afternoon in the first week of March the rude awakening came.  A rather huge flock of wide tailed dark brown tree sparrows, slightly bigger than the cardinals in size, swarmed on the tree in one fell swoop.  The scene was eerily reminiscent of the Alfred Hitchcock 1963 horror thriller, The Birds, terrorizing the tranquility of the sleepy town of Bodega Bay.

The intruding sparrows must have sent the resident cardinals scampering underneath the gutter to avoid being physically overwhelmed with fatal finality.  They were nowhere to be seen in or around the tree.  Putting up even nominal territorial defense appeared to be alien to the reflexes of the cardinals.  I watched in awe as the invading flock feasted on the berries with frenzy not in the least perturbed by my presence at the window.
[
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Almost as suddenly as they had come, if not more so, the sparrows departed the tree in a blinking of an eye.  They had left next to nothing to indicate that they graced the holly with their visit, although unwelcome it might have been.  But there was ample evidence of what they had taken away.  


They cleaned up almost three quarters of the berries.  Other than the twigs heaving a sigh of evident relief for having the load taken off them, the cardinals must have resented the invasion because they went missing for a few days.  They had seemingly gone off to mourn the unceremonious violation of their domain.

They finally came back a couple of days or so ago.  I cannot prove it but I’m convinced they are the same cardinals who were there before the sparrows’ invasion.  They seem to be a bit more persistent in attempting to breach the window barrier.  They flew against the glass with a much stronger vigor and determination, i.e., more forceful and more frequent. I decided to lower the blinds because I have been scandalized at the prospect of finding dead cardinals on the roof of the garage.

This changed behavior had given me a clue on what they might see beyond the window from their side of the universe.  I surmise they see more berries to feed on.  The reflection of the tree on the glass window had made them entertain the prospect of another tree in the unfathomable dark beyond.
With the change of seasons, comes
the change & cleansing of hearts, minds, lives!

~~The Rites of Spring at the Poets Corner
Although it may not always work as precisely as it might have been designed originally, Mother Nature has without any doubt, a built-in self-compensating mechanism to modulate the vagaries of her excesses.  Thus, as the outside thermometer by the kitchen window persistently hovered barely north of the freezing mark with an occasional excursion below zero, the frigid carpeting of winter remained unhampered in its destiny to melt away.

The hibernation of winter grudgingly surrenders to the thaw of ice and snow, bringing in the budding awakening of spring.  With furtive jubilee the cypress clusters point their dormant spires skyward to assert their claim to a legacy of poised dignity.





Conceding that life is laden with the good, the bad, and the ugly I also brace myself that the seasonal warming summons the colony of ants of black, red and orange or whatever other hues that nature can conjure.  That they would anytime soon impose their annoying nuisance in the kitchen from sources nobody knows.

It’s reassuring to confirm that the cycle of the seasons still holds sway.  Too bad, the apostles of Michael Mann and his cohorts of Anthropogenic Global Warming acolytes have disregarded such an unmistakably observable event.  Myself being an ardent believer in the inherent goodness of human nature, dare not therefore condemn me if I prefer to join the more hopeful and cheerful cohorts of the species, especially some select poets, in celebration of life’s awakening:
. . . The palms put forth their gems, and every tree
Now swaggers in her leafy gallantry.
The while the Daulian minstrel sweetly sings
With warbling notes her Terean sufferings. . . .







A Color stands abroad
On Solitary Fields
That Science cannot overtake
But Human Nature feels.
. . .
A quality of loss
Affecting our Content
As Trade had suddenly encroached
Upon a Sacrament.
~~Emily Dickinson, A Light Exists In Spring

Thursday, March 13, 2014

Hopscotching the Kabuki of Political Burlesque

Hopscotching the Kabuki of Political Burlesque
XXXIV 
Then of the Thee in Me that works behind 
The Veil, I lifted up my hands to find 
A Lamp amid the Darkness; and I heard, 
As from Without--"The Me Within Thee Blind!

~~Omar Khayyam, The Rubaiyat
 To simultaneously paraphrase and parody Shakespeare, this is the winter of our discontent made summer by the Solar Flare of Presidential incompetence on the State of the Union.

Beyond its ceremonial obeisant significance, the State of the Union Address had been diminished since we anointed a community organizer into the Oval Office.  Maybe you were just too dyslexic to even notice it.  That its yearly occurrence has been ensured by a Constitutional mandate  (Article II, Section 3) had not made the sufferance thereof any more endurable.

This year’s version consisted of more than sixty-five minutes of bloviation, unadulterated by any pretense at attempted adherence to civil decorum.  It was a global media extravaganza the closest approximation to attaining the consummate Nirvana of solipsism.  It was a far cry from the one-paragraph note that Pres. George Washington transmitted to Congress for the first State of the Union Report.

Admittedly, the shortening by five full minutes over the one I painstakingly endured through four years ago was a definite improvement.  While I had delved into that earlier version at length, {see, ch. 26 op.cit. at pp. 293 ff.} some of the comments therein bear repeating for clarity, since they are apropos of this year’s version to the proverbial “T”:

The self-proclaimed transformational President proceeded to transform a traditional ritual of governance in the hallowed halls of Congress into a locker-room pep talk on his expectations of how the nation ought to behave and think, and how his party and the opposition should conduct themselves in order to live up to his standards of decorum and accomplishments.
I did not have the nerve to suffer through the State of the Union festivities of 28-Jan-2014.  To circumvent the risk of shattering the TV set with my laptop (or vice versa) in a vain attempt to skip the farce, I resorted to watching the second tape of The Great Escape (no pun intended), the star-studded WWII classic.  I just could not ungrudgingly countenance soaking up Presidential shenanigans at primetime.
To atone for my deficit in patience and intestinal fortitude, I needed to go back to the official White House transcript of the address.  Buttressed with commentaries from the usual suspects in The Fox News Channel, I commend myself for having gallantly escaped the rites of martyrdom without missing much of the substance of the occasion.  Thank goodness for some residual freedom of choice.

I avidly love Opera but find the subtle intricacies of Okuni Kabuki of the Genruko period of feudal Japan too esoteric and bizarre, even for my not overly delicate sensibilities.  Even when I sojourned in the Land of the Rising Sun I did not have much stomach for the Grand Kabuki which has become the mainstay of the Obama Regime’s paradigm for governance. 

Pres. Obama’s State of the Union Addresses had been political vaudeville at its most grotesque embodiment.  This year’s version was no exception.  If anything, it had gotten worse in both form and substance.  It is a showcase of the political class’ calculatedly acquired expertise in squandering and abusing other people’s money.

America’s decline diminishes me because by a conscious and deliberate choice, I am a part of America.  Whenever and wherever Pres. Obama is blatantly mocked and disrespected, though I know deservedly so, it’s far beyond me to rejoice.  The sentiment is more akin to John Donne’s somber invocation for all of humanity, famously popularized by Ernest Hemmingway, in a novel on the Spanish Civil War:
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
When it comes to what has befallen America, Schadenfreude has never been appropriate.  Even the exact opposite emotion, namely, Verstohlenmitleid does not apply for the simple reason that I am very much a part of the tragic misfortune rather than merely a hapless bystander.  I cringed with both outrage and embarrassment as Pres.  Obama bungled his way through one flashpoint after another from Cairo to Crimea spiced with a hodgepodge of scandalous domestic controversies.
Time was, it used to be a source of bewilderment why nobody else is scandalized by the Obama paradigm of governance.  It certainly cannot be the case that my standard of integrity is far above the one embraced by the hoi polloi.  With barely a smirk and a wink, Pres. Obama maintained with a straight face that there is not even a smidgen of corruption at the IRS.  The rest of the nation ought to have been outraged.  Instead a majority joined the choir of “Amen and Hallelujah.”
A sense of déjà vu is not necessarily akin to vindication.  My observation earlier made remains accurate {p. 262 op.cit}:
. . . it has always been my contention, since I started becoming aware of politics, that without any exception, any nation always deserve the leadership that happens unto them, regardless of the process (or errors) they come by it.
‘There is no doubt that the subrogation of national sovereignty to a global authority is an act that properly falls in the rubric of high crimes and misdemeanors. It is a category of conduct constitutionally impeachable, by law.  But with [the Senate] controlled by the Democrats, in the infamous parlance of Al Gore, there simply is no “controlling legal authority” to make impeachment even a remote possibility.  . . .

Instead of feeling absolved by history, it feels more like having been kicked in the groin by the unfolding of events.  And there is nobody to kick back at to get relief from the umbrage which is verging on the insufferable.  Hence I revert to joining Samuel Johnson in his lament:

Others with softer Smiles, and subtler Art, [75]
Can sap the Principles, or taint the Heart;
With more Address a Lover's Note convey,
Or bribe a Virgin's Innocence away.
Well may they rise, while I, whose Rustic Tongue
Ne'er knew to puzzle Right, or varnish Wrong, [80]
Spurn'd as a Beggar, dreaded as a Spy,
Live unregarded, unlamented die.

Friday, March 7, 2014

The Blizzard Chronicles Continued

The Blizzard Chronicles Continued
The cold earth slept below
Above the cold sky shone;
And all around,
With a chilling sound,
From caves of ice and fields of snow
The breath of night like death did flow
Beneath the sinking moon.
~~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lines: The cold earth slept below

[dsc611]
Long before the moon had a chance to sink into the abyss beyond the horizon, low-lying snow-clouds rudely concealed her majestic reign over the landscape.  Along with the atmosphere turning much colder, the snow-clouds hovered closer to the ground mimicking early morning fog of late-spring except being far much thicker, it felt like you needed to slice it with a machete or a samurai sword to navigate through, barring possession of Harry Potter’s Sorcerer’s Stone.

As the fog thickened, an inordinate drop in ground surface temperature ensued.  The thermometer outside the kitchen window registered as low as - 12°C.  While the HVAC system in the house was fully functional, I could just enjoy the scenery with a somewhat hidden guilty sense of Schadenfreude since I did not have to venture outside the glass doors if I did not want to indulge my sense of adventure.
A chill no coat, however stout,
Of homespun stuff could quite shut out,
A hard, dull bitterness of cold,
That checked, mid-vein, the circling race
Of life-blood in the sharpened face,
The coming of the snow-storm told.
~~John Greenleaf Whittier, Snow-Bound
Then the wages for my Schadenfreude were delivered in spades.  One fateful night, unbeknownst to us, the fan which reliably pumps the hot air from the attic to circulate it to the rest of the house overheated.  The thermostat was set to auto.  But the sensor was somehow disabled.  The cool off cycle ceased being triggered and the motor burnt to a crisp.
Mercifully, the incident only blew a fuse in the main box but kept the boiler fully functional.  The baseboards remained warm.  But without the air circulation mechanism everything else in the room got as cold as a puppies nose.  My stack of bottled Ylang ylang-scented Banaba extra virgin coconut oil congealed into the consistency of lard or refrigerated bacon fat.
The thermometer reading outside the kitchen window hovered in the range -12°C to +8°C.  Downstairs, the inside thermometer readout dropped from +25°C to +15°C.  Upstairs the readings dropped from +28°C to +18°C, give or take a degree.  A ten-degree drop in room temperature presented a complete shock to my thermostatic senses and my ambient relationship with my emotional disposition. 
Deployment of portable space heaters and a heating pad under the comforter helped some but not enough to ease the nagging feeling of a drastic reversal in fortunes which reverberated in the inner chambers of my reverie.
To fully capture the entire emotional gestalt into a coherent narrative, I ventured to find the exact antonym of Schadenfreude.  To my utter disappointment and near defeat, the only citation I could find was an old National Post blog from which I quote at length:
. . .A syndrome that has no name in English. We all know it; we just have no word for it.  It’s a condition for which even the Germans have no word, and Germans have a word for everything.
 For instance, they have a word for the opposite condition, a notorious word that other languages borrowed and English speakers often use without translation:  The word “Schadenfreude” describes the sublime euphoria that suffuses a person when he hears about the misfortune of another.
Here is why I only conceded a “near defeat.”  Based on my admittedly rudimentary familiarity with the anatomy of the German language, I reverse-engineered the contextual meaning of Schadenfreude to arrive at its exact single-word opposite which should be “Verstohlenmitleid.”  It literally means “furtive compassion.” Just nota bene, for posterity, you read it here first and you learned it first from me.
[dsc558]
So now instead of simply being immersed in Schadenfreude for the comfort and convenience that my modest and humble abode provide, I am simultaneously engulfed by the overwhelming Verstohlenmitleid on spying anybody brave the frigid landscape.  Ditto on hearing my neighbor cardinals peek and peck their beaks at the window pane from the evergreen holly athwart the garage roof-awning.  Unbridled by conscience or care, I can celebrate with Keats the anticipation of spring:
O thou whose face hath felt the Winter’s wind,
Whose eye has seen the snow-clouds hung in mist,
And the black elm tops ‘mong the freezing stars!
To thee the spring will be a harvest time.
~~John Keats, The Winter’s Wind
[DSC559]
It took all of ten days to order the parts and schedule the electrician to install the motor and get ventilation humming again.  It is absolutely amazing how we take for granted the equilibrium of normalcy if it were immune from the perturbation of the unpredictable.  Being jolted once in a while by the unexpected adds spice to the humdrum quietus of accustomed tranquility.
With the Ides of March almost upon us, I do not anticipate any further frigid renderings from the precipitate wrath of Chionê, daughter of Boreas and Oreithyia.  But then again, time was, in the last dozen years that we sojourned in this neck of the woods, there was at least one Thanksgiving Day and one Easter Sunday (not in concurrent season) when snow buried the grass by a couple of inches.
[dsc612]
The leaves of grass just started to peek through the compacted frigid mantle.  So, with an unadulterated glee and sympathy I appreciate in awe and wonderment the alacrity and condign composure with which the Fairy Queen endure to abjure connivance with the vagaries that mother nature could conjure.  Consequently, Verstohlenmitleid would afford me the luxury to resonate with Spenser in praise of tenacity and formidable resourcefulness:
Streight, bitter storms and balefull countenance,
  That makes them all to shiuer and to shake:
  Rayne, hayle, and snowe do pay them sad penance,
  And dreadfull thunder-claps (that make them quake)
With flames & flashing lights that thousand changes make.
~~Edmund Spenser, The Mutabilitie Cantos from The Faerie Queene

Thursday, March 6, 2014

Blinking at the Antics of Putin

 Blinking at the Antics of Putin

This may be condign punishment for Obama’s foreign policy carelessness and for his wishful thinking about Putin as a “partner” and about a fiction (”the international community”) being consequential. It certainly is dangerous.
  ~~George H. Will, Misreading Putin, and history . . .

Whoever first conceived of “condign punishment,” must have been, to put it charitably delusional.  Punishment is necessarily an after-thought to what has been construed as a misdeed or a transgression.  Well-deserved and adequate, the closest adjectival equivalent to “condign” that I can come up with, are relatively arbitrary conceptual categories at best.
To the victim of a crime what might be acceptable as adequate punishment depends on the victim’s disposition.  Even Shylock’s pound of flesh, with or without the attendant drop of blood may prove to be inadequate.  It largely depends on what the punishment is meant to accomplish which in turn is determined by what kind of justice is being administered.
Some theorists on jurisprudence identify as primarily given, arbitrarily I may add, four types of justice.  These are corrective, retributive, procedural and distributive justice.  They bring forth the delicate question of who needs to be punished.  A hunt for the perpetrator of a construed crime is an industry by itself, worthy of the wild imaginings of a Dick Tracy, a Sherlock Holmes, or an Edgar Allan Poe, etc.
When it comes to the country’s Foreign Policy, there appears to be very little confusion as to who is responsible and who should be punished.  They are not necessarily the same entity.  Moreover, whoever is responsible is not necessarily susceptible to punishment.
The case of Presidents Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama is deliciously if tragically instructive.  As I emphasized earlier elsewhere {p.262 op. cit.},
But it has always been my contention, since I started becoming aware of politics, that without any exception, any nation invariably deserves the leadership that happens unto them, regardless of the process (or errors) they come by it.
It is tragic because by my reckoning at least, Pres. Obama richly deserves to be accountable for his crimes of omission.  Unfortunately, having already been re-elected, he is no longer, in the normal course of events susceptible to any form of punishment, appropriate or otherwise.  Consequently, it is “we the people” who eventually deserves the punishment.  That we will get it is a certainty.  Whether or not we deserve it so is a matter of ideology.
Let us proceed to count the ways.  Once again, I resort to quoting myself {see p. 232 op. cit.}:
. . . When people swoon over the profundity of such meaningless pronouncements as “we are the ones we have been waiting for,” you can be dead certain that a segment of the populace is seized with the malady that can only be characterized as political dyslexia, if not outright dementia.

It is not so much that some people are mesmerized by the rhetoric of President Obama that is disastrous for the country. Rather it is the eventual creation of a political underclass which will perpetually be wards of the government that bodes disaster. This is the end that every policy initiative espoused by the Obama regime appears designed to accomplish. . . 
We can for certain mend our ways respecting future endeavors.  As to how promptly we can recover from the Obama Presidency disaster depends on how lucky we can get and whether American Exceptionalism is as potent as it has been traditionally purported to be.
Meanwhile life moves on and we play the cards we have at hand.  We suffer through the three-ring circus of ObamaCare.  We muddle through the rituals of another mid-term election campaign.  With all the equanimity we can muster we bear our penance, furtively heeding the somber if rather neurotic admonitions of Fyodor Dostoevsky:
. . . stand at the cross-roads, bow down, first kiss the earth which you have defiled, and then bow down to all the world and say to all men aloud, 'I am a murderer!' Then God will send you life again. . . .