Obama and the Nerd Conquest

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/20/11

The Washington Post reports that President Obama’s speech was greeted with apathy in the Arab world. There is a picture of a “rebel fighter” in Libya in dashing beret, Che whiskers and an AF-47. 15,000 have died in Libya alone in the “Arab Spring” – the phrase popularized by nerd American journalists like those who politely raise their hands at Obama press conferences. It was supposed to make Egypt the new Silicon Valley for hip young Muslims who use smart phones, not AK-47s. All conquests are attempts to make The Others like us. This one to make the random hordes of the Arab deserts more like nerd generation archetype Mark Zuckerberg.

The idea of this slaughter was brought to Obama by his National Security advisor Samantha Power. It can’t be all Power’s fault; the rush to invade – to make Islamabad a hip, Muslin, Mill Valley – pervaded the nerd press. But perhaps they had heard expressions like “Repression will fail . . . tyrants will fall” and America “cannot hesitate to stand squarely on the side of those who are reaching for their rights” before, from the Ayatollahs, from the Soviets, from the Americans.

So it comes as no surprise that the Obama administration has no use for Israel’s Jews. Jews are dense. You cannot abide the wise Dov Ber of Mezeritch in your cannon if you have Bono. Hannah Arendt and Lady Gaga do not flush. Jews have anchored Europe to the earth for two thousand years; they are the egg from which our universe hatched. The rising reichs of Europe were the first to recognize that certain deeply extroverted material progress in the world was deemed impossible by the presence of the introverted Jews. The Intelligentsia of Russia in the 1840s as well – the “new man” had no use for the Jew, who anchors the human race to the ancient and the cosmic. Losing the Jew is first necessity of virtually every “new man” movement. Likewise, the newly hatched Nerd Mind cannot abide such complexity; it floats aloft in a hundred balloons, a celebration of the unbearable lightness of being endlessly young.

But it would be egregious to refer to these people as anti-Semites because they support the Palestinians and dislike Jewish Israelis. Like movie director Lars Von Trier, who the Beautiful People threw out of Cannes yesterday for joking he was a Nazi, saying they were “disturbed” by his comments, they find Israeli Jews merely annoying. Anti-Semitism requires a certain heft of passion and dark character which is antithetical to nerd karma. Frankly, it requires manhood.

Every phase of the Euro/American imperial conquests has been the same: First we send the soldiers, then the priests, then the anthropologists and now at the end we send the nerds. Now there is nothing left to conquer. It is the last inning, when they send the fat kids in to play. The conquest is complete and the nerds are given the last stronghold: Jerusalem, the cosmic egg, the center of our humanity, the unconquerable.