(10 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
Hunter’s been busy quietly leaking diary entries of Mitt Romney in The Chronicles of Mitt, so I thought it only fair to leak at least one pre-election entry from Barack Obama’s diary, as follows:
Dear Human Diary,
It is I, Barack Obama, a blank tablet, like you, only your better. It’s been an uneventful campaign against the robo-lugal who can barely veil his contempt for humans due to his defective cloaking mechanism. I guess I am blessed in that way. My cryptic predatory abilities are virtually unmatched, like an angler fish, only I am much prettier on the outside. Prettier than Ali, really, and my phantom punch can take out an entire block of Sonny Listons. And their funeral parties. The only person who even comes close to me in predatory crypsis is Chief Justice John Roberts who has a worthy “lie-in-wait” game, camouflaged in the uprightness of umpire gear, feigning his so-called “balls and strikes” surrounded by his 1950’s attired family accoutrements, before suddenly finding himself officiating the football game two stadiums away. While that’s impressive, can he exhume corpses from the 1960’s and reanimate them in fiery cadences that make the humans cry as I did in 2008? Yeah, I didn’t think so.
You see, the real beauty of me is that people like me. They trust me. Being one of them is a brand that sells.
I didn’t even have to exert myself this time around. Romney’s cloaking abilities are so lame that Nate Silver has me over 90% in the shittiest economy since the Great Depression. While some people call Mitt “The Willard Mechanism,” “The Ambulatory Sears Mannequin,” he’s known around DC as “the glitch in the Matrix,” “déjà vu,” “the double-take cat.”
My proactive subsumption architecture gives me animal-like speeds for flight, fight, feeding, and…uh…”draining three-pointers,” but unlike Mitt, I was programmed to be cross-fostered by humans, having, for example, an ability to follow their gaze mutually and mirror perceptrons to mimic entire suites of emotions across complex situations, to appear to know what they’re feeling without actually having feelings inside. I’ve got a MatLab chip in my head for covariance matrices. Duh. And for the record, I only play chess in two dimensions: the one where it looks like I’m on their side and the other one.
Those little “emotional hooks” count more than you would think. I can completely agree with Romney in the debates on policy issues, endless wars, race-to-the-bottom globalization, slashing social safety nets, trashing the climate, etc., and yet people just react better to me. When Romney talks jobs, jobs, jobs for the public, people know he secretly thinks he can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half. I could do it with a quarter. In fact, I won’t brag about it, but I may not have to hire the working class at all with the trans-Pacific Partnership in the pipeline, and yet, somehow I do not evoke the same fear, the same “uncanny valley” as Glitchy Mitt.
Some actual folks do “horse whispering,” or “dog whispering,” etc., which only means that these human whisperers understand intimately the language of horses and dogs, that they read behavioral topographies like a map. Rather than breaking a horse in the old-fashioned and brutal cowpoke way, taking days of hog-tying and physically and mentally exhausting the beast over days, the whisperer skillfully elicits successive reactions until the horse thinks he’s part of the whisperer’s herd, often in under 30 minutes.
I do “human whispering” like it’s second nature. Which it is by now, although it’s completely acquired, because I don’t have actual human DNA. My simulator is un-freaking-believable. Freaks me out sometimes when I use it on myself in the mirror, although my nuclear-powered sexual unit asked me to cease and desist on the Al Green impersonations, or there would be “no more three-pointers to rain in the drain,” but it’s harder to fool another bot. Once you know how to human whisper, you can get humans to do virtually anything voluntarily.
Like the horse-whisperer, I carefully pierce my subjects with a hint of fear, calmly asking, “Do you no longer wish to be Good Americans?” And they do want to be thought of as members in good standing, so I am careful not to snarl that “The American Way of Life is not negotiable!” like Dick Cheney, because that scares them too much, and too much fear is incompatible with what comes next when the poor outcast goobs hang their heads and smack their lips penitently: Then come over here and let me give you a hug, a big Good American group hug. Then the goobs think that I am one of them, but technically speaking they have just joined my herd. Either way, The American Way of Life really is not negotiable, only my way is “easier” on everybody than Dick’s physical coercion and exhaustion method.
Unlike, Romney, Bush, Cheney, or even John Freaking Roberts, I can get close to people, scary close, and remain completely undetected by the vast majority who are whisper-sensitive.
I can promise hope and change as I irreversibly cement the status quo, including two-tiered legal systems, immunity for elite wrongdoing, rising inequality, bailing out the wealthy fraudsters with no strings attached, surging in Afghanistan, taking out Libya without congressional approval (on humanitarian grounds, no less!). Heck, I’ve got them so begoobered I can accept a Nobel Peace Prize while war-mongering in their fucking unfazed faces. I can trash the Constitution because I’m a Constitutional scholar. W couldn’t touch that with a ten foot pole and a ladder. Only amongst those resistant to whispering (there are always a few) am I accurately considered amongst the worst of civil liberties presidents ever. Which reminds me to put Glenn Greenwald on the fucking “no fly” list. Just kidding, Glenn. Those who have joined my herd no longer take you seriously as an outsider. Maybe I’ll paper over his rendition with some gay rights celebrations. Despite the extraordinary success of drones, we still need some rank and file humans to pull an occasional trigger. Even such a horribly mixed gesture completely throws humans off the civil liberties scent.
That’s why I’m sailing into this election at over 90% without breaking a sweat. I know exactly how to hold their hands as we walk them out to the wood chipper. And they believe me when I tell them that the death throes of modern liberalism are nothing to fear.
Good night, Human Diary.
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in Donald Fagen’s ruminations? There is barely a triad on god’s earth he won’t fuck with before laying it down on a track, but that one holds special powers. I swear, one day I am going to take actual music lessons to find out what this all means. I mean, I’ve taken some philosophy, which obviously helped me a lot in that “meaning of life” respect, so I figger music lessons might help me understand what Fagen means when he says that the be bop turn around in Peg was merely an arranging technique. I find that kind of incomprehensible language just brimming with potential data. Also, how did that Josie chick score the E7#9 right before her eyes caught fire? These are burning questions, my fellow prisoners. I really need a paycheck to hire a goddamned musician on this one.
But I think the American people can get back to basics by electing Romney. He is incredibly simple, even elegant, in his structure but this simplicity might escape just enough Americans that would cause him to lose. His algorithm is really cool. Measure what humans think at any time and then mirror that. The problem comes because his owners have a nasty agenda so he’s always inserting a discordant note (perhaps a #9 to his E7)–it remains to be seen what people are going to buy into. I never thought it could work as well as it did which makes me think that we should be writing code with elegance in mind rather than just brute force computing power.
I’m excited to see which algorithm works best Baroque Obama or neo-classical Romney.