The Politics of Ennui/"Man's Search for Meaning"

In watching the daily cable channels, I still have not heard ONE Obama supporter articulate a single accomplishment of their candidate!

At twelve, I picked up my first serious non-fiction book, intrigued by the title, Man's Search for Meaning, by Viktor E. Frankl. Frankl, a psychiatrist, spent time in a Nazi concentration camp. His portrayal of the experience in the first half of the book is profound and poignant. The second half is devoted to the psychological wisdom he gleaned while surviving the horror, Logo Therapy, or the therapy of "meaning."

Vicariously living through Frankl's account, provided an interior affirmation that, that is the point of life. In other words, human beings are inherently compelled to seek meaning. Furthermore, the anathema of existence is ennui, boredom, meaninglessness, this is the devil in our midst and the greatest threat to our culture.

Fast forward to today's politics and the Obama "movement;" it is the epitomy of relativism, ennui. It is as though, as a culture, we have so trivialized reality, become so desensitized to moral ambivalence, so indolent intellectually, that we have lost our soul...the one Obama promises to repair through the art of the shallow! His supporters see no incongruity between his words and his substance, as merrily they row along.

In discussing T. S. Eliot's profound poem, Four Quartets, Thomas Howard, (Dove Descending,) addresses the topic of man's destruction through an "assault" on meaning. His application equally describes the swirl around Obama.

"The 'temptation' always seeks to diminish and ruin the sheer force of meaning..."

Therefore, if meaning is a constituent necessity to a properly integrated personality and, extrapolated outward, to society, then the Obama "phenomenon" is a grave "temptation."

The only hope that we won't be seduced by the pettifog of vacuity and its repercussions, resides in the gut level common sense of the American people, notwithstanding the blank looks on the faces of Obama supporters when asked for ANYTHING substantive.