O

Und zu guter Letzt, kurz bevor nach MEZ der 20. Januar anbricht, ein Verweis auf eine Eloge auf Big O.

Kathryn Lofton trägt sie auf Immanent Frame vor: The Oprahfication of Obama.

...Fifth, you will need to be ambivalent. You have always been neither here nor there, neither us nor them, and neither of or outside. You have always been able to see from many perspectives, to appeal to many sorts of people, to believe many different things, even as you are fiercely moral, upstanding, near pious. You are, as everyone knows, a Protestant. But you dabble in everything, shying not away from the Koran or kabbalah, Jewish professors or Eastern spiritual advisers. You will entertain anything that might embolden your O. You are the ambiguity of your epoch, the middle that makes the mass, the crossroads of a country that excited your youth, raped your ancestral continent, and claps now for your children. You are a global distribution suffused with spiritual truth. You are motivated with missionary zeal to convert everyone, unrelentingly, to change. You make them believe their best lives are yet to come. You make it impossible to look away, to hate, to dissent, or to change the channel. You make us feel good, finally. You are our redemption. You are our favorite smile. And you are our satisfaction at the possibility of a secular that made it all so.