Monday, April 23, 2012

Kony and Obama more alike than not

Not for shock and awe value or clickbait and sinker gamesmanship, but for the raw truth of the matter, I find the Kony 2012 and Obama 2012 campaigns and the products themselves really to be more alike than not past the usual trivialities like similarities in their birth year of 1961, area of ancestral background for them being East Africa, and both fighting to oppose the institutionalized governmental unfairness with their own sense of justice despite being leaders in their own right. I see how both hold office with a dialectic mix of civil nationalism and religious fundamentalism or even mystic like charismaticism in their respective ideologies, to create a syncretic way of life that rings hollow and not as true as it can be, using a message of hope, change, and progress to purify and enlighten their nation from the dark past it has been and path it still walks. One can even realize how both Joseph and Barack and their micromanaged campaign teams, if you look very carefully, run from the same playbook albeit one quite militaristic and the other political yet still using means to an end zero sum game theory.

That now said, I do not think both these leaders are the same people with the same goal, Joseph Kony and Barack Obama are two different personalities with two different objectives in life who in all likelihood will eventually one day come to oppose each other in a global interventionist mission sooner than later due to such a massive social media tsunami we all witnessed most recently.

However, let it be widely known, advocacy group influence and their clicktivist socmed campaigns like Invisible Children and its Kony 2012 run the risk of becoming so popcult in their ways of action, that a less than positive reaction will become more the norm than not over just a short time from now. As facebook, twitter, and youtube becomes important buzzwords in our lexicon, the actions and reactions when using these pomo tools could have some deep and divisive consequences, beyond any current thought or contemplation we can harbour in such a shallow intellectual basin. For these websites hold more power than we really do give them credit for, with us only now realizing how disasterful and destructive slowly as the Stop Kony and Cover the Night epic fail in not plastering the major cities of the world in posters has shown us, lost political strategy and capital on emotional causes only gains strength for those reasonably motivated on important positions and situations with a goal no matter how saintly or sinful which is true and real for them and falls pathetically short for anyone but is the lesson here.