It's Great To Be Obama

President Obama is feeling so juiced about his the future, he jumped at the chance to guest-edit the November issue of Wired.

He's feeling so wired that he even turned the word "science" into a verb for the occasion. After all, it's the best time in the history of America to be alive in America. All you need is to get down with the "churn" of technology, baby. Whether you're a desperate entrepreneur in Maryland fiddling around with a 3-D printer to make stuff for Etsy to pay off your onerous college debt, or an out-of-work fracker in North Dakota dreaming of going green now that the oil is being exported via bomb trains to New Jersey for shipment across the wide Atlantic, life has never been better.

Obama's cheerful editorial celebrating an alleged reduction in crime rates received ironic pride of place right above a reprint of an older article instructing readers how to make "an untraceable ghost gun in America" with a 3-D printer. But never mind all that. Because he is so celebrating the greatness of skipping the middle-man Uber drivers so that Uber investors can rake in ever more profits with driverless vehicles. People who need robots are the luckiest people in the world.   

As for humans, he wants to put them on Mars by 2030. No surprise that it was an outlandish blockbuster Hollywood movie called The Martian that inspired him:

 Of course, I’m predisposed to love any movie where Americans defy the odds and inspire the world. But what really grabbed me about the film is that it shows how humans—through our ingenuity, our commitment to fact and reason, and ultimately our faith in each other—can science the heck out of just about any problem.

With writing like that, is it selfish of me to be impatient for the first of his many, many overpriced autobiographies to hit the bookstores?

And if you're feeling sad and blue and poor and not excited about billionaires traveling to outer space, then it's all grouchy Donald Trump's fault (And as ever, Obama reduces crushing social problems to the neoliberal buzzword, challenges.)

Here’s another thing I believe: We are far better equipped to take on the challenges we face than ever before. I know that might sound at odds with what we see and hear these days in the cacophony of cable news and social media. But the next time you’re bombarded with over-the-top claims about how our country is doomed or the world is coming apart at the seams, brush off the cynics and fearmongers. Because the truth is, if you had to choose any time in the course of human history to be alive, you’d choose this one. Right here in America, right now.

Because anybody this self-satisfied should make you feel satisfied, too:

 Obama is so wired on capitalistic crack, he starts getting redundant:

This kind of progress hasn’t happened on its own. It happened because people organized and voted for better prospects; because leaders enacted smart, forward-­looking policies; because people’s perspectives opened up, and with them, societies did too. But this progress also happened because we scienced the heck out of our challenges.

This is truly presidential talk. When Trump goes low with the F-word and violence toward women, Obama goes high with heck.

No way would he ever plagiarize Matt Damon's original line from The Martian:

Obama and Damon actually owe each other. Once an ardent critic of the president's bellicosity and conservatism, Damon abruptly changed his mind after a very special visit to the White House to screen Monuments Men with Democratic bundler George Clooney. Obama took Damon aside and helped him see the neoliberal light. Obama is now quoting him and pimping out his movies every chance he gets. Matt Damon is now totally wired for Hillary Clinton.

To show how bipartisan they all really are, another fine upstanding folksy family guy is also extremely wired on Churn Baby Churn. Back when the elites on both sides of the Uniparty were still into sabotaging Bernie Sanders while insanely propping up Clintchurian candidate Donald Trump, Republican Ohio Gov. John Kasich of Ohio praised Wall Street for its churning expertise.

He told CNBC's John Harwood that he didn't understand why Bernie was saying Wall Street's business model is a fraud. "Wall Street's there to provide some of the glue to make that economic system churn," he seethed, oddly thinking that glue makes for more creamily efficient whipping. "Did we have problems there? Nah.Of course. Is there too much cream at the very top greed? Never never never. Of course. Are there rules and regulations that are necessary? Of course not. But what's he think we should do, abolish Wall Street? I mean, it's so sane absurd. You talk about Donald Trump talking in broad generalities."

Feel the Churn, Not the Bern

Kasich, neoliberal centrist that he is, sounds exactly like Hillary Clinton. She must be thanking her god-given talents that Donnie bumped the moderately extremist Kasich out of contention when he did. That whole "Pied Piper" strategy and collusion with mainstream media to elevate Trump is working out beyond her wildest dreams. She really scienced it.

So I do wish everybody would stop singling out and picking on Hillary Clinton for those WikiLeaks revelations about her coddling and canoodling with Wall Street and bragging about her own "economic good fortunes." Because Obama isn't exactly talking to the lower orders in his Wired screed either:

That’s how we will overcome the challenges we face: by unleashing the power of all of us for all of us. Not just for those of us who are fortunate, but for everybody. That means creating not just a quicker way to deliver takeout downtown but also a system that distributes excess produce to communities where too many kids go to bed hungry. Not just inventing a service that fills your car with gas but also creating cars that don’t need fossil fuels at all. Not just making our social networks more fun for sharing memes but also harnessing their power to counter terrorist ideologies and online hate speech.

I'd always thought that one responds to challenges, not that one must "overcome" them. And that gives credence to the notion that neoliberals use the word "challenge' as a euphemism for distracting the poor and working classes from the capitalistic horrors unleashed upon them by neoliberalism.

 But, I quibble.

The better to further distract you from record wealth inequality and the militarization of our domestic police forces and spy agencies, the special Obama edition of Wired also devotes a whole section to fear-mongering about the cyber-espionage emanating from Russia and China. This helps the ruling class racketeers set the paranoid stage for public acceptance of World War III to supplement the creeping erosion of our own civil rights. The recent unproven claims that Putin is attempting to throw the upcoming elections through the series of embarrassing (and mostly, pretty boring) WikiLeaks revelations about Clintonland is the new casus belli meme wherever you go on the social networks these days. 

 That’s one reason why I’m so optimistic about the future: the constant churn of scientific progress. Think about the changes we’ve seen just during my presidency. When I came into office, I broke new ground by pecking away at a Black­Berry. Today I read my briefings on an iPad and explore national parks through a virtual-­reality headset. Who knows what kind of changes are in store for our next president and the ones who follow?

I'm afraid to ask. But in my own little virtual-reality headset, I'm sort of hoping for a bottom-up democratic counterrevolution against increasingly dangerous capitalistic churns-for-profit, accompanied by the emergence of third, fourth, even fifth parties. I'm hoping for more WikiLeaks revelations on, say, Obama's own closed-door speeches to the war-hungry and money-hungry plutocrats pulling the strings. And I don't much care whether the leaks come from Russia or from Mars.

Jobs, not drones. Education, not a trillion-dollar nukes upgrade. 

Meanwhile, here's Neil DeGrasse Tyson giving Obama a satirical reality check on his big spacey distracting Martian propaganda.