Barack Obama became a drag queen yesterday in a new effort
to secure the 2014 WorldVision title.
The United States president appeared as ‘Michelle’ in a
heart-felt performance of #Bring Back Our
Girls prompted by the abduction of more than 200 female students from a
boarding school in north-east Nigeria.
Produced by the White House (rumours that Apple Inc is
poised to take over the visionary production company, are completely unfounded),
the ‘first lady’ sampled Malala, the award winning women’s education campaigner
who first came to public attention when she was shot in the head by the Taliban
– and survived.
Michelle/Obama also re-worked some of the best known tunes in
American culture, e.g. realising your full potential in the land of equal
opportunities, giving these a new twist – pro-women’s education, anti-terrorism
– in response to the kidnappings and bombings carried out by militant Islamist
band, Boko Haram (rough translation: ‘Western education is forbidden’).
White House Productions are thought to have launched Barack
Obama’s alter ego Michelle, in order to re-assert themselves at the top of the WorldVision
rankings after their Ukrainian foreign policy number failed to chart
successfully.
There have been complaints that the Whites imposed their traditional
House style on a supposedly new performer (the word ‘unconscionable’ jarred
with the otherwise conversational tone of Michelle’s lyrics); nonetheless the
Washington version of #Bring Back Our
Girls has met with widespread approval.
Wearing a powder blue top and sitting atop an antique chair
with the Stars and Stripes in the background, Michelle put in a deliberately understated
performance – in contrast to the Shirley Bassey-style torch song which last
night won the Eurovision Song Contest for Austria’s ‘bearded lady’ Conchita
Wurst (real name Tom Neuwirth).
Michelle’s #Bring Back
Our Girls was restrained even by her own standards: she previously gave an
energetic performance of Let’s Move,
an anti-obesity campaign which served as the White House white label in advance
of yesterday’s official WorldVision release.
In Africa earlier this week, from far up country where Nigeria’s
oil wealth does not run to (northern Nigeria is now poorer than it was 50 years
ago), the leader of Boko Haram (or perhaps a stand-in) released an hour long video
of riffs and raps about selling the kidnapped girls into slavery. (The heirs of Ronald Reagan would no doubt disown
his use of the world famous chorus, let
the market decide.)
As a band, Boko Haram is so far removed from the international
performance circuit it will do anything to gain precious nanoseconds in the global
attention economy. Instead of the pantomime leer of ‘a brown eyed handsome man’
singing ‘Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl’, or the mythical depiction of the
Rape of the Sabine Women, this group is actually acting out everyone’s worst
nightmares. Not only piling on the hyperbole but also doing rhetoric for real. (Imagine
Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan and The Dead Kennedys all rolled into one).
Members of Boko Haram such as the gangly youth photographed
in custody wearing an Arsenal football top, are acting out of desperation. As if
their lives depended on it; not least because the West has created a media-centric
way of life which does indeed depend on being uploaded, becoming part of the
performance circuit, not being left to rot in the dark, dungeon of the
invisible, unheard of, the non-existent.
Being in the
medium by any means necessary – that is the message of the current, Western-led
WorldVision rendered by everyone who is anyone – from Lady Gaga to
Michelle/Obama and even Conchita Wurst (Tom Neurwith currently enjoying his best
15 minutes).
The appalling irony is that heartless Boko Haram has already
taken this message to heart.
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