I'd call this well done and well said and pretty much on the money. Our culture's sentimental, fetishistic obsession with a vapid idealization if not adoration of a fantasy of youth incanted in the squalid, hollow minds of broken adults is almost certainly symptomatic of a something bad.
Of course, everyone understands the desire - there's not a middle-aged and counting soul in the world who doesn't wish they were eighteen again - god knows I do - but it's one thing to idly wish for it and feel the pang of something lost, and it's quite another to embrace delusion and try to reanimate those ghosts through sympathetic magic. This is what disturbed me so about Obama, not the man himself - although, granted I'm not a fan of the guy nor his putative 'ideas' - I think he's a charlatan, a pretender, an egotistical con artist and not fit for the job he has - but then one could have said similar things about Bush, so there ya go - I guess the democrats deserved equal time when it came to destroying the country by offering up awful nominees [hey, they gave us Carter for christ sake] - no, it wasn't so much Obama the lurking Fabian himself, objectionable as he might be, that disturbed but more rather I think the callow and almost willful ignorance that seemed to motivate the near adoration of him in 2008 [will David Brooks' reputation ever recover from his paen to the perfect crease in Dear Leader's pants?] - that so many people so easily bought into the simplistic, sentimental and utterly dissembling nonsense the man was spewing, that's what worried, or should have worried a thoughtful person.
