In folklore studies it's called a "wedge driving rumor", ie one that sows discord, generally between races. Obama is doubly "Other": black and a democrat. The people who don't like him are searching for any excuse to discredit what they see is the unthinkable -that this type of person is now president- so they invent possibilities, explanations, that fulfill the basics of the paranoia that now fuels this attempt to discredit.

The basic premise that Obama has an exotic name, parentage, place of birth (many people haven't been to Hawaii, and can only imagine it as something wildly different), upbringing (remember the "muslim" school in Indonesia?), and ultimately, that he's black and able to use his considerable intelligence to his advantage against any challenges on substantive issues, probably scares the crap out of anyone who still clings to the notion of the "White Establishment" as the principal factor of our government power structure.

Rumors are largely based on the potential for truth, that it "could have" happened that way. Isn't it possible, after all we've been through, with hostile, exotic outsiders attacking our cultural notions about ourselves with violence, that they've sent one of their own to continue the job from within? They've infiltrated us in the past, right? Sent in some of their own to learn to fly planes from Americans, a skill they used to attack us with, right? Why isn't it possible that they're smart enough to get into our highest levels of government? I mean, just a few weeks ago he was "pallin around with terrorists". Weren't there just some collective fears based around this from people we put our trust in (members of the White Power elite)?

Seems pretty obvious that the first thing to do would be to find out whether or not this guy was really American. Right?

Forget Mormonism, or even religion as a hated bastion of conservative excess. Anyone old enough to remember the abuses of the guru craze in the Sixties and Seventies, or the debunking of Carlos Casteneda, will tell you that liberals are just as guilty of odd, pernicious behavior while under the intoxication of a variety of groupthink postures.

It seems rather more obvious that the total tab of who voted for Prop 8 is based on a collective consciousness of socially intolerant ideation and the need some people have for the existence of an "other". Do human beings need an enemy to fight, just to get out of bed in the morning?

What would happen to the lower brain urges many of us have for fighting and dominating others if we lived in a society truly based on tolerance, and had no one left to scare us into building bombs, or fences? Religion, Christianity, as a belief system, is supposed to give one the strength to fight those urges, while, as an institution, it seems more likely to encourage them.

Which is why the rest of us just wish there could be an honest accounting of the gaping inconsistancies between some people's "beliefs" and their actions, regardless of what name one gives it. Because they mostly seem to be based on an obvious need to call yourselves "US" and somebody else "THEM", which is supposed to be the farthest thing from the attitudes of the person who created your beliefs, if one is a Christian.

Maybe it is a fantasy to think one can imitate the son of a god. It sure doesn't seem as if many Christians are having much luck at it.

I'd love if some smart guy writer/cultural commentator could investigate the general suspicion I think most of us have in that it's not actually faith that is poisoning our society, but the institutions people build around the ideas of faith. They could start with all of the obvious contradictions involved in being a Christian, like how the Old Testament tells us we can do all of these horrible things to people, yet Jesus is a rather different affair in the New. Yet people still manage to inappropriately conflate the messages of the two to suit their own clannish bigotries. They could move from there to the Shia apostasy, to the caste system in India, and on, and on...

Sounds like an organizational issue to me, and if, as a society, we're going to condemn anything, it should be the super structure that tells you how to channel your harmless, personal feelings about a "higher" power into an intolerance towards other people who are actually corporeal and have the same human qualities you do. Then again, we're only human. We can't be expected to, like, transcend our worse impulses, can we?