But it occurred to me that the whole campaign has a literary quality to it. Obviously, every campaign wants to tell a story, provide a "narrative." But with Obama there seems to be an added layer to it. That Berlin spectacle, for example, seemed like an awfully silly thing for him to do, particularly if he had his way as originally planned and spoke at Brandeburg Gate a la Kennedy and Reagan. But it's less silly if you understand the theory behind it. That spectacle was intended to offer a coming attractions of his presidency, like a movie trailer. The Obama campaign is not much interested in focusing on issues — it's no doubt copious position papers notwithstanding. It is about aesthetics, emotions, impressions, the sense of being swept up in something. It's the perfect product for YouTube culture. "Have you seen the latest Obama video?" Of course you have, the whole campaign is a YouTube video. The Berlin speech wasn't an attempt to make himself look like a plausible Commander in Chief so much as it was a way to tease Americans that even more excitement is coming. This is what the movie will look like, and you can see it if you just buy a ticket in November.

An explosive fad in the 1980s, postmodernism was and is an enormous intellectual hustle in which left-wing intellectuals take crowbars and pick axes to anything having to do with the civilizational Mount Rushmore of Dead White European Males.

"PoMos" hold that there is no such thing as capital-T "Truth." There are only lower-case "truths." Our traditional understandings of right and wrong, true and false, are really just ways for those Pernicious Pale Patriarchs to keep the Coalition of the Oppressed in their place. In the PoMo's telling, reality is "socially constructed." And so the PoMos seek to tear down everything that "privileges" the powerful over the powerless and to replace it with new truths more to their liking.

Hence the deep dishonesty of postmodernism. It claims to liberate society from fixed meanings and rigid categories, but it is invariably used to impose new ones, usually in the form of political correctness. We've all seen how adept the PC brigades are celebrating free speech, when it's for speech they like.

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