Is Obama the Obsolete Man?

By Ellis Washington


Logic is an enemy, and truth is a menace.

He was obsolete. But so is the State, the entity he worshiped. Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of Man, that state is obsolete.

~ Narrator Rod Sterling

Prologue to an Obsolete Man

I have always learned many life lessons from watching Rod Sterling's TV series The Twilight Zone (1959-64). I remember as a little kid often staying up late at night watching reruns of this iconic show in the 1970s. One episode I just saw recently which I didn't remember ever seeing back in the day was called The Obsolete Man (aired June, 1961, 3 months before I was born). This is now my favorite episode ever. As I watched this show I was very impressed by Rod Sterling's prescient understanding of history (indirectly displaying the evils show trials by totalitarian regimes like the French Revolution, Stalin's Soviet Union and Hitler's Nazi Reich), but also Sterling's understanding of God, humanism, politics and especially human nature in all of its existential, but predictable grotesqueries.

These existential Mass Delusions are systematically imposed upon America during the Age of Obama – Communist healthcare imposed on America to kill the elderly, minority and the preborn, Same-sex marriage to deconstruct the family, Christianity and the Church, Obama's open borders and Sanctuary Cities policies where our largest cities are purposely destabilized by violating federal immigration laws by allowing open immigration to over 30 million uneducated, diseased and criminal illegal aliens from Mexico. Another Obama Obsolesce policy is his apocalyptic foreign policy which has the U.S. mired in an existential Cold Wars with Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Israel, Lebanon, Russia, North Korea, and China among other nations.

Rod Sterling sets the plot in a futuristic, tyrannical America, where the Narrator sets a ghastly dystopian narrative: "You walk into this room at your own risk, because it leads to the future, not a future that will be but one that might be. This is not a new world, it is simply an extension of what began in the old one. It has patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history since the beginning of time. It has refinements, technological advances, and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of human freedom. But like every one of the super-states that preceded it, it has one iron rule: logic is an enemy and truth is a menace. This is Mr. Romney Wordsworth, in his last forty-eight hours on Earth. He's a citizen of the State but will soon have to be eliminated, because he's built out of flesh and because he has a mind. Mr. Romney Wordsworth, who will draw his last breaths in The Twilight Zone."

The Plot

The Obsolete Man, starring Burgess Meredith as Romney Wordsworth and Fritz Weaver as The Chancellor, is composed in two acts. Act One is set in a large, foreboding board room with little light and furniture save a long table and massive podium. On the side of the room are numerous government apparatchiks robotically and sequentially standing next to each other. At each end of the table is a microphone with one end having seat with a State secretary. Above the secretary is a podium with the State Chancellor standing imperiously upon a ghastly larger podium holding a collection of files.

Romney Wordsworth is a nobody; one of millions of cogs in the vast machinery of the tyrannical, dystopian state; a man now at the end of his usefulness to the State and therefore is put on trial like multitudes before him for the crime of being obsolete. Since the State follows the irrational fascist motto: Logic is an enemy, and truth is a menace, the State has abolished books and literature as well as their antecedents – Ideas and Thought, Truth and Reason, therefore his employment as a librarian is presently a crime punishable by death.

Killing a librarian, the guardian of books in a civilized society, reminds me of one of my favorite literary works, George Orwell's 1984. Here's an except where the fascist Big Brother government is working incessantly to destroy language and thus language's transcendent meanings (Reason, ideas, thought, beauty) by Syme, an insipid little apparatchik working in the Ministry of Truth:

It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words, said Syme. The Eleventh Edition is the definite edition, he said. We're getting the language into its final shape – the shape it's going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we've finished with it, people like you [Winston] will have to learn it all over again... We're destroying words – scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won't contain a single world that will become obsolete before the year 2050.

Other crimes Wordsworth is guilty of is his belief in God which is also punishable by death, since the State has decreed like the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in his 1882 book The Gay Science, that "God is Dead" or in Sterling's interpretation of Socialist America, that there is no God. Mr. Wordsworth is prosecuted by the fanatical apparatchik, Chancellor, who declares with obscene bravado (reminiscent of Hitler and Mussolini's stage antics) in front of the amassed court that since Wordsworth is no longer relevant to the State, he will be executed. Here is perhaps the critical scene of the trial and the court's prejudgment of Wordsworth where the Truth of God confronts and triumphs over the Tyranny of the State:

Chancellor: Wordsworth, Romney, Field Investigation Finding Obsolescence. Do you know why you're here Mr. Wordsworth? ...

Chancellor: I'd ask you again, your occupation Mr. Wordsworth?

Wordsworth: I AM a librarian, that IS my occupation, that is my PROFESSION. If you people choose to call that obsolete...

Chancellor: A librarian. Having to do...with books.

Wordsworth: (Proudly) Yes sir...books!

Chancellor: Since there are no more books, Mr. Wordsworth, there are no more libraries, and, of course, as it follows, there is very little call for the services of a librarian. Case in point: A minister. A minister would tell us that his function is that of preaching the word of God. And since it follows that since The State has proven that there is no God, that would make the function of a minister quite academic as well....

Wordsworth: There IS a God!!

(Crowd jeers in shock. The chancellor looks angry)

Chancellor: You are in error, Wordsworth. There is NO GOD! (To the crowd) The STATE HAS PROVEN THAT THERE IS NO GOD!!

Wordsworth: You cannot erase God, with an edict!

(Crowd is even more in shock at Wordsworth)

Chancellor: You are obsolete, Mr. Wordsworth!

Wordsworth: A lie, no man is obsolete!

Chancellor: You have no function, Mr. Wordsworth. You're an innacuranism, like a ghost from another time....


Wordsworth: I am nothing more than a reminder to you that you cannot destroy truth by burning pages!

Chancellor: You're a bug, Mr. Wordsworth. A crawling insect. An ugly, misformed, little creature, that has no purpose here, no meaning!

Wordsworth: I am a human being...

Chancellor: Delusions, Mr. Wordsworth, DELUSIONS!! That you inject into your veins with printer's ink, the narcotics you call literature: The Bible, poetry, essays, all kinds, all of it are opiate to make you think you have a strength, when you have no strength at all!!! You are nothing, but spindly limbs and a dream, and The State has no use for your kind!!!! (Calming down) You waste our time, Mr. Wordsworth, and you're not worth the waste. Instruct him!

Like all trials by totalitarian empires of antiquity – from Socrates, Jesus, Galileo, to The French Revolution, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Hitler – Wordsworth's "trial" was only a cynical charade where his guilt and sentence was already predetermined, therefore he is given the death sentence which must be executed within 48 hours. However, there is a twist: Wordsworth is permitted to select his form of execution. He cryptically demands and is granted his own private assassin and has his execution televised nationwide. Wordsworth wanted a public spectacle believing that it will demonstrate to his fellow slaves the gross injustice that awaits all citizens once the State judges you obsolete. The Chancellor, in his gleeful arrogance allows the court to grant both of Wordsworth's unusual requests which, as in many of the Twilight Zone episodes, will become a cautionary tale against the Chancellor.

At exactly 11:16 pm, less than an hour before his execution, Wordsworth summons the Chancellor. Ironically, his little room is not drab and desolate like the courtroom, but filled with Life – literature, books, art, tapestries, light, even the Bible... all strictly outlawed by the fascist State. Here, the domain of ideas triumphs (even if but for 45 minutes) over the fascism and force of the State; here, Wordsworth is in charge, and thus discloses to the Chancellor his method of execution: that a bomb hidden inside this room will explode at the midnight hour. He describes that the response to his pending execution that will concern the viewers is not his own but the Chancellor's. At this crucial moment the Chancellor, who is always outrageous and obscene, suddenly feels small, fearful and obsolete as he realizes that the door is locked and none of his Gestapo agents answers is cowardly, pathetic pleas for escape.

Wordsworth then uses his death as living allegory and demonstrates to the totalitarian State and its multitude of slaves viewed on TV how a Christian man faces death with dignity. He pulls out his unlawful, long-hidden copy of the Bible, and starts reading well-known passages from Psalm 23 and Psalm 59, as the Chancellor squirms like a little worm in his chair. Thus, Wordsworth's heroic and serene acceptance of death appears in stark contrast with the Chancellor's cowardly ranting, raving pleas for mercy. When the Chancellor repeatedly begs Wordsworth to be freed "in the name of God" the kindly librarian finally accedes and thus gives the Chancellor the mercy he so arrogant denied the obsolete librarian (and to multitudes of others) by opening the door. As the Chancellor flees from the room and halfway down the stairs, the bomb explodes instantly killing Wordsworth, who in his last moments of life, takes his death like a Man, standing erect, with eyes a gaze to the heavens, his heart and mind filled with peace and joy as he prepares to face his Destiny and his God.

In contrast, the Chancellor staggers like a drunk man into the courtroom, exasperated only to learn that he has been terminated by his own underling ('subaltern'); and soon discovers that he is now obsolete: "You have disgraced the State. You have proven yourself a coward. You have, therefore, no function," the new Chancellor decrees. The former Chancellor, like Wordsworth is unceremoniously convicted as the crowd in the courtroom screams: "Obsolete! Obsolete! Obsolete! and surrounds him, and despite his continued pleas to the court, vowing that he is in fact not obsolete and desires only to function inside the State, the crowd, chanting robotic slogans surrounds him and beats him to death.

Epilogue to a Democrat Socialist Dystopia

In the same-sex marriage case, Justice Clarence Thomas, in his Obergefell minority opinion, wrote about the "inherent worth" or "dignity" of all humans in God's eyes, writing: "That vision is the foundation upon which this Nation was built. The corollary of that principle is that human dignity cannot be taken away by the government. Slaves did not lose their dignity (any more than they lost their humanity) because the government allowed them to be enslaved. Those held in internment camps did not lose their dignity because the government confined them. And those denied governmental benefits certainly do not lose their dignity because the government denies them those benefits. The government cannot bestow dignity, and it cannot take it away." The government cannot give "rights" and it cannot take them away. This normative, natural law jurisprudence caused the Star Trek actor George Takei, an outspoken homosexual, to shamefully libel Justice Thomas as "a clown in blackface."

The underlying historical and political message of Rod Sterling's classic Twilight Zone episode, The Obsolete Man was intended to expose the fundamental dangers of Communism and Socialism encapsulated in this famous quote by Soviet Premiere Nikita Khrushchev: "We cannot expect the Americans to jump from capitalism to communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving Americans small doses of socialism, until they suddenly awake to find they have communism." Despite President Obama pushing American into communism, Wordsworth wisely equates the Chancellor to Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, and questions "History teaches you nothing, does it?" The Chancellor's reply is "On the contrary, history teaches us a great deal... Hitler, Stalin, too. But their error was not one of excess it was simply not going far enough! Too many undesirables left around and undesirables eventually create a corps of resistance. Old people for example, clutch at the past and won't accept the new. The sick, the maimed, the deformed, they fasten onto the healthy body and damage it. So WE eliminate them! And people like yourself, they can perform no useful function for The State, so...we put an end to them."


Likewise Barack Obama in a 2001 radio interview implied that the liberal fascist State in his view didn't go 'far enough' when he said, "... The Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn't that radical. [The Warren Court didn't go far enough] It didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution. ..." Therefore, today Obama is treacherously violating the Constitution by using the Roberts Court to "break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution," to enforce a militant Communist-Progressive hegemony over the U.S., to effectively enslave 330,000,000 Americans under the despotism of an oligarchy of five on SCOTUS.

Obama is the Obsolete Man because like the Chancellor on the TV show, he argues that Hitler and Stalin had the right idea, but that their great error was that they didn't go "far enough"; that they did not nudge or force their hateful Communist-Progressive agenda far enough. The episode is also intended to emphasize the essential importance of God, philosophy, literature, art, freedom of religion, free speech and the integration (not separation) of legality and morality in a society; transcendent ideas (which though taken away by the Socialist State in the episode) was bequeathed to us by America's constitutional Framers under natural law, conservatism and capitalism and the Bible.

In the concluding statement, Rod Sterling as the Narrator says, "The Chancellor, the late Chancellor, was only partly correct. He "was" obsolete. But so is the State (President Barack Obama and the Democrat Socialist Party), the entity he worshiped. Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of Man, that state is obsolete. A case to be filed under "M" for Mankind – in The Twilight Zone."

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Invitation for manuscripts

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