Obalming: all aboard the optimism wagon

We live in, in all senses, eye-watering times.

Keep count, dear friends, if you are able, of the current slew of newspapers, politicians, organisations, businesses and who-the-hell-ever "Obama-ising" their various communiqués, either directly or indirectly.

Fully three weeks on, and the Change/Hope/Optimism wagon rumbling remorselessly around our mainstream media channels remains a most accommodating vehicle.

Riding up front this week? The British Transport Police, no less. A press release aimed at none other than "travelling football fans" reads (in all seriousness) as follows:

"The election of Barack Obama to the White House has turned a page in world history – now is the time for football fans to do the same...His election has brought with it a new sense of optimism, and we are also optimistic that the trend of increasing problems associated with some travelling fans can be reversed."

All aboard, ladies and gents. There's space aplenty on this Trojan horse…

We can be confident, however, that those least mollified by the present deluge of Western propaganda are the people and nations currently eking out an existence at the sharp end of US and British "cooperation". People and nations to whom the Democrats' proselytising carnival of "Change" will not extend quite far enough.

No, while the eulogised epicentre himself makes noises about Afghanistan that are in fact less promising than John McCain's, we can be sure that news of a "sense of optimism" swirling about the ears of US/UK citizens will fail to offer much comfort to those shattered, grieving families still living in illegally-occupied and missile-obliterated territories.

The chasm separating the continuing reality for these forgotten souls from the egregious fallacies packaged and sold to the West's citizens is more than merely grotesque. At a time when the violated millions of our scorched playgrounds remain displaced, starving, traumatised and dying, there are surely few things more insidious than a self-certified rhetorical fug, trumpeted soothingly at every turn – as if anything at all is set to Change, under the current parameters, for these Unpeople.

But for the hawks and their complicit media machine – so desperate to re-brand, re-justify and re-energise the appalling policies of the Blair/Bush era that have been ceaselessly clothed as righteous truth for a pacified public – nothing less will do.

Let us call it Obalming, shall we? Like embalming, its ultimate effect is the preservation of death. The sanitising of decay, disrepair, disaster.