“More problematically, the word choice sucks all logic out of the sentence. In the previous paragraph, Obama had warned his readers about the ‘the relentless, often silent spread of militarism in the country.’
In this paragraph, the reader is told that these same military institutions are ‘moribund’ that is ‘nearly dead.’ How their debilitated state keeps the ‘energies’ of the Students Against Militarism (SAM) ‘alive’ is apparently left to the reader’s imagination.”
To be fair, he refers to the spread of “militarism,” which is not necessarily the same thing as the military institutions. Of course, I haven’t read the whole paper. I’m sure it’s confused.
What is worse, IMO, is that the passage from the Dreams book presented as an example of how “great” a writer B.O. might be, is also atrocious (just in a different way). It reads like a 19 year old in their first creative writing class presenting an unintentional parody of “great writing”.
To be fair, I have not read his book, only passages here and there. Maybe the chosen passage is a bad example.
it is a kind of mindless repetition of platitudes not properly strung together or even grammatical, a terrific skill at echoing the zietgeist of the movement he is attaching to like a remora.
it is a kind of mindless repetition of platitudes not properly strung together or even grammatical, a terrific skill at echoing the zeitgeist of the movement he is attaching to like a remora.