May 15, 2008--In Ishmael Reed's 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo, a dangerous epidemic, "Jes Grew" threatens 1920s America. For the uninfected, the virus' symptoms are troubling and sudden, centering on an obsession with the dances, lingo and clandestine locations associated with ragtime and jazz. Jes Grew infections start in the country's colored precincts, but the virus soon shows itself capable of spreading to nation's most vulnerable - young white people - sending them out into the streets shaking and twirling and hot with a fever that was "electric as life and […] characterized by ebullience and ecstasy." Far from being simple young-people foolishness, the outbreak threatens the very fabric of Western Civilization itself what with all the freed asses (and hence minds) it engenders.

A white secret society called the Wallflower Order tries to stop Jes Grew. Its weapon? A "talking android," which is to say, a black man who renounced all aspects of black culture as pathological, primitive and self-defeating. (Insert the name of your favorite black conservative here.)

Flash forward 80 years from Reed's fictional/non-fictional world, and your humble narrator (aka, me) is sitting on his putatively free ass, whiling away some spare time on YouTube. A friend has just sent me a new Obama viral video, a Day-Glo music-vid by Sa-Ra Creative Partners   member Taz Arnold. Hung on a single, loopy lyric verse and an iconic Isley Brothers sample, Arnold's contribution to the ever growing corpus of Obama-related youtubery is an ebullient and ecstatic little trifle.

This is real and not for play

I'ma vote Obama way

We hood, We votin' and throwin' it up.

(WATCH THE VIDEO)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbjBHkKiS4c

Most notable for me was not the video's pro-Obama message, but how it summarizes a certain, mashed-up segment of black L.A. hipsterdom. Spandex and baseball caps, Hollywood Boulevard and the Watts Towers, crotch-hugging skinny rock pants and low-slung hip-hop denim all bump against one another and cohabitate in the L.A. sun, and all of that black diversity and enthusiasm feel completely united under the rising red-white-and-blue sun of the Obama logo. It's the perfect video to watch today, and the best thing is that I am pretty sure there will be a better one tomorrow.

Whether it's the Vote Different ad that kicked off the primary season's viral warfare, or a completely loopy set of videos called Barack in 74 that imagine a man who may well be our next president as a resolutely nerdy stoner at Occidental College, this has been the best campaign ever for ads and videos. It's also been a completely one-sided campaign. Whoever first said "there is joy in the struggle" likely wasn't thinking of viral video, but if the muses of humor, visual intelligence and mashed-up insight could vote, they would clearly be voting Obama. (A tip of the hat to Media Assassin Harry Allen for bringing "Barack in 74" to my attention.)

There's a settling consensus that Obama's likely victory in the Democratic primary race will be due, at least in part, to his ability to harness and inspire DIY Internet memes like Taz Arnold's viral video. Indeed, Obama's campaign has used the Web to stunning effect, whether in terms of fundraising or get-out-the-vote operations like the recently launched Vote for Change, a social networking/registration tool that raises the prospect that, as The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder put it, "[o]n election day, Obama might have more than a million individuals volunteering on his behalf. That should scare the beejeesus out of the McCain campaign and the RNC."

A still from "Barack in 74" http://www.youtube.com/user/BARACKin74

But for black, borderline conspiracy-theorists who view Mumbo Jumbo as a holy Ur-text, the hardening conventional wisdom about Obama and the practical uses of the Internet tell only half a story. It's not just that the first viable black presidential candidate in history made particularly good use of the fluid, hybrid, collaborative, poly-vocal, decentralized, viral and "open" atmosphere of the Internet. It's that the fluid, hybrid, collaborative, poly-vocal, decentralized, viral and "open" values of the Web echo what many of us believe has been the underlying strength of how black culture has been made and distributed for about 400 years. Of course, the black candidate both "gets" the current media environment and reaps the lion's share of that environment's benefits; Jes Grew was Web 2.0 before there was word for it.

Ad hoc images of Obama getting the dirt off his shoulder, or playing Luke Skywalker to Hillary Clinton's Darth Vader strike such a cord because Obama's candidacy and identity are aligned with "Jes Grew" values of revision, remixing, riffing and improvisation. Obama may be a (colored) surface onto which people of all shades and persuasions project their own fantasies, but his rhetoric and operations, the "do-it-yourself" call to hope and the social networking powered fundraising, also directly invite the novel responses and riffs we've been enjoying this electoral cycle. His appeal and the way he operates are not just culturally alien to how both Hillary Clinton and John McCain operate, they are antithetical to their candidacies as well.

Could anyone in the world imagine a borderline not-safe-for-work video like this being created for any candidate except Obama? (Jesse Jackson, maybe?) Clinton's appeals to bureaucratic expertise and McCain's aspiration to be the latest "Republican daddy" leave little for voters to do except sit back and submit to higher authorities, and who would spend an afternoon playing with Final Cut Pro in response to that?

All of Clinton's memorable images were official campaign spots, a home security ad, and some Saturday Night Live skits. And the only clip I can think of from the other side are The McCain Girls, who were so, well, dumb, I'm convinced they're Democratic operatives. The Web is obviously chock full of sexist, degrading images of Clinton, but what's curious is that her partisans never felt any compulsion to remix her image or extend it into novel territory a la Obama's youtube army. Remixing and riffing may have started out, Jes Grew-like, in the nation's black cultural precincts, but everyone is infected now. Including, you would think, "hardworking, white" Clinton voters.

The Clinton campaign's inability to conjure up much in the way of people-powered audiovisual enthusiasm suggests a candidacy not built for the member-generated era of YouTube, but lifted from the top-down early-Internet of Clinton I.