© 2009, UrbisMedia
Now don’t get the idea that I’m going Lou Dobbs on you. The Birthers are a mob of cretins and hoodless KKKers. But in raising Barack Obama’s provenance they have left a shadow question that comes more into the light as Obama shows himself to be the sort of public leader that many of us thought he was not.
First of all Barack Obama’s electoral astrology is perhaps the most propitious in American political history, and he must be commended for recognizing that, despite his inexperience and ethnicity, it was his best (and perhaps only) shot at the big prize. He arrived a his political apogee at the time when the nation had been literally trashed by a stupid, born-again Christian arrogant fool who had stolen the presidency and then become the pawn of an unheard of Saudi Wahabbist who put the country into an eight-year psychological shock. George W. Bush did not govern; he followed the mad intentions of Cheney and the neo-cons to bring America down even better than Osama bin Laden believed. The disparities between rich and poor were vastly expanded, lobbyists in Washington trebled, public debt soared to the needs of two unnecessary wars, Katrina showed how uncaring and inept government could be, and finally, the unregulated greed-corrupted economy came crashing down.
The first success factor was that Barrack Obama was not George Bush. Neither was professional POW John McCain, the “Maverick,” who played his part beautifully by selecting the trailer trash, Christian-breeder governor of Alaska as his running mate. Obama’s lofty and vague “change” and “hope” campaign, orated by a man born to rhetorical gesture and the teleprompter, contrasted with a Republican Party engaged in self-sundering between the ghost of Bill Buckley and the omnipresent flabby mound and flatulent mouth of Rush Limbaugh. After Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes, and self-defeating Democrats progressives and liberals felt like the Hebrews after wandering forty years in a political desert. They, too, were ready to worship a false idol.
It was almost too good to be true. Finally, somebody who, well let’s say intimated, that the preceding administration had demonstrated with finality the desperate need for structural change in a country that was living on a maxed-out credit card debt of denial and insidious political corruption. It was almost as if the Messiah had arrived, a Black/White Jesus who would haul down the Pharisees and kick money-changer ass. And oh, how it needed change, real change, structural change; how it needed to be led out of a desert of denial, corruption, overindulgence and trepidation. There was still a witless hoi polloi of Joe the Plumbers who will never have a clue about their own self interest and for whom history consists of who won the monster truck races last week, and the Book of Revelations. As far as they were concerned the Anti-Christ was in the Oval Office.
The irony was that, while Obama seemed to see his election and a signal for reconciliation and bipartisanship, what his victory really did was tear the veneer off of America’s abiding problems with race, ethnicity and class. And that extends to the venerable halls of Congress. Surprisingly, Obama has hardly turned out to be a problem for political right. His first act was to extend a tax cut to the rich; Guantanamo remains open, as do black sites and rendition; torture has stopped (we think), but gays are still purged from the military, and DOMA is still there; most of the main players in the economic crisis were welcomed into the administration to make sure that the bonus boys stay too rich to fail, and the stimulus for Main Street was woefully insufficient. But the real signal that liberals and progressives had been ideologically buggered was the troop “surge” (America’s Charge of the Light Brigade) in Afghanistan. That has been promulgated before the main structural change that might have signaled that we were on our way to a real democracy and out of a corporatocracy would have been a serious public health system. What that experience has proved is that the insurance companies rule by way of their bought congressional minions, the Crone and the Creep, Snow and Lieberman. And thanks to the president’s lassitude and political ineptitude the dream was dead and buried by the ides of November. Not only had we not gotten the next FDR, but FDR had more courage and vision in one lame toe than Obama has in his young, sleek body.
As this is written Mr. Obama is once again in Copenhagen where his exhortations for global cooperation to do something about the only thing that has the best chance to save my grandchildren’s generation from having to pay off the Chinese for Bush’s (and now Obama’s) stupid wars—mass human extinction by ecological collapse. The ultimate extension of the Vietnam logic—“we must burn the planet to save it.” He will fail in that eloquent plea as well, since well as even the Third World knows that the same forces arrayed against his flimsy health plan efforts will stifle America’s part of the Copenhagen deal, if there is one. (“Nobody’s gonna cancel my season NASCAR tickets!”)
How could this man who spoke boldly, if abstractly, about “change” and “hope” could have turned out to be the timid, ineffectual incrementalist who extended nearly all of his predecessor’s policies would commit political gaffs like he did over the Cambridge affair, who would dash off to Copenhagen thinking his mere appearance would win an Olympics for Chicago. At first I put it down to rookie ineptitude, then deluded myself with the “he has inherited a mess” excuse, then assuaged myself with the “he really believes in bipartisanship” nonsense. But now I might have to admit that Mr. O could turn out to be Mr. ZerO.
I struggle to figure this out. He’s a left-hander who, in basketball parlance, can’t “go to his left,” but going to his right doesn’t get him any closer to the hoop either. (OK, it’s a bad political metaphor; you’d like it better if you were a player.) Somehow I figured that an African-American president who actually did “community organization” would have more concern about the guy who seems “small enough to fail” rather than the fat cats who convinced him they are “too big to fail.” Then the hypothesis hit me that maybe I was stereotyping Obama, thinking of him as coming from the streets of Southside Chicago, not to them as a Columbia-educated community organizer. Maybe that his going to Punahou Prep School in Hawaii, then Jakarta, was not quite like the typical urban African-American experience. He had encountered racial discrimination, but he was not of the American slavery/Jim Crow legacy. He was seven years old and living in Jakarta when M.L. King was killed. He is shaped by a bi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-national, broadly educated experience. The “birthers,” who only see the color of his skin are of course wrong about his “nationality,” but they are inadvertently expose something else about his pedigree; Obama is indeed a “true” American (despite Palin’s implications), but he is not atypical African-American either.*
So what? So, Obama is in some sense sui generis, and maybe that makes him a sociologically blank canvas upon which a lot of us painted long unfulfilled hopes for this country that has been in a four-decade slide on the greasy chute—to the right and downward. Maybe he is too young to see that history as I do. Maybe he is far closer to the “Me generation” than the “Greatest generation,” or even the “Woodstock generation,” whatever shape they might have imparted to his personality and ideology. Maybe I forgot that we can be inspired by words, but it is deeds—especially the bold deeds that are called for in extraordinary times—that define a president who can really lead. Is it unfair of me to paint my ideal leader, my FDR reincarnate, on him? Hell no! The stakes are too high, way too high, for my president to be laughing it up with bozo White House gate crashers while health care gets flushed by the Crone and the Creep, while more American blood irrigates Afghan soil, while too man of our people are out of their homes and jobs, and while the planet toasts. Enough with the telepromptered orations; I wanna see some real change!
Right now I am feeling a little bit Rhett Butler and, “frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn?” But I know myself well enough, and the Scarlett side of me will entertain the delusion of hope: “tomorrow is another day.” (Maybe it will be Kucinich’s day, I hope).
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© 2009, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 12.18.2009)
*I know I’m on thin linguistic ice here with typical. But what I am referring to is that, in addition to his other social variables, he is hardly comes from the 30% (est.) unemployed, 25% in prison, 84% chance of likely to have been a victim of homicide; 50% high school drop out rate.