Now that a white supremacist has just been made the next president’s closest White House adviser, and the president-elect has called conspiracy theorist Alex Jones of Infowars to thank him and his followers for their part in his election victory, we have reasonable confirmation that we are indeed in a fever-dream America. Tom Engelhardt
These days I often find myself wishing that Norman Mailer were still alive to turn this fecal moment of America's democratic saga into art.
Mailer's The Armies of the Nightand Miami and the Siege of Chicagoboth dating from the legendary year of 1968 were an important help in making some sense of a period that had begun with the mysterious assassination of JFK and carried us through the civil rights battles and martyrdom of Martin Luther King, all accompanied by the obscenity of the Vietnam war... a period whose divisions and bitterness have as yet to heal.
It was a great story and Mailer told it well.
Intuition tells me we are about to enter a similar period.
We are faced with the immovable fact that someone so surreally "un-presidential" as Donald Trump has captured the White House, thus becoming the most powerful man in the world overnight ... And that he has achieved all this mostly by evoking the sordid, family demons inhabiting the septic tank of white America's psyche.
Seeing something so improbable I'm tempted to believe that the Donald must have made a iuuge, wonderful, "deal" with none other than Old Scratch himself.
Living the sickening horror that Trump's mysterious ascension and
triumph produces, I wonder if someone so reality grounded as Mailer
could have handled anything this weird. Certainly analyzing paranormal phenomena was never part of his skill set.
In fact, analyzing my own shocked and sickened feelings and searching the corners of my subconscious, I discovered to my amused horror, that the only living author that might have the vocabulary to portray Trump's uncanny rise in the face of all common sense and decency, is J.K. Rowling and she doesn't write about politics, she writes about witchcraft.
A great villain makes for a great story and we are now part of this villain's story
Nobody knows better than Ms. Rowling that the heart of a thrilling yarn is a good villain, at that she's tops. Remember it was J.K. Rowling that created Lord Voldemort, who is the closest thing to Donald Trump I've ever seen.
See how she analyzed her creation, the "Dark Lord", AKA "He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named" in a BBC interview:
Rowling described Voldemort as a self-hating bully: "I think it is often the case that the biggest bullies take what they know to be their own defects, as they see it, and they put them right on someone else and then they try and destroy the other and that's what Voldemort does." Wikipedia
So the Good News is that Trump is a flawlessly perfect villain; and perfect villains... like perfect heroes, are of enormous value in great stories, and remember, great stories are the philosopher's stone of political action.
Think back on how many people were moved to vote back in 2008 just by reading "Dreams of My Father", but the problem was that after voting people simply expected their "hero" to take care of everything while they went about their business... that way, since the people didn't stay mobilized, "Hope" and "Change" turned out to be little more than words in the wind.
A perfect villain will keep the people mobilized.
The problem is we have our villain, but we haven't got a hero yet... Where is our Harry Potter, the one who can break all Voldemort's spells and incantations and expel He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named to the outer darkness?
The answer is one Harry Potter isn't going to get it. To change things there must be an army of "Harry Potters". An army teeming with all those citizens of America and the world who can't face sitting passively by watching President Trump crush one by one all their hopes and dream of freedom and justice. They, all the engaged and committed people must be the Harry Potters of our times, the ones who keep freedom alive.
To paraphrase a musty old slogan from the 60s (irony alert) "Let a million Harry Potters bloom"! DS
The political climate in America is toxic and it has been ever since Richard Nixon launched his Southern Strategy and caused Republicans to pause from their golf and stock coupon clipping long enough to plunge into neofascist populism and charismatic religion. The fiscal conservatives have been using the social conservatives and the just generally resentful and racist elements as cannon fodder to win elections and now they finally see what Nixon hath wrought.
Nixon's "southern strategy" is the cause of what we are seeing now. Nixon began it and Reagan fine-tuned it, with his "welfare queens" and "state's rights". It was all very simple: it was postulated on the theory that southern whites, who had supported the Democrats solidly (the solid south) since the Civil War and had been some of most favored by FDR's "New Deal", in fact hated black people more than they loved their own children, who needed health care, housing and schools. This curious theory proved correct and since then, the southern states and a great many poor whites elsewhere vote Republican.
The Republicans have begun to see that they have fallen into a trap of their own construction: the party of the rich, which catered to the yokels is now in danger of being taken over by the yokels... which could be catastrophic for American business interests all over the world.
We are looking at a scenario that could produce a serious mutation in the system, which, even if it doesn't make it all the way to the White House, could seriously warp America's political landscape.
Most informed observers seem to concur that high unemployment is here to stay for quite a long time. That the number of white, working poor is growing exponentially and that this group, very large although unhyphenated, with all of its former, 1930s, left wing populist fervor long since extirpated, is bereft of any ideology except charismatic Christianity; with its critical faculties dulled to disappearance by a brutish corporate entertainment culture and drugged with sentimental, xenophobic patriotism and with nowhere to go except toward racism and paranoia.
These people have no defense against globalization and the new technologies except fear and resentment. And having an African-American in the White House has destroyed the last citadel of their precarious, tattered and battered self-esteem: the thought that, no matter how far down they were, there was someone they could look down on... black people.
Incoherent, celebrating violence, sentimental, paranoiac and resentful: it's all there cooking on the stove of high unemployment.
Certainly continuing high unemployment with no relief on the horizon is the recipe for populism. Since left wing populism is out of the question in America, then it would have to be right-wing populism.
The rise of socially conservative populism is the joker in the deck that could derail globalization and interrupt the pantomime of American politics. The idea sounds fun, but the reality could be pretty terrible.DS
If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from. Frank Rich - NYT
Over half of surveyed Republicans said they believe that the president is a socialist Muslim who wants to take away gun rights and turn over U.S. sovereignty to the U.N. What’s deeper, though, is the vitriol of those beliefs, with a substantial number of Republicans believing that Obama resents America's heritage (47 percent), is the "domestic enemy that the U.S. Constitution speaks of" (45 percent), wants to use an economic or terrorist event as an excuse to take dictatorial powers (41 percent), is doing some of the same stuff that Hitler did (38 percent), and may, in fact, be the Anti-Christ (24 percent). Daily Beast
David Seaton's News Links
Just to begin by giving a quick answer to the question posed by the title of this post, "Why are so many Americans so crazy?". The answer is that living in a cloud of misinformation, they are being driven insane.
There is always the temptation to see certain people as reasonable when they aren't. "Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. Isaiah 1:18", was the favorite bible passage of Lyndon Baines Johnson and it describes the basic attitude of all successful negotiators. The lesson learned from the epic battle to pass a more than tame and mediocre health bill is that it is impossible to negotiate with whipped up insanity.
All of this insanity, from tea party to Antichrist is about using racism to distract people from seeing clearly what is right in front of their faces.
Essentially what we have is Rupert Murdoch in the role of Joseph Goebbels, with Beck and company playing post-modern George Wallace, nightly on Fox.
The idea is very simple, classic really. The system is in crisis, social inequality is widening and hardening, so stimulating paranoia and racism is a simple and effective way of keeping people from thinking about things like taxing the rich in order to get good public schools, affordable health care and other such Bolshevik twaddle.
To understand this craziness we have to turn it inside out. The first thing about it that catches my attention in the Harris and similar polls is that a significant portion of the American population is totally paranoid and extremely suggestible. If we discount genetics and/or some hallucinogen that has been added to the water, we would have to look at objective factors to account for this vulnerability.
To begin with America's cult of competition, of dividing people from childhood into "winners" and "losers", has created an entire nation within the nation of losers: an enormous mass of people who feel terrible about themselves.
The American Dream is based on social mobility, but a great many Americans have not "moved" up since they arrived, even many who arrived during colonial times. At this moment many are on an express elevator moving down.
Since colonial times the subjugation and humiliation of African-Americans has provided a valuable tool in defusing social tensions in the rest of the population.
It all goes back that far.
Probably the most valuable service to domestic peace that slaves provided even, or especially, for those who didn't own them, was the role of being someone even the most miserable white person could feel superior to.
The real problem in America is not racism in itself, the problem is a society or a culture that divides human beings into "winners" and "losers" and punishes the losers so mercilessly. These unfortunates simply cannot survive psychologically without their "whipping boy". Racism is a tool of social control. The classic "divide and rule".
That is the dirty little family secret of American capitalism: keeping the races at each others throats prevents the social democracy that exists in practically every other country of similar economic development.
God knows that America is full of desperately miserable white people. Not all of them are poor, not by long shot.
For losing and feeling miserable in America is not just economic, a study of marketing messages will give you an idea of the infinite ways that an American can be a "loser".
The entire American consumer economy, which is 70% of the total, is based on making people feel bad about themselves, making them feel poor, ugly, sick, helpless, stupid, inadequate and then offering to sell them something to relieve the pain of rejection and failure. A person of color might blame all the frustrations of life on race prejudice and he or she would be right in most cases. The white loser, and they are legion, hasn't ever had that safety valve.
Those whites who fear they might be "losers" themselves, and if we look at the economic and psychological facts of life in today's American, that might include most American whites, desperately need someone to look down upon as a psychological safety valve and of course, since time immemorial African-Americans, even the lightest skinned among them, have served that purpose. Their status as loser was even pleasing to the abolitionists that wanted to "uplift" them.
For literally hundreds of years, besides this role as the official ultimate-loser, no other role beyond entertaining or lifting heavy loads was permitted them.
In 1952 an African-American author, Ralph Ellison published a ground breaking novel, “The Invisible Man”, whose title many critics feel defined the experience of people of African descent in America: that of being invisible and voiceless. In the years that followed, the people of color in the United States raised their voices and became visible, to the great and continuing discomfort of many whites. The white people of the US south who once voted solidly Democratic have punished that party’s leadership of the civil rights movement by voting solidly Republican ever since… the key to the victories of Nixon, Reagan and Bush. The “Conservative Revolution”, that only favors the rich, is based on the resentment of poor whites and gives the wealthy the necessary numbers to win elections.
With Barack Obama this resentment is coming to head.
Up till now, American "identity" politics was always played with surrogates: WASP or "waspable" white men wearing masks.
Thus Bill Clinton was "America's first black president". The whatever WASP whose turn it was to woo Latinos, would eat tacos and say "juntos podemos" with an atrocious accent etc, etc. Candidates would attempt to show that they were "sensitive" to the feminist agenda and so on. Absolutely de rigueur for all white, male and protestant presidentiables was a photo at Yad Vashem sporting a yomulka. This all came with the turf like kissing babies. It was all a game.
The problems start when the Democrats decided to use "originals" instead of the traditional, "ballo in maschera". The whole charade begins to fall apart without the WASP surrogates.
All of this resentful white anger has been directed heretofore against surrogates: the Jimmy Carters, the Ted Kennedys, the Walter Mondales, the Dukakises, the Gores and the Kerrys; and all the racism was disguised in euphemisms like "state's rights" or "liberal" or "elitist" or "un-American".
Now for the first time the American white ultra-right have got the chance to actually organize and march against a real black man who incarnates all the euphemisms, instead of a surrogate.
Even a "JFK meets Sydney Poitier" figure like president Barack Obama, or especially like Obama, is an unbearable provocation -- a lifetime membership card in the "loser" club -- for millions of American white people.
What is to be done? How to proceed.
Take a look at the two quotes below. I think that between them they hold the germs of program for the American left... if such an animal really exists.
"Reagan’s view of government as the problem is increasingly at odds with a nation whose system of health care relies on large for-profit entities designed to make money rather than improve health; whose economy is dependent on global capital and on global corporations and financial institutions with no particular loyalty to America; and much of whose fuel comes from unstable and dangerous areas of the world. Under these conditions, government is the only entity that can look out for our interests." Robert Reich
The deeper point--the ones the tea partiers haven’t courage nor the brains to see--is that our technological age has laid bare a core fact of American life: that our corporatist state uses white men and women just like it uses black, brown and yellow ones--as cannon fodder. There is little “upward mobility.” Your children probably won’t live as well as you, much less better. Your 2nd and 3rd mortgages made them billions and then they bankrupted you. They stole your future itself. Leonce Gaiter
The ideas expressed here are not very complicated, they would be practically self-evident if so much time and media effort plus financial fiction had not been expended in clouding all these realities.
When Robert Reich speaks of health care saying that America's "economy is dependent on global capital and on global corporations and financial institutions with no particular loyalty to America", he is underlining one of the principal facts of our world today, i.e. non-state actors, like multinational corporations, effectively controlled by a small percentage of the share holders and/or a management elite, are often more powerful than elected governments. This means, as Reich points out, that empowering government, which we elect, is the only defense we have against these unelected, non-state actors, who are indifferent to our welfare, whose only motive is profit.
Leonce Gaiter makes clear that this relationship with the non-state actors is an oppressive one and that with the bursting of the credit bubble and the destruction of the "wealth effect" created by endless credit, many people are finding themselves to be much less "middle class" then their advertising created fantasies led them to believe. Their treasured self-image is well tarnished and they are discovering that, as Gaiter says, "our corporatist state uses white men and women just like it uses black, brown and yellow ones--as cannon fodder." So in this crisis any person who lives from his salary and whose only patrimony is/was the house he lives/lived in, is, in the words of Marx and Engels, "at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind".
Alas, few are equipped either by temperament or by training to face with "sober senses" either the "real conditions" of their lives or the "relations with their kind". This lack makes them easy prey for movements like the Tea Party that fill the paths to truth with the traditional red herrings of American racism disguised as libertarianism.
This nauseating and supremely effective tactic is being trotted out once again.
At this moment the fundamental role of progressive Americans is to expose and root out racism.
The day when Americans in similar economic straits cease to see skin color and see clearly and soberly what they all have in common, in the same way that the wealthy and powerful minority always have: on that day will the battle for social justice in the United States be more than half won. DS
"I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he's African American," former president, Jimmy Carter told NBC in an interview. Washington Post
When Bertold Brecht got cynical or angry at Communist regimes, he told them that, if the people were rebelling against their wisdom, they should "change the people." Perhaps that's what Obama needs to do -- change the people, his people. Or maybe, in time, the people will change themselves. Immanuel Wallerstein
David Seaton's News Links Color in the United States is just a "warning signal" that history has walked into the room. But even history doesn't explain it all. Our history of slavery is pretty horrible, but slavery was horrible in Cuba and Brazil too. However, Cubans and Brazilians are much more relaxed about color. Americans, though, are not really relaxed about much of anything.
Our culture is Calvinist: brittle and inflexible even in its hedonism, where, with predestination, the devil literally takes the hindmost.
Although in many parts of Europe, for example, losing, being maudit, is considered romantic, the worst put down in American English is to call someone a "loser".
Therefore, Americans are obsessed with "winning" and "losing".
This makes American racial tension different... I think America's racism has something to do with America's puritanical streak, with its hatred of vulnerability and the vulnerable slaves were "losers" par excellence.
The vulnerability of the "other", whomever that other might be is the origin of the sickest of fantasies. This role has been passed onto the slave's descendants. Probably the most valuable service that slaves provided even, or especially, for those who didn't own them was there being someone even the most miserable white person could feel superior to, and God knows that America is full of desperately miserable white people.Not all of them are poor, not by long shot.
For losing and feeling miserable in America is not just economic, a study of marketing messages will give you an idea of the infinite ways that an American can be a "loser".
The entire American consumer economy, which is 70% of the total, is based on making people feel bad about themselves, making them feel poor, ugly, sick, helpless, stupid, inadequate and then offering to sell them something to relieve the pain of rejection and failure. Those whites who fear they might be "losers" themselves, and if we look at the economic and psychological facts of life that might include most American whites, desperately need someone to look down upon as insurance against being losers and of course, since time immemorial African-Americans, even the lightest skinned among them, have served that purpose. Their status as loser was even pleasing to the abolitionists that wanted to "uplift" them.
For literally hundreds of years, besides this role as the loser, no other role beyond entertaining or lifting heavy loads was permitted them.
In 1952 an African-American author, Ralph Ellison published a ground breaking novel, “The Invisible Man”, whose title many critics feel defined the experience of people of African descent in America: that of being invisible and voiceless. In the years that followed, the people of color in the United States raised their voices and became visible, to the great and continuing discomfort of many whites. The white people of the US south who once voted solidly Democratic have punished that party’s leadership of the civil rights movement by voting solidly Republican ever since… the key to the victories of Nixon, Reagan and Bush. The “Conservative Revolution”, that only favors the rich, is based on the resentment of poor whites.
Making equal citizens of the descendants of slavery: descendants of both master and slave, was the inescapable duty, dharma, of American progressives. This situation made and still makes a mockery of the Declaration of Independence, which was written by a slaveholder and seconded by slaveholders... This injustice could not be allowed to stand
Lyndon Johnson, perhaps the closest thing to a man of the left that has ever sat in the White House, knew that this was his duty and although a southerner carried out that duty unflinchingly.
Master politician that he was, I'm sure he knew what was to follow: Nixon's "Southern Strategy", that opened the door to Reagan, Bush-I and Bush-II, a movement that strove mightily to undo all that Johnson tried to achieve with his "Great Society"... and largely succeeded in destroying it and gave a political base to all those whose philosophy has deprived generations of Americans of decent public health care and decent public schools.
With Barack Obama this resentment is coming to head.
Up till now, American "identity" politics was always played with surrogates: WASP men wearing masks.
Thus Bill Clinton was "America's first black president". The whatever WASP whose turn it was to woo Latinos, would eat tacos and say "juntos podemos" with an atrocious accent etc, etc. Candidates would attempt to show that they were "sensitive" to the feminist agenda and so on. Absolutely de rigueur for all white, male and protestant presidentiables was a photo at Yad Vashem sporting a yomulka. This all came with the turf like kissing babies. It was all a game.
The problems start when the Democrats decided to use "originals" instead of the traditional, "ballo in maschera". The whole charade begins to fall apart without the WASP surrogates. All of this resntful white anger has been directed heretofore against surrogates: the Jimmy Carters, the Ted Kennedys, the Walter Mondales, the Dukakises, the Gores and the Kerrys; and all the racism was disguised in euphemisms like "state's rights" or "liberal" or "elitist" or "un-American".
Now for the first time the American white ultra-right have got the chance to actually organize and march against a real black man who incarnates all the euphemisms, instead of a surrogate.
Even a "JFK meets Sydney Poitier" figure like president Barack Obama, or especially like Obama, is an unbearable provocation -- a lifetime membership card in the "loser" club -- for millions of American white people.
The real problem in America is not racism in itself, the problem is a society or a culture that divides human beings into "winners" and "losers" and punishes the losers so mercilessly. These unfortunates simply cannot survive psychologically without their "whipping boy". DS
A multiracial group of police officers on Friday stood with the white officer who arrested a prominent black Harvard scholar and asked President Barack Obama and Gov. Deval Patrick to apologize for comments the union leaders called insulting. Associated Press
David Seaton's News Links It has always been a truism of the classic left that the "class struggle" in America is eternally short-circuited by racism: that the hostility of working class whites toward blacks, and working class blacks justifiable mistrust of their white "comrades", always meant that the bourgeoisie could divide and rule them in comfort. In short, racial hostility would always trump class loyalty in America.
The clearest example of this was Nixon's "Southern Strategy", whereby tricky Dick pried loose the heretofore populist, "a chicken in every pot", southern whites from their age old, "solid south" loyalty to the Democrats and enfolded them into the Party of Abraham Lincoln, something which violated not only their most precious traditions, but also their every economic interest.
Thus, in America, so the saying goes, politics are racial, not class, based.
Perhaps this is changing.
Commentators from all over the world have affirmed that the election of America's first African-American president heralded a post-racial America.
In a rather perverse way, perhaps the professor Gates arrest hoo hah is this new America's first icon.
Hey, don't laugh! Look at it this way: as the quote above from AP shows, a multiracial group of working class union members stood united with their white "comrade" and faced down two members of the upper middle class, a Harvard professor and a former professor of the University of Chicago, (the second professor just happens to also be the President of the United States of America).
This multiracial workers union solidarity has stopped these powerful and prestigious men dead in their tracks and has the president -- supposedly the most powerful individual in the world -- back peddling rather smartly.
Is this a sign of the changing times?
As more men and women of color take their places in positions of power, naturally defending their privileges and the system that provides them with those privileges; as their color becomes increasingly incidental to their power and the status that goes with that power; as the oppression they, by the very nature of their position, exert on those beneath them is less and less identified with a particular skin color, will this -- in a deteriorating and stagnant economy -- bring the oppressed of all colors together to fight oppression... no matter the color of the oppressor?
If this is where post-racial America is taking us, then the "establishment" is soon going to be heartily sorry that they ever took this road and it will be interesting to see what tactics they may use to get the races conveniently back at each others throats. DS
Asked by Israel Channel Two Television reporter Shai Gal what would happen if Israeli forces tried to evacuate Havat Gilad, Arele replied, "At most, they'll demolish one measly shack, so they'll have something to show - that Kushon [a Hebrew slur equivalent to the "N" word] in the United States, in order to have an Etnan [the biblical term for a fee paid to a prostitute] to give him - if you [secular] guys know what an Etnan is."
I ask myself the following question:
If an Israeli wingnut was able to kill the prime minister of Israel and has received a lot of support in Israel for doing so, why should anyone think that an attempt on "Kushon" Obama would be out of the question? One of the drunk kids in the video, "Feeling the Hate" even says he would like to kill the president. OK, so he is just a drunk kid, but there are a lot of settlers, who aren't drunk, but are very dangerous and are American citizens.
What I am really afraid of is that one of these settlers, who is an American citizen, who can enter the US without any restriction, who can blend into an American crowd without being noticed as "foreign looking", who has had military training, will try to kill Obama the same way they killed Yitzak Rabin... Then the shit will really hit the fan.
I think this is a real problem and perhaps the only way to keep it from happening is to talk about it. Normally this would be putting ideas into people's heads, but I think the ideas are already there.
Let me make myself crystal clear: I am not talking about the drunken American louts in the video and I am not talking about wingnuts and sons of the wild jackass in general. There are always lone crazies around in the USA like the guy who shot Reagan. I am talking about the Israeli settlers "movement".
We are talking here about a group of people which is not only messianic and fanatical like Al Qaeda, but which also is closely connected to the Israeli establishment. We are talking about people who practice racist violence on a daily basis, who have weapons and have been trained to use them and who have used them, not just had fantasies about using them.
It also happens that some of the most fanatical and violent settlers are Americans of dual-nationality, who have many connections and admirers in the USA; these are people who can enter and reside anywhere in the USA without restriction, speak the language without a "foreign" accent and blend into the landscape without calling attention to themselves. In short "ordinary" Americans.
So what I am saying is that we have a climate of hate and group of well-connected, armed fanatics that consider themselves "on a mission from God", who are also native Americans. This has all the ingredients for a history making disaster. DS
David Seaton's News Links This is certainly the year that a lot of stereotypes have bitten the dust: of course the top of the list of broken prejudices is symbolized by our president, Barack Obama, the first person of known African descent to occupy the Oval Office and soon we will have the first Hispanic Supreme Court Justice.
This is wonderful. But the destruction of other stereotypes, though they fill the observer with wonder are anything but wonderful.
Max Blumenthal's little film "Feeling the Hate" has broken more stereotypes for me, personally, than the election of Barack Obama or the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court.
The success of either Obama or Sotomayor is no surprise to me on racial or ethnic grounds, as I have never thought that the color of a person's skin or ethnic origin had any bearing on their ability to carry out the duties and responsibilities of high office.
However, I also never thought I would ever hear Jewish people throw the word "nigger" around with such practiced aplomb as in this video.
As a matter of fact, I don't ever remember seeing a Jewish person as drunk as those portrayed in Blumenthal's interviews in my whole life; in my youth it was proverbial that, "Jews don't drink": getting roaring drunk was something that was left to brutish, wife-beating, Polish peasants and to feral Russian Cossacks.
So here, thanks to Mr. Blumenthal, we have a group of future "my son the doctor(s)" and Jewish Princesses, stumbling drunk, talking with the same disgusting bigotry as the Polish peasants and Russian Cossacks that used to rape their great grandmothers or the rednecks that spat on the Jewish Freedom riders in the 1960s or that lynched Leo Frank.
To whom do we owe this transformation, this leveling?
To the USA?
To Israel?
In the words of a great American poet, "C'est la vie say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell". DS
I fear the Israeli public is going to elect that maniac Binyamin Netanyahu on Feb. 10, and that will be the complete end of any 2-state solution, and we just have to live with a horrific Apartheid for decades, which will cause more conflict and further poison much of the world against the United States. Juan Cole
So, just to recap: It’s five to midnight and before the clock strikes 12 all we need to do is rebuild Fatah, merge it with Hamas, elect an Israeli government that can freeze settlements, court Syria and engage Iran — while preventing it from going nuclear — just so we can get the parties to start talking. Whoever lines up all the pieces of this diplomatic Rubik’s Cube deserves two Nobel Prizes. Thomas Friedman - New York Times
David Seaton's News Links The election of Barack Obama is bound to have a powerful effect on the Middle East and especially on Israel, perhaps for what he does, but certainly for the message the voters are sending in his person or more precisely in what his person symbolizes.
We cannot yet know what America's voters have actually voted for, but we know what they think they have voted for and although they may not realize it, what they think they have voted for sends a powerful message to Israel. A message which conflicts with Israel's very foundations.
Americans have voted for a person who belongs to no particular "tribe" or ethnic group, an amalgam of races and cultures: a person who is a symbol of some sort of "new man", freed from any historical or ethnic preconditioning. This "Adam" quality, perhaps more than any other, excited and continues to excite Americans and many others around the globe.
However this quality is in direct conflict with Israel's whole reason to exist.
If any people in the world have a long view of things, it is the Jewish people, and no people in the world have such a short memory as the Americans.
Israel is all about purity of pedigree and lineage, of maintaining the group intact. There are literally endless discussions in Israel on the subject, "who is a Jew ". I am not criticizing this, it has proven marvelously effective in preserving the Jewish identity over thousands of years (you don't hear much from the Hittites any more, do you?) and I am sure that thousands of years from now, when the United States is merely a subject for archeologists, there will be human beings whose customs and heritage will be recognizably Jewish. The time proven Jewish way may be far superior: America may only be a flicker on the screen of world history, but it must be true to its own light.
In his inaugural speech President Obama observed that 60 years ago his father would not have been served in a Washington restaurant. Americans, in electing Obama, have symbolized the repudiation of their own tribal history and traditions and have chosen to reinvent themselves. Israelis have chosen to reinvent themselves by embracing their own tribal history and traditions.What each country stands for is diametrically opposed to what the other stands for and their national trajectories are traveling in opposite directions.
To avoid being tiresome, only one example that could sum it all up: Israel is a country where a racial-religious qualification is needed to buy land. This simply cannot be squared with what the Americans voted for when they voted for Barack Obama.
I agree with Juan Cole, quoted above: the Israelis are probably going to elect the ultra right-wing thug Binyamin Netanyahu as their new prime minister and the two state solution which now shows clear signs of rigor mortis will begin to stink.
From that point on we are looking at a clear alternative of official apartheid or opportunistic ethnic cleansing as alternatives to the liquidation of the present "Jewish state", not necessarily the end of a state where Jews live comfortably, but the end of a so defined democratic "Jewish state".
I think that Netanyahu would be comfortable with either apartheid or ethnic cleansing although I think he would prefer the latter to the former.The question is: how are those who voted for what Barack Obama symbolizes supposed to have a "special relationship" with that? DS
According to the legend, the Cloak of Invisibility has the power to shield the wearer from being seen by Death. - Harry Potter - Wikipedia
David Seaton's News Links In the picture that illustrates this post, a picture which appears in all the major American media, an actor playing the current President of the United States, strikes the pose of Rodin's "Thinker", obviously engaged in having a bowel movement.
During the entire presidential campaign, primaries included, many people, both for and against, have been asking, "Can an African-American be President of the United States?" They have been missing the whole point.
Not only can a black man be President of the United States of America; it is now a essential requirement for the job.
Until seeing the poster of Josh Brolin as Oliver Stone's "W" sitting on a toilet in cowboy boots with his pants around his ankles under the caption "Sitting president", I admit I didn't understand how essential this was either. But, on seeing the poster, I had an epiphany, a revelation, and saw the whole question clearly for the first time.
Today, after eight years of George W. Bush; as the image and the brand and the reality of American power unravels, only a black man can be president of the United States .
Why is this?
Not because, as Andrew Sullivan suggests, a brown face in the White House will make us suddenly beloved in places like Pakistan... it wont, not at all, perhaps quite the contrary.
But rather because nobody would dare to put a black person on a poster like the one advertising Oliver Stone's film, that's why.
Political caricature is ill willed and cruel and after centuries of our cruelty it is taboo for civilized white people to ridicule a person of color.
For example, Steve Bell, the Guardian's brilliant cartoonist, characterizes George W. Bush as a chimpanzee. Obviously if Bell drew Barack Obama as a chimpanzee he would be considered a vicious, racist beast.
Probably the most famous political cartoon of all time was Herblock's 1954 drawing of Richard Nixon crawling out of a sewer... Would any American cartoonist ever dare draw something similar of Obama no matter how much he disagreed with him? Would a major newspaper like Herblock's Washington Post ever dare to print such a thing?
To draw a caricature ridiculing a politician you have to cruelly exaggerate the victim's salient physical characteristics. How do you draw or represent any African-American with ill intent without crossing the line into racism?
Barack Obama pictured on a movie poster sitting in a warm bathroom, wearing comfortable cowboy boots... defecating?
Fageddaboudit!
This is what I call the "Harry Potter magic cloak of invisibility" that Americans don when they cloak themselves in Barack Obama.
By electing Barack Obama, Americans want to protect themselves from themselves and at the same time protect themselves from the world's ill will.
The political climate in America is toxic and it has been since Richard Nixon launched his Southern Strategy and caused Republicans to pause from their golf and stock coupon clipping long enough to plunge into neofascist populism and charismatic religion. Reading the traffic, commentaries, forums and blogs of the American Internet, I find myself sickened by how vindictive, petty, personal and ad hominem it is; both on the left and on the right. If it has been so in relativelygood times, there is no reason to expect it to sweeten up in truly bad times.
Things are very bad and they are getting much worse.
Whoever is elected president is in deepest doo doo even before their inauguration.
The country is going to be in a bad mood and surly, but commentators, cartoonists and even most popular bloggers will walk on eggs when treating president Obama. At this time the default position for Obama supporters, when confronting anyone skeptical of Barack Obama, his personality or accomplishments, is to treat them as racist. As president Obama finally takes his bruises from reality instead of speculation, this position should harden. The taboo against racial abuse should guarantee America at least a few months of most welcome peace.
Things have gone so far that electing the untested Obama and invoking this taboo, is probably the only way Americans have of restoring, in their own eyes, the sanctity and the prestige of the center of American political life, the office of the presidency, the post of the nation's commander in chief.
And when someday a million Shiites take to the streets in Iraq shouting, "Death to America! Death to Obama!", they too can be dismissed as racists.
"My religion is to seek for truth in life and for life in truth, even knowing that I shall not find them while I live." Miguel de Unamuno
David Seaton's News Links The above quote is from one of Spain's greatest literary and intellectual figures, Miguel de Unamuno. Unamuno is perhaps best known for his book, "Del Sentimiento Trágico de la Vida" (The Tragic Sense of Life).
Richard L. Rubens, Ph.D. wrote of Unamuno's philosophy,
The central, defining characteristic of the tragic sense of life is its insistence on the balance between the striving for rationality on the one hand, and the recognition of the underlying irrationality of existence on the other.
Nothing is more foreign to most Americans than the idea that we struggle in vain and that the struggle itself is the meaning of life. Another great Spanish poet and contemporary of Unamuno's, Antonio Machado wrote and I'll make a clumsy attempt to translate,
Caminante son tus huellas Traveler the path is your footprints and nothing more El camino nada más; caminante no hay camino Traveller, there is no path se hace camino al andar. You make the path by walking Al andar se hace camino y al volver la vista atrás se ve la senda que nunca se ha de volver a pisar. When walking you make the path And when you turn to look back You see the path that you will never trod again Caminante, no hay camino sino estelas sobre el mar. Traveler, there is no path Only sparkling reflections on the sea ¿Para que llamar caminos A los surcos del azar...? Why call paths, That which are only the furrows of fortune Todo el que camina anda, Como Jesús sobre el mar. Every traveler walks, Like Jesus on the sea
I put this under a photo of LBJ and MLK because I think that somehow they illustrate both Unamuno and Machado's philosophy. The tragedy of the American left: how justice defeated justice... how basic decency and democratic values condemned millions of Americans of all colors to poverty and illness.
Hegel wrote:
"The heroes of ancient classical tragedy encounter situations in which, if they firmly decide in favor of the one ethical pathos that alone suits their finished character, they must necessarily come into conflict with the equally justified ethical power that confronts them."
Making equal citizens of the descendants of slavery: descendants of both master and slave, was the inescapable duty, dharma, of American progressives. This situation made and still makes a mockery of the Declaration of Independence, which was written by a slaveholder and seconded by slaveholders... This injustice could not be allowed to stand
Lyndon Johnson, perhaps the closest thing to a man of the left that has ever sat in the White House, knew that this was his duty and although a southerner carried out that duty unflinchingly.
Master politician that he was, I'm sure he knew what was to follow: Nixon's "Southern Strategy", that opened the door to Reagan, Bush-I and Bush-II, a movement that strived mightily to undo all that Johnson tried to achieve with his "Great Society"... and largely succeeded in destroying it and gave a political base to all those whose philosophy has deprived generations of Americans of decent public health care and decent public schools.
This contradiction is America's original sin and its tragedy, its eternal fate. DS
Social engineering is a concept in political science that refers to efforts to influence popular attitudes and social behavior on a large scale, whether by governments or private groups.(...) The most effective way for "social engineering" is through mass media and especially television.(...) Political conservatives in the United States have accused their opponents of social engineering through the promotion of political correctness, insofar as it may change social attitudes by defining "acceptable" and "unacceptable" language or acts. Wikipedia
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"The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this." Albert Einstein
"Religion is the opium of the people: this saying of Marx is the cornerstone of the entire ideology of Marxism about religion. All modern religions and churches, all and of every kind of religious organizations are always considered by Marxism as the organs of bourgeois reaction, " V.I. Lenin
Marxism-Leninism has consistently advocated the control, suppression, and, ultimately, the elimination of religious beliefs. Within about a year of the revolution the state expropriated all church property, including the churches themselves, and in the period from 1922 to 1926, 28 Russian Orthodox bishops and more than 1,200 priests were killed (a much greater number was subjected to persecution). In the 1920s and 1930s, such organizations as the League of the Militant Godless ridiculed all religions and harassed believers. Atheism was propagated through schools, communist organizations (such as the Young Pioneer Organization), and the media. Wikipedia
Twenty years ago, any KGB officer found practicing religion would have been promptly sacked. Now, according to the “committed Christian” and Russian leader Vladimir Putin, religion “has a big place” in 21st-century Russia. That place has stretched deep into Russian Intelligence. As a former KGB foreign intelligence officer, Putin has more direct control of intelligence than any Russian leader since Joseph Stalin. One of the distinguishing characteristics of the KGB was its militant atheism. In March 2002, however, the FSB (Putin’s domestic security and intelligence service) at last found God. The Times
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"The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country - a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen - is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope - the audacity to hope - for what we can and must achieve tomorrow." Barack Obama
Victoria Switzer, a retired social studies teacher, was on phone-bank duty one night during the Pennsylvania primary campaign. One night was all she could take: "It wasn't pretty." She made 60 calls to prospective voters in Susquehanna County, her home county, which is 98 percent white. The responses were dispiriting. One caller, Switzer remembers, said he couldn't possibly vote for Obama and concluded: "Hang that darky from a tree!" Washington Post
David Seaton's News Links To avoid confusion, I'll put what I think is the moral of this story right up front.
It is important to fight for change, because in the process of fighting you may change yourself, but changing others even for the their own and for the general good may have unforeseen consequences... for them and for you.
Cultures change over time, but it is difficult to intervene in them to change them. It is like a neurosurgeon operating on a deadly brain tumor, a little slip and "oops! There go the piano lessons."
I started out this post with four photos and a slew of quotes about the Soviet Union's effort to eradicate religion. Contrary to what most people in America would think, this was not done out of "evil" intent, but rather with the best intentions imaginable.
Scientific opinion was largely that expressed in Einstein's recently discovered letter: religion was, "primitive and childish". Czarist Russia was a primitive, superstitious and priest-ridden society, well symbolized by the photo of the "mystic" at the top, Rasputin. Therefore Lenin's view was logical: religion existed solely for the "protection of the exploitation and the stupefaction of the working class" and Lenin was the man of action par excellence: Vladimir Ilyich was mister "see snake, kill snake".
The third quote from Wikipedia's article on Soviet atheism, gives a brief outline of the logical measures he and his successors took to effectively rid Russia of such a plague of ignorance and alienation.
Or so it seemed.
During the years of glasnost, before the collapse of the USSR, I was much surprised to learn from Spanish friends who were dealing on a daily basis with Soviet officials that all these loyal Communist apparatchiks confessed that they had been baptized and indoctrinated in the forbidden Christian practices from childhood.
I think that was when I first realized that the Soviet system's goose was really cooked.
This is where the lady in the third photo comes in: the eternal Russian granny, the "babushka".
The babushkas had kept religion alive in Russia.
Now as we see in the last photo, as far as Vladimir Putin, a former KGB colonel, is concerned, "that old time religion" is good enough for him.
All of this just goes to prove that Barack Obama is not the only one with a granny that makes her grandsons cringe.
Over the last 50 years or so, American institutions, especially the armed forces and Hollywood, have moved heaven and earth to change American racial attitudes root and branch, but like with religion in Soviet Russia, I'm afraid that in the USA too, the babushkas have it.
That there is and has been a racist backlash against the effort to eradicate such ignorant and hateful injustice is no secret. Barack Obama himself analyzed it very well in his historic, 'A More Perfect Union' speech.
"(...) these resentments aren't always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition." Barack Obama
And all of this anger has been directed heretofore against surrogates: the Jimmy Carters, the Ted Kennedys, the Walter Mondales, the Dukakises, the Gores and the Kerrys; and all the racism was disguised in euphemisms like "state's rights" or "liberal" or "elitist" or "un-American".
Now for the first time the Reagan Democrats are going to get the chance to actually vote against a real black man who incarnates all the euphemisms, instead of a surrogate.
It won't even need any Rovian sulphur and brimstone, all the thing will have to do is sit there and be: the babushkas have already taken care of it.
I think McCain is going to win this thing if he doesn't have a stroke or a heart attack during the campaign.
That is the bad news.
The good news is that I think that there is going to be a massive splitting of ballots and that the Democrats are going to get comfortable majorities in both houses despite losing the White House. If they had run Al Gore, I think the Democrats might have had their biggest victory since Roosevelt, but being post-60s Democrats they had to blow it. DS
The racial divide that has opened up within the Democratic Party is almost certainly less problematic than the hurdles Mr. Obama could face attracting support outside the party in November should he win the nomination. It is, after all, the Republican Party that captured the allegiance of the whites most uneasy about the civil rights movement and its legacy. “It will be a challenge to win a general election with an African-American candidate,” said Larry Bartels, a professor of politics at Princeton. “The challenge has less to with internal tensions within the Democratic Party than with the resentments and racial misgivings of the general electorate.” The New York Times
David Seaton's News Links You could say that the civil rights movement broke the left in the United States, but at the same time you would have to ask what good a left would be that was predicated on racial inequality.
If the previous sentence could be expressed as a neat mathematical formula, computers could solve the conundrum that has stumped the American left since the 1960s.
This endless conversation has left the poor of America with substandard public education and without decent health care, while what passes for "progressive" politics busies itself with ethnic and sexual identity questions instead of class divisions.
In this the United States not only fails itself, it fails the world. America is the only developed country without any serious social democratic movement and this gives endless comfort to right wing parties everywhere. Many European social democrats try to pretend that the Democrats are their American opposite numbers only to find them in reality corresponding to something similar to Christian Democrats.
And all of this because of America's race divisions. Here is a sample from Pennsylvania:
In the former mining and textile regions of northeastern Pennsylvania, places like Scranton and Wilkes- Barre, (Obama's pollsters) expected to lose by about 10 points. Instead they were defeated by better than 2-to-1. Likewise, in the industrial towns of western Pennsylvania, like Johnstown, home of U.S. Representative John Murtha, a powerful Clinton supporter, Obama lost not by the eight-point margin his team had anticipated, but by 46 points. Bloomberg
With the pundits sounding shrill alarms:
We are not as powerful as we used to be because over the past three decades, the Asian values of our parents’ generation — work hard, study, save, invest, live within your means — have given way to subprime values: “You can have the American dream — a house — with no money down and no payments for two years.” That’s why Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous defense of why he did not originally send more troops to Iraq is the mantra of our times: “You go to war with the army you have.” Hey, you march into the future with the country you have — not the one that you need, not the one you want, not the best you could have. Thomas Friedman - NYT
Americans are glum at the moment. No, I mean really glum. In April, a new poll revealed that 81 percent of the American people believe that the country is on the "wrong track." In the 25 years that pollsters have asked this question, last month's response was by far the most negative. Other polls, asking similar questions, found levels of gloom that were even more alarming, often at 30- and 40-year highs. Fareed Zacharia - Newsweek
What we are talking about is decadence... It's been obvious for years, but it seems to finally be catching up with mainstream types like cheery chipmunk, Tom Friedman and the more realist, Fareed Zacharia.
If you wanted to understand what is happening in America, it would easier if you looked at it through the lens of a miniature, opera buffaversion: Berlusconi's Italy.
Without getting into an exhaustive analysis, let us say that Silvio Berlusconi is a cartoon version of the US power structure.Silvio Berlusconi incarnates in his sole person the entire American establishment: business, press, television, even sports. The decadence of Italy is like a toy version of what is happening in the United States.
Now, after sixty years, Italy is moving back toward Fascism. (No kidding, the new mayor of Rome is a genuine, arm in air, viva il Duce, former street fascist). Is this where we are headed?
I'll be returning to the Italian example in future posts, if Italy is not currently on your radar screen, please get up to speed. When you do, I think you will agree that the comparisons are most helpful in illuminating of the problems America faces, but on a smaller, more accessible scale. The USA even in decline (especially in decline?) is too mind boggling to readily get your hands around. DS
Henry Ford said that "history is bunk". I think most Americans agree with that and truly want to believe that it is possible to completely erase the past and begin anew... But, in fact the relations between white America and the decedents of African slavery are America's Balkans, which as Churchill said, "produce more history than they can digest". Any American city is Bosnia-Herzegovina. And this is not really about color.... it's about history. A Bosnian Muslim and a Bosnian Serb share the same language and morphology, but history has them at each others throats. Color is just the uniform that American history assigns each player in this horrible game. Denying it doesn't change anything.
I first discovered this when, here is Europe, I was thrown into the company of Cubans and Venezuelans of color and later with African exchange students. No history separated us, there was no tension at all on either side, we hung out together in the most natural way... Even in England, the relationship with students of the British Caribbean, was fluid. African-Americans have told me they experienced the same thing. For all of us it was an inexpressible relief.
It is not about color it is about history. Contrary to what Obama says, we are not "one people", but two peoples, each with distinct, but overlapping cultures, who must share the same space and learn to live with each other and even love one another. I think we have as good a chance as the Bosnians do, but not any better one.
I believe that Barack Obama illustrates perfectly my idea that race relations in the USA are cultural and that color is only a uniform that normally goes with the culture.
Obama is culturally "white". He was raised in Hawaii by white grandparents and went to private schools where the significant non-white population is Asiatic and that not only didn't Hawaii ever have any history of African slavery, it wasn't even a part of the United States at the time of the Civil War. He also lived in Indonesia, where he would have been treated as an American expatriate... an object of mild curiosity. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Muslim Indonesia attaches any particular stigma to African ancestry.
In short, to paraphrase Reverend Wright, I doubt if any white person ever called Barack Obama "nigger" in his whole life. It seems to me that the Obama took the personal decision to become part of African-American culture, in the same way he could have gone to an ashram in India and become a yogin. Attending such a radically black nationalist church as Wright's was Obama's way of joining the new culture... Now he has been caught by it.
I think Barack Obama is an immensely talented politician, but for him to really become anything great, I think it is essential for him to first fail miserably at something important.
In my opinion this campaign if the first real event in his whole life. If he fails now at this imposture, he may come out of this trial by fire burned a shade darker and a much more interesting and important figure in American life.
More than President at this point I see him as the natural successor to Ted Kennedy. To be President he needs more time in the oven. Paradoxically what Obama is going through now is making him into a culturally genuine African-American. That is when his real story finally begins. DS
David Seaton's News Links Barack Obama describes his grandmother as:
"a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."
I don't know for sure if I'm the only one who found this all a tad supercilious, but I suspect I'm not.
It turns out that I too come from serially broken homes like Obama and, hey, I too had a white grandmother, who like Obama's, was
"a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who love(d) me as much as she love(d) anything in this world"
And hey, huge coincidence.... she too was frightened of black men just like Obama's. Wow.... and that made Obama cringe?
Cringe?
Good thing he never listened to Chris Rock on the subject:
"The media has distorted our image to make us look bad, why must you come down on us like that, brother? It ain't us, it's the media." Please, cut the fucking shit, okay. Okay? Okay? When I go to the money machine tonight, alright, I ain't looking over my back for the media: I'm looking for niggas!'
Now that makes me cringe, and I don't cringe very easily. You don't have to be Bill Cosby to know that there is huge problem in the United States of America with black men.
"The United States has the highest reported incarceration rate in the world. While the United States currently incarcerates 750 inmates per 100,000 persons, the world average rate is 166 per 100,000 persons.(...) African Americans, who are 12.4 percent of the population, are more than half of all prison inmates, compared to one-third twenty years ago. Although African-Americans constitute 14 percent of regular drug users, they are 37 percent of those arrested for drug offenses, and 56 percent of persons in state prisons for drug crimes." “Mass Incarceration in the United States: At What Cost? US Senate Report
And many of the causes of this problem were well described by Obama's "old uncle" Reverend Wright, (I bet the 'old uncle' bit made Wright cringe). Here is how he preached it.
"The government gives them the drugs [referring to the Iran-Contra Affair], builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people...God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme"
Now brother Noam Chomsky couldn't have said that any better. If we were going for truth and not truthiness, Obama would have defended both his white granny's and Jeremiah Wright's views, because both of them are making intelligent and realistic comments about a problem that affects both their lives, as it does any American of any color that lives anywhere but places like Iowa and Minnesota.
So, in fact, where others see a history making, earth shaking, speech steeped in authenticity, I only see Tony Blair with a fabulous tan. DS
"Democrats are worried that the Obama spell will break between the time of his nomination and the time of the election, and deny them the White House. My guess is that he can maintain the spell just past Inauguration Day. After which will come the awakening. It will be rude."Charles Krauthammer - Washington Post
Erin go bragh?
David Seaton's News Links I admit I am having some second thoughts on my theory's present validity on reading Krauthammer.
I detest Krauthammer, a poisonous neocon, but he is very smart. With him, "every movement has a meaning". Each word he writes is dripping with intention. He seems to have already written off Hillary Clinton and is unloading on Obama. His idea, put briefly, is that Barack Obama is some sort of George McGovern with a cool tan.
I joined in an intense debate on Barack Obama in the great politics junky's venue, TPMCafe, and I got some interesting questions that I thought I'd paste in here at News Links.
David, do you think there is more racism in our country over the past, say, 20 years, less, about the same, different? Are your thoughts on that part of your sense of hopelessness? Do you think it is impossible to over-estimate the racism of the American people?
I think every American is race conscious. I say this because in the United States anyone with even a drop of African blood is considered "black". This is not true of Latin Americans, where to be black means to be just that, "black". I have had Cubans that were as "black" as Colin Powell tell me that they were Basques or Galicians and nobody thought this was strange.
This leads to some strange attitudes. For example my maternal great grandmother was Irish from Dublin, the boxer, Mohammad Ali's maternal great grandfather was Irish from Dublin too. Ali is loquacious, poetic, pugnacious, brave and funny. Irish, no? No, of course not, he is "black". Ha, ha! But if I say that I am Irish nobody laughs, and I can't fight my way out of a paper bag... I would say that as long as nobody would think to say how "Irish" Mohammad Ali is, America is a racist country.
Is it "too soon" for a "black" man to be President of the United States?
Well, it is fair to say that it is much too soon for most white men or women to be president, so, not being a racist, I imagine black people wouldn't be any different.
Having said that, I think it is important to also say that Barack Obama is not the first "black" man to be considered for the job. Not too many years ago, General Colin Powell was being talked about very seriously for the presidency and certainly before Bush spoiled him, few would have argued that he was not qualified for it. If we look at the field this year, Powell might be considered overqualified. He surely has a thicker CV than any recent candidate and a record of proven judgment: certainly if the "Powell Doctrine" had been adhered to, the USA would have never invaded Iraq. I think that if he were a Democrat he would already have been president by now.
David, what are your specific concerns about Obama? What do you think would happen if he were President?
Here I am afraid that I agree with the detestable Mister Krauthammer, which is why I quoted him above. Here is the whole thing. DS
Charles Krauthammer: The Audacity of Selling Hope - Washington Post There's no better path to success than getting people to buy a free commodity. Like the genius who figured out how to get people to pay for water: bottle it (Aquafina was revealed to be nothing more than reprocessed tap water) and charge more than they pay for gasoline. Or consider how Google found a way to sell dictionary nouns-- boat, shoe, clock -- by charging advertisers zillions to be listed whenever the word is searched.
And now, in the most amazing trick of all, a silver-tongued freshman senator has found a way to sell hope. To get it, you need only give him your vote. Barack Obama is getting millions.
This kind of sale is hardly new. Organized religion has been offering a similar commodity -- salvation -- for millennia. Which is why the Obama campaign has the feel of a religious revival with, as writer James Wolcott observed, a "salvational fervor" and "idealistic zeal divorced from any particular policy or cause and chariot-driven by pure euphoria."
"We are the hope of the future," sayeth Obama. We can "remake this world as it should be." Believe in me and I shall redeem not just you but your country -- nay, we can become "a hymn that will heal this nation, repair this world, and make this time different than all the rest."
And believe they do. After eight straight victories -- and two more (Hawaii and Wisconsin) almost certain to follow -- Obama is near to rendering moot all the post-Super Tuesday fretting about a deadlocked convention with unelected superdelegates deciding the nominee. Unless Hillary Clinton can somehow do in Ohio and Texas on March 4 what Rudy Giuliani proved is almost impossible to do -- maintain a big-state firewall after an unrelenting string of smaller defeats -- the superdelegates will flock to Obama. Hope will have carried the day.
Interestingly, Obama has been able to win these electoral victories and dazzle crowds in one new jurisdiction after another, even as his mesmeric power has begun to arouse skepticism and misgivings among the mainstream media.
ABC's Jake Tapper notes the "Helter-Skelter cult-ish qualities" of "Obama worshipers," what Joel Stein of the Los Angeles Times calls "the Cult of Obama." Obama's Super Tuesday victory speech was a classic of the genre. Its effect was electric, eliciting a rhythmic fervor in the audience -- to such rhetorical nonsense as "We are the ones we've been waiting for. (Cheers, applause.) We are the change that we seek."
That was too much for Time's Joe Klein. "There was something just a wee bit creepy about the mass messianism," he wrote. "The message is becoming dangerously self-referential. The Obama campaign all too often is about how wonderful the Obama campaign is."
You might dismiss as hyperbole the complaint by the New York Times's Paul Krugman that "the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality." Until you hear Chris Matthews, who no longer has the excuse of youth, react to Obama's Potomac primary victory speech with "My, I felt this thrill going up my leg." When his MSNBC co-hosts tried to bail him out, he refused to recant. Not surprising for an acolyte who said that Obama "comes along, and he seems to have the answers. This is the New Testament."
I've seen only one similar national swoon. As a teenager growing up in Canada, I witnessed a charismatic law professor go from obscurity to justice minister to prime minister, carried on a wave of what was called Trudeaumania.
But even there the object of his countrymen's unrestrained affections was no blank slate. Pierre Trudeau was already a serious intellectual who had written and thought and lectured long about the nature and future of his country.
Obama has an astonishingly empty paper trail. He's going around issuing promissory notes on the future that he can't possibly redeem. Promises to heal the world with negotiations with the likes of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Promises to transcend the conundrums of entitlement reform that require real and painful trade-offs and that have eluded solution for a generation. Promises to fund his other promises by a rapid withdrawal from an unpopular war -- with the hope, I suppose, that the (presumed) resulting increase in American prestige would compensate for the chaos to follow.
Democrats are worried that the Obama spell will break between the time of his nomination and the time of the election, and deny them the White House. My guess is that he can maintain the spell just past Inauguration Day. After which will come the awakening. It will be rude.
