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[Note to readers: I wrote this for CounterPunch back in May 2009, but was reminded by a friend to re-post it, as the Obama administration descends continuously into the nightmare...]
My good friend Travis, from Moab, Utah, got it into his heat-scarred head that Obama, following the historic election, would soon be taken out – via, you know, the cabal. Why? Because of all his “change” chatter! Because of the “threat” Obama posed to the status quo! “Just like Martin Luther King! Like JFK!” Or like Malcolm X and RFK. “Threatening the system!” And so on, breathing hard. Well, certainly MLK and Malcolm X – following his Mecca conversion – shook things up, and, from the perspective of those who can’t stand the idea of peace, unity, and brotherhood through democratic action, needed to be shot. But beyond the very real achievement of Obama as heir to the civil rights triumphs of the Sixties – no small thing, obviously – the comparison with King is of course laughable.
Travis, a thinking man who in his spare time rafts whitewater and reads too much, comes around fast when he knows he’s wrong. This doesn’t happen easily with the Obama liberal, who can only be characterized as a religious nut. Suffice to say, what we have proof of in Obama is that black people too, rising to the very top, can be compromised and corrupted and befouled by trying to work a corrupt and filthy system. Hell, anyone who gets to be president of the United States is already enough of a lunatic for climbing so high on the ladder that he has to know how low he’s fallen morally, ethically, spiritually, in a “republic,” so-called, whose chief branches of government respect only cash, lies and trick costumes. But expectation was too high: One imagined the cultural weight of Obama’s negritude, those 400 years of lawlessness guised in institutions (slavery, Jim Crow, segregation), would have given him pause to back the same kind of lawlessness among bankers, or continue the pursuit of lawless wars, or defend the kick-in-your-face kind of lawlessness inherent in the torture of people worldwide – as if mere melanin confers this consciousness and conscience. It is only the exceptional man who translates conscience into political action. Martin Luther King, rolling currently in the depth of the grave, was such a man; Obama is not.
So a few of the Obama drones, too few, are beginning to wake up. I get a note from a veteran DC lawyer, now retired, who worked in cabinet posts in four administrations from the 1970s into the 1990s. “There are really important civil liberties issues that we Obama supporters thought would change on inauguration day,” the lawyer writes. “I was shocked (and I don’t shock easily) by the continuation of the expansive use of the state secrets privilege. With that one inheritance from the Bush Administration alone you can stop any case from ever being heard in court. You can even stop a judge from hearing a case where to purchase levitra to decide whether the government’s claim of state secrets was proper. And the plaintiff will never know why his case was dismissed. This is scary shit in any democracy.” Right: Lawlessness enshrined in secrecy – the old Bush game unchanged.
Radical journalist William Blum, author of Rogue State (by which he means the United States), perhaps puts it best: “I could really feel sorry for Barack Obama — for his administration is plagued and handicapped by a major recession not of his making — if he had a vision that was thus being thwarted. But he has no vision — not any kind of systemic remaking of the economy, producing a more equitable and more honest society; nor a world at peace, beginning with ending America’s perennial wars; no vision of the fantastic things that could be done with the trillions of dollars that would be saved by putting an end to war without end; nor a vision of a world totally rid of torture; nor an America with national health insurance; nor an environment free of capitalist subversion; nor a campaign to control world population … he just looks for what will offend the fewest people.”
That Obama has nothing of the offensive style and scope of the grinning Texas hogfucker who preceded him is exactly the concern. Because, in the end, the clarity of the administration of George W. Bush was a good thing, and sometimes I while away the hours wishing Bush had snatched himself an emergency third term (or has he?). He was the honest face of the United States government, in that he was totally dishonest, happily incompetent, a brute and a child, smashing most things he touched, and didn’t care if you knew it. His greatest achievement was the nakedness that he offered, the exposure of how the republic really works, which is to say how it doesn’t work at all except to gather power unaccountably while stealing from the poor and giving to the rich. It was quite a gift, this disgusting leprotic frame of government laid bare, and it served to galvanize forces that, given time, might have shaped into something like an actual rebellion, in particular among progressives, paleoconservatives, civil libertarians, and among the secessionist movements of the northeast. Now, many of those who had joined up for the fight go easy under the gaze of Obama – pacified and co-opted, because the face is nice. Here in Moab, a progressive island in the Utah desert, one finds the Obamaites, many of them wealthy and educated, walking about with the smile of certainty that smothers thought, knowing it will all work out as long as their guy is driving us off the cliff.