The Sorry State of our (Dis)Union
Last night, I heard something sincerely pathetic. I heard a man beg for his job on national TV.
Understand something. I detest reality-TV; it gave us Snooki and added “G-T-L” to the vernacular. It gave us Maury Povich and Jerry Springer, who from their not-so-rareified digs in the same studio in Connecticut, gave us “Who be my baby daddy?”, and “When it comes to Little Baby X, Cletus, you ARE the father!” That said, last night's escapade was one of the saddest pieces of reality-TV I've seen.
I’ll admit, President Obama tried to take the high road – last night, we heard the ‘statesman’ persona speak, in contrast to the goat-rodeo going on in the Great Traveling Republican Tent-Revival and Debate Circus – but once you peel back the onion just a bit, you’ve got pure shuck-‘n-jive.
Oh. There was ‘hope’ and ‘change’ involved, too.
Still in all, last night's speech was pure reality-TV. Through all the tap-dancing, it’s easy to forget how completely fragile his tenure in office really is, especially when watching that rodeo on the other side of things; admittedly, he looks good when the current crop of Republicans is considered. Still, last night I watched Obama give what may likely be the last major speech of his political life before he fades into obscurity and a well-heeled government-pension-with-perks. Why?
Because he doesn’t get it.
He doesn’t get that the nation is mean. Angry, and mean. Ten years of war; five years of recession, thirty years of other chicanery plus unemployment, homelessness and general national despair will do that to people.
He doesn’t get that we’re stupid. Having abandoned education, it’s small wonder that we have Tea Party types who can’t spell; have no idea what a ‘socialist’ is and less idea of how the government works. They're the same mob who managed to convince The Rest Of Us to vote in the biggest crop of losers we’ve seen in Congress since the Founding. What my grandfather said years ago is still true – you can’t fix stupid. It’s the one Achilles-heel of American democracy – if the whole country wants to engage in a full-on race to the bottom, then go batshit-off-the-rails crazy, there’s nothing to prevent it. The ‘greatness of America’ is horseshit.
Obama also doesn’t get that he’s failed, miserably (in making that last statement, I’m choosing to believe that he had good intentions.)
There’s still a core of ‘believers’ who’ll point out all of the things he’s done – things which he covered again last night. Conspicuously absent were the things he didn’t do, as well as the things he did which should never come from the pen of a genuine Progressive.
He perpetuated the crimes and Constitutional atrocities of the last Administration. He added to them (NDAA). He authorized Federal troops to take to the streets on the heels of inevitable civil unrest. He kept Gitmo in place. He authorized ‘targeted killings’ of American citizens and foreigners alike. He’s given the banking system a hall-pass for their behavior, and has steadfastly refused to acknowledge the elephant in the room – the criminal behavior of the Wall Street barons. His Justice Department has come down on the wrong side of far too many things. It's impossible to turn a blind eye any longer.
He's also ignored the huge consensus in America, both from the Progressives and the Tea Partiers alike – to hold the criminals on Wall Street accountable for their actions, and to do something real and concrete about the mess we call ‘health-care’ in America. He did exactly-squat about the first one - and passed a bill which the Republicans deride as 'Obamacare' for the other (something which does far too little for far too few of us, and which called in every marker and bit of street-cred the man had in order to enact.)
He's also ignored the huge consensus in America, both from the Progressives and the Tea Partiers alike – to hold the criminals on Wall Street accountable for their actions, and to do something real and concrete about the mess we call ‘health-care’ in America. He did exactly-squat about the first one - and passed a bill which the Republicans deride as 'Obamacare' for the other (something which does far too little for far too few of us, and which called in every marker and bit of street-cred the man had in order to enact.)
The cognitive dissonance grew so loud in places that it was impossible to ignore – there were people who refused to budge in their seats when the applause-on-cue began after he extolled the virtues of ‘retraining’ people to move from one factory job to another. To prove his point, he had his staff find a factory worker who'd gone through one such program at random; this woman was the resident of some Podunk town which had lost a lot of factory jobs; she'd retrained in a year or so at a community college and was now the proud recipient of - yep - yet another factory job.
She was flown to Washington to sit in the front row near Obama's wife, Michelle, so she could nod and smile and be generally grateful for the government grant. No mention of the fact that real education – the kind which prepares Americans to compete in a world where engineers and doctors and other highly-trained specialists are needed – is out of reach for all but the very few.
She was flown to Washington to sit in the front row near Obama's wife, Michelle, so she could nod and smile and be generally grateful for the government grant. No mention of the fact that real education – the kind which prepares Americans to compete in a world where engineers and doctors and other highly-trained specialists are needed – is out of reach for all but the very few.
Meanwhile, most of America’s college-graduates aren’t nodding and smiling –they’re drowning in debt while the home they’ve shared for the past few years with their parents as ‘boomerang babies’ is in foreclosure.
Real courage would involve standing in front of the microphones and cameras and saying, “I fucked up, folks. As I speak, the arrests are being made, from Louis Blankfein on down – and we’re going to clean house in the banking system. Tomorrow, we're closing Gitmo. We're rolling back the Bush-era assaults on civil liberties. There will be no more drones at Occupy rallies. I'm putting a muzzle on Homeland Security. I was wrong to authorize the killing of Anwar Al-Awlaki. I was wrong to invade Pakistan to kill BinLaden, no matter how dangerous the man was. And I was wrong to brag about it, too. These things are in the past. I can't change them, but I can change what happens moving forward."
We didn’t hear that. We heard a lot about ‘sacrifice’; we heard hot air and noise about correcting the inequities in the country, and a lot of “Bring me this or that bill, and I’ll sign it!” – all the while ignoring the fact that Congress is now little more than a goat-rodeo all of its own.
The truth is that Obama has no plans to do any of these things – his one plan from now ‘till November is to do what every first-term President has done since the beginning – work on ensuring his second term. This is where his efforts will go, and that’s where you’ll see more of the same. More pandering; more sellout; more say-this-and-do-the-other.
Last night, Barack Obama begged for his job. You can’t call it anything else.
I’m not buying.
