Review - "Hopeless - Barack Obama And The Politics of Illusion"

I'll say it again, in case anyone's missed it: Barack Obama is not a nice man.

Now, finally, someone had both the time and the resources to write the book I wish I'd've written myself - in it, Joshua Frank and Jeffrey St.Clair make the point that politics is a medium of illusion, and that Barack Obama is a master. Noam Chomsky said of the book, "Those who feel that like lemmings they are being led over a cliff would be well-advised not to read this book. They may discover that they are right."

Those who voted for Obama in 2008 (and I have to count myself among them) did so for two reasons - first, we succumbed to our fears; rationalizing that the 'lesser of two evils' was better; that a McCain presidency would lead to catastrophe, and that, in any event, Sarah Palin was one heartbeat from the White House. Second, we voted for him to un-do the dreadful assaults on civil liberty and freedom around the world unleashed by G.W. Bush, having used a combination of redneck 'git-r'-dun' philosophy and brute force to make a wholesale end-run around the Constitution, his casus belli being the 'liberal establishment' and the perceived foe of international terrorism.

We learned - at least, those of us who kept our eyes open - that Obama was far more political than idealistic; the Constitutional scholar was neatly replaced by a changeling; a person who, in the words of the book, "...(sold) pristine idealism to the masses, (but) is at heart a calculating pragmatist, especially when it comes to advancing his own ambitions. Obama doesn't want to be stained with defeat. It's one reason he has walked away from pushing for a Palestinian state, after his Middle East envoy George Mitchell resigned in frustration. It's why Obama stubbornly refused to insist on a public option for his atrocious health care bill. It's why he backed off cap-and-trade and organized labor's card check bill and the DREAM Act."

Pandering to the right and to the Wall Street interests who got him elected, Obama has stood-down and stood-by while the worst of the Bush era continues unabated - and in some cases, has gotten worse. Instead of the stalwart idealist, we got a panderer who gets his ass kicked at every turn; a man who runs to the Center every time conflict raises its head. The result has been at best mediocrity; at worst a crisis of leadership unseen since Warren Harding.

Again, from the book, "Of course, Obama's most grievous political wounds were self-inflicted, starting even before his election when he rushed back to Washington to help rescue Bush's Wall Street bailout. Instead of meeting with the victims of Wall Street predators or their advocates, like Elizabeth Warren and Ralph Nader, Obama fist-bumped with the brain trust of Goldman Sachs. In the end, Obama helped salvage some of the most venal and corrupt enterprises on Wall Street, agreed to shield their executives from prosecution for their financial crimes and, predictably, later got repaid with their scorn.

Thus the Obama revolution was over before it started, guttered by the politician's overweening desire to prove himself to the grandees of the establishment. From there on, other promises, from confronting climate change to closing Gitmo, from ending torture to initiating a nationalized health care system, proved even easier to break."

As to Afghanistan, "Within weeks of taking office, Obama had been taken to the woodshed by Robert Gates and General David Petraeus and had returned to the White House bruised and humbled.... This was meant to be a punitive war, pure and simple, designed to draw as much blood as possible, an obscene war fought largely by remote-controlled drones attacking peasant villages with murderous indiscretion.

Afterwards, the American peace movement could only bray in impotent outrage. But as Obama's wars spread, the last flickering moral lights in the nation...dissipated into whispered lamentations; hushed murmurs of disillusionment. Could it be that the American Left had gone extinct as any kind of potent political force and it took the election of Barack Obama to prove it?"

Sadly, yes.

The book itself is a collection of essays from some of America's best and brightest thinkers. True believers will disagree with all of them - and continue in their denial. The truth, unvarnished, is hard to swallow - even as the predator-drones rain indiscriminate death on civilians after one of Obama's Monday-morning meetings to decide who lives and who dies in small mud-huts in far-flung parts of the world; whose names are hard to pronounce to the pseudoLiberals and Hoveround-riding Teabaggers alike.

Perhaps the best indictment comes from Paul Krugman in one of the book's essays: "More and more it's becoming clear that progressives who had their hearts set on Obama were engaged in a huge act of self-delusion. Once you got past the soaring rhetoric you noticed, if you actually paid attention to what he said, that he largely accepted the conservative storyline, a view of the world, including a mythological history, that bears little resemblance to the facts."

Politics is illusion. Obama is its master.

While we're at it, we might as well add that ignorance is strength; war is peace - and freedom is slavery - and that a Big Lie is the truth, if uttered often enough.  He's taught us that, also.



(You'll find Hopeless - Barack Obama And The Politics of Illusion here, at Amazon.Com)  

It's a National Holiday....

July 4th, 2012 - The Surreal States of America

In a closed society where everyone is guilty, the only crime is getting caught.

--  Hunter S. Thompson

In David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks”, there’s a Red Room, where a fellow called The Man From Another Place helps people find the truth. The problem is that this only happens in the subject’s dreams – it’s up to them to sort out the truth when they wake up back in reality.

Those of us who Stayed Awake in Class have the habit of pointing out reality on a regular basis to the Rest of America – the problem is that we don’t get the props we should, because most of America has Gone ‘Round The Bend.

Reality, it would appear, no longer applies in the land of the (not so) free.

The sitting president has a meeting once a week to decide who lives and who dies in Afghanistan by way of the use of predator-drones (he's high on those things); while the masturbating little boys who operate the joysticks - inured to death on a screen by way of videogames - refer to dead children as 'bugsplats', are actually praised as 'warfighters' and 'heroes' by way of countless July 4th parades and ceremonies.  All the while, that guy in the Oval Office has his supporters conned into leaving their 'Obama-with-a-peace-sign' bumper stickers on their Priuses, and into thinking that he's the Guy Who'll Bring Peace, Love, and Harmony Back.

Bitch, please.

Meanwhile, over 60% of Americans believe that a guy named ‘Jesus’ is coming back, Real Soon Now, to sort-out all the bad-people.  When He comes back, he’s going to take his legion of Born Again Zombies and establish a Thousand-Year Reich here on earth (where, ostensibly, there’ll be no crime, unemployment, or worries about things like Kim Kardashian’s ass).

There’s a subgroup of that 60% who not only believe that ‘Jesus’ is coming back – He’s so pissed that He’s exacting ‘judgments’ on America and the rest of the world (this is why we have such an abysmal economy and why we’re mired in our remaining 'official' war in Afghanistan, as well as suffering from tornadoes, drought and flooding).

Take last year - Rick Perry, governor of one of the largest states in the whole damn country, believes this stuff to the core of his being.  He got rid of 6,000 firefighters last year to balance his budget, while half of his state was burning down around his ears - then rented an entire stadium to beg his Imaginary Friend for rain.

According to people like Perry, everything will be set right if we just grovel and beg hard enough to a dead guy.

(That, by the way, is insanity - but I digress....)

Economically, we’re no better off. Our current President was elected on the back of a ‘bailout backlash’. We expected him to deal with a lot of the problems created by the eight years of the Bush regime; those of us who connected the dots on these things realized that he had a very narrow window in which to accomplish anything of substance; instead, he set about planning for a second term by way of pandering to people who wanted him gone in the first place.  Thing is, it just might work - because he sold out in the very beginning to the Wall Streeters and other criminals-with-money, and he's doing the same damn thing this time around.  The price was to let the perps off the hook who ruined the economy.  So far, he's done a good job of that.

Now, we're engaged in a war which has been going on for ten years now – and we've no way to pay for anything. Nearly one fifth of the country is out of work. What little steam the economy had managed to build has gone flat (that'll happen when you destroy between 40 and 60% of a population's wealth), and the current status-quo is unsustainable.  The man in charge squandered his chance to set things right. The banks which got that bailout money are all sitting on that pile of cash, waiting to buy up what remains for a song and a dance when the whole thing finally falls off a fucking cliff.

In any sane world, most of the nation would have put an end to this a long time ago. Instead, there are two kinds of people in America now: Those who are aching for a religious-themed ProtoFascism, and those who still believe that the current President has answers.  Both types are 'believers' - they believe the electoral system actually still matters; that their vote is going to usher in Change.  Neither has grasped the real reality - that they're simply voting their fears rather than their values, and that engaging in the insanity of elections is akin to going to the horse-track to place a bet - when the track, the betting-booths, the concessions-stand, the fucking parking-lot (and both horses) are all owned by the same people.  It's a full-on race-to-the-bottom, and the only winners will be the people who bought the elections.

Today, it makes no sense to vote for either candidate in our two-party system -  it's like asking for a window or an aisle seat in a plane that's about to dig a half-mile trench in a Kansas cornfield at 400 miles an hour. While there are a couple of people running for the highest office in the land who are pointing this out, a vote for either of them is nothing more than a protest; a wistful look back at a time when voting one's conscience was what made democracy work.  Meanwhile, real power lies in the street, whether we want to acknowledge that or not.  Will thousands of Americans head to the upcoming conventions to protest?  I'm doubting it - although they should.

Don’t think that pointing out any of this is going to make you any friends, either. In fact, thanks to some of the caprices of both the past and current administrations, if you step out of line too very far by way of protest, you’re more likely to have a couple of taser-prongs shot into your hide and your ass thrown in a jail-cell, while the ‘progressives’ stand meekly aside and wonder what happened – violence begets violence, and we’ve had a decade of body-counts, photos of half-burned children and all that follows to desensitize us to the maltreatment of our own citizens.

America is a police state. Try applying for a passport; you’ll be asked to provide a complete biography now (hey; why pay people to compile dossiers on the citizenry – get the people to do it themselves) - and if you owe taxes, there's a 'Progressive' senator from California who'll deny you the right to travel.

Don’t believe me? Do some research. It’s all there.

Thinking about retiring in the Surreal States? Guess again. The Right isn’t content to take your civil rights. They’re coming for your Social Security; your Medicare; your private pension. They’re doing so in the name of ‘deficit reduction’. See, in their world, these programs are not funded by payroll taxes; they’re ‘entitlements’ – and hence ‘bad’, because no one deserves a ‘free ride’. 

(This, by the way, is what happens when a nation goes insane – they change the definitions; then the rules. Lies become truth. All that’s lacking is the Two Minutes Hate.)

Today, American flags will pop up in neighborhoods all over the Surreal States, in a vain attempt to remind us of where we used to live, and to help us forget that our sitting president is at worst a war criminal and a damnable bastard; at best a buffoon, and that the cabal of cretins who really run the show actually mean us well.

Meanwhile, there’s no Red Room and no Man From Another Place to remind us of what’s really going on, even in our dreams. The country continues on an insane path to self-destruction, and anyone who tells the fucking lemmings that they’re marching dutifully toward a cliff labeled “Fascism” will sooner or later be sorted-out for good and all by a Big Bull Lemming with one of those tasers I mentioned earlier.

Happy Fourth of July, America.