Category Archives: Obama

The horrific things we do to each other

Americana, Evolution, Obama, Politics, Psychological Musings

Boston-0405

I brought a biography of Clarence  Darrow – Attorney for the Damned – with me for the flight to Boston. I am not so sure that it was a great idea: I was still in Dayton, Tennessee – at the Monkey Trial – when the plane landed in Boston. And still in Tennessee on the bus ride to New Hampshire.

Darrow was in my family’s pantheon of civil heroes – or, at least, my dad’s pantheon, and by extension, mine – and I was enjoying reading about him in more detail than the stories that had been pretty much fixed in my DNA as a child. Darrow was a free-love-bohemian and I was a little taken back by how much free love and bohemianism there was back in the 1890s. He defended so many people that nobody else would touch, like Loeb and Leopold, the Western Federation of Miners who were in an industrial war with the Mine Owner’s Association in Idaho, or a black family that moved into a white neighborhood in Detroit.

The Mine Owner’s Association had the politicians backing them, and the police, and the Pinkerton’s who beat strikers to death under the banner of law and order. The miners struck back, bombing mines and buildings. The black family had everybody against them also, with the police protecting a crowd of whites who were trying to force the family out. It was a time of brutality and it was a time that resonates today, both financially and racially, although in a milder form.

A couple of years later, William Jennings Bryan ran for president as a populist hero against the powerful, the police that protected them, the Pinkertons, and even President Cleveland, of his own party, who sent Federal troops in to back the rich. Much of what Bryan said then is still germane now: There are two great theories of government. One claimed that if you would only legislate to make the well to do prosperous, their prosperity would leak through to those below. But the Democratic idea is if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity would find its way up through every class that rests upon them.

The book was about the Darrow I had been taught, the defender of the powerless, but there was a Darrow I didn’t know. A Darrow who also defended people because he wanted money, people like a white bigot who brutally killed a Hawaiian and who Darrow knew was guilty. My dad was a defense lawyer for a while and he constantly pitched that a person is innocent until proven guilty. In the same manner as Darrow, my dad defended people like a bartender who killed his wife. Daddy knew he was guilty – even I knew he was guilty hearing the stories over the dinner table – but that didn’t seem to matter to Darrow or my dad. But sitting on the airplane,above it all, it mattered to me and left me in a melancholy funk.

I had brought a New Yorker book review of a couple of books about the partition of Pakistan into two countries, Pakistan and Bangladesh. I put down my Darrow book and read the book review to improve my mood. That was even worse. Nixon was a prick and while he and Kissinger congratulated themselves on their masculinity and pragmatism, the Pakistani generals, our allies, slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Bengalis who were – as Nixon said – just a bunch of brown goddamn Moslems.

I thought of Obama and our drones and how our government seems to find killing people OK as long as it suits our political needs and my melancholy grew. I went back to Darrow, and, fortunately, I was able to cheer myself up with the Monkey Trail, The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, in Dayton, Tennessee, where the Courthouse had a banner that said Read your Bible.

Today, it is easy to laugh at Dayton and the trial but it was no laughing matter then and it still isn’t. Like the  Capital vs.Labor  fight, Ignorance vs. Science is a conflict that is still with us.

On the bus to New Hampshire, in Dayton, it was Darrow against Bryan and Darrow was at his best. You can close your eyes, Darrow said, But your life and my life and the life of every American citizen depends, after all, on tolerance and forbearance….If men are not tolerant, if men can not respect each other’s opinions, if men can not live and let live, then no man’s life is safe. If today you can take a thing, like evolution, and make it a crime to teach it in public schools….At the next session you can ban books and newspapers.

Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant, and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one, you can do another. Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding…After awhile, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man,  and creed against creed until – with flying banners and beating drums – we are marching backwards to the glorious age of the 16th century, where bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.

Getting off the bus in New Hampshire, the sun was out and people were taking family pictures.

Boston-9556

 

 

Clinton, Obama, and a Unified Field Theory of the Outsider

Americana, Obama, Politics

Obama-

I grew up feeling like an outsider, I don’t know why, really, but I did and it left me with a disdain for the ruling elite – the longer ruling and the more elite, the greater my disdain, Saudi princes are high on the list for example – and, of course, I desperately want to fit in, even to be part of the ruling elite. When Michele and I were in India, while we were staying at a bed and breakfast Royal Castle, I had the chance to photograph the mini-Maharajah – called a Rao, I believe – who owned the place. I did everything but genuflect. All my disdain was gone and all that was left was conditioned deference. I was in the sun and his highness was in the shade and I was sweating so much I was worried the camera might squirt out of my hands.

When Clinton ran for president as the new, young, energetic, leader and, then, after winning, nothing really changed; I wondered why. He was an outsider, the son of a single mom, from Hope Arkansas and I expected him to understand that America was heading in the wrong direction. Unions were getting weaker, good jobs were going overseas, the rich were getting richer and everybody else was just limping along. In many ways, Clinton just seemed powerless, making little changes around the edges while the tide of American prosperity continued to run out. It seemed like a time for bold action and Clinton was cautious.

The next guy, George Bush the Younger,  brought bold action. He said things like I am going to use my political capital and we all laughed. And then cried.

The came Obama and I had such great hopes. Obama ran on bringing change – real change – to Washington and I believed him. The son of a white mother who had once been on welfare and an African intellectual who went back to Africa, he was almost the definition of an outsider. During his campaign, he seemed to understand the country from outside the Washington bubble. I thought It will not be business as usual, and I was so wrong. As Gary Young editorialized in The Guardian, When given the choice of representing the interests of those who voted for him and the interests of American military and economic hegemony, he chose the latter. That’s not the change people believed in.

Obama ran on closing Guantanamo (or Gitmo, as we have learned to call it). Gitmo is still there, the prisoners are still there and now Obama’s administration is force- feedings the detainees. Candidate Obama wrote about smoking pot – when questioned if he inhaled or, like Clinton, only pretended, he said that he inhaled, That was the point –  now his administration is going after California pot dispensaries at a higher rate than Bush. Obama ran on bringing transparency to Official Washington, and he has gone after more whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined.

That is not to say Obama is a complete bust, far from it, by all rational accounts, he is an excellent establishment president.  It is just that he has not been an agent of change, not in the way either Roosevelt was, or Bush, for that matter.  I wonder why. Again

It seems like a pattern. It is easy to say that they are both Democrats and Democrats are pussies, to say that Democrats are too reasonable. That Democrats are Liberals and too willing to see the other side. I don’t believe that. I think the pattern is that both Clinton and Obama were outsiders. For Clinton or Obama to rise to power from where they started, they had to fit in. I read somewhere that black people have a much better sense of white people than the reverse because they are observing white life – in detail but from the outside – where white people are completely oblivious to black life and the same is true of a guy from Hope Arkansas. 

As much as Obama – and Clinton – wanted to make a change when they became President, they found themselves in a world that they knew of more than knew and, even if they were critical when running, it is a world they admired and wanted to fit in. True, it was a world they thought they knew, but only from the outside, it is not a world they inhabited. It is a world they have been conditioned – for lack of a better word – to fit into. It is also a world, in which it was very easy to be intimidated when they actually got there. No matter how critical Obama has been at the lack of transparency in Washington when the Director of the National Security Agency says We can’t release this information, it is classified, it would hurt the country, he goes along. 

Fossilized hubris

Americana, General U.S. Grant, Obama

Near Vicksburg-2

This morning, I heard somebody on the radio talk about fossilized hubris, but then I realized that was not what they said. It was only what I heard, connecting audio dots that weren’t there. Now I have fallen in love with that term, even if it is imaginary. It reminds me of the ruins of an old Mississippi plantation that Michele and I visited in 2008. The plantation had been captured by the Union during General U. S. Grant’s Vicksburg campaign and that campaign has been on my mind because it started about 150 years ago, in April 1863.

Michele and I went to Vicksburg in 2008 to see some Civil War Battlefields in which Grant had been the Union commander. Grant chose to not to attack the citadel of Vicksburg directly, instead going down river to a location near the, now, abandoned plantation. Standing on the parapets of Vicksburg – The Gibraltar of the West – overlooking the Mississippi, it was easy to see why.

Vicksburg-2

 

Later, standing in the empty, quiet, ruins of the Plantation, sweating in the late spring sun, and surrounded by what would be called jungle anywhere else, we could feel how difficult even that road of attack must have been. But, standing in the abandoned ruins, the year that Barack Obama, a black man, would be elected President of the United States – in 2008 – was a very good feeling. It was like standing in fossilized hubris.

 

 

“The Greatest Honor of my Life”….His Eminence Archbishop Demetrios A Couple of Thoughts on the Inauguration

Americana, Obama, Politics

In talking to various people yesterday, I was surprised at how many hadn’t watched the inauguration on Monday. After all it was a holiday – maybe not on the same level as Christmas – without any football games to compete with it. Michele and I started watching it – DVR delayed – at eight in the morning and, after taking the middle of the day off, were watching, or re-watching, parts of it at ten that night. To me, it was a great reality show about America; the best, the worst, the meh. It was a reality show about the transfer of power.

Before he gave the  benediction at the Congressional lunch for the president, His Eminence Archbishop Demetrios of the Greek Orthodox Church, looking at Chuck Schumer – the head of the organizing committee and MC for the day who was clearly having a great time – said Thank you, this is the greatest honor of my life. I can understand that, it seems to me that it would be the greatest honor in almost anybody’s life. He was the first Greek Orthodox anything to give such a benediction and it underline the theme for the day; inclusion. Inclusion in the American Dream, in the American tapestry. Acceptance and Acknowledgement in being an American.

In this case Acceptance included a second term African-American President. As an aside; I am one of those people who thinks winning a second term is even more important than winning the first. As Ta-Nehisi Coates said on Colbert the other night, using a football analogy, Winning once was like a Cinderella  Team, winning the second time was defending the Championship. During his first term, Obama did some things very well and others not so good. He didn’t solve all our problems – I don’t think anybody could, they are just too big and too pervasive – but he diligently kept working at trying to solve them. I think he won re-election because the American people looked at him and saw an hardworking guy taking on huge problems as well as anybody could be expected to do.

Inaugurations are about the transfer of power. Something that was as rare as an unicorn until George Washington walked away from power after his second term. We are no longer the world’s only Democracy and, in some ways, we are not the most democratic, but we transfer power as well, if not better, than anybody. And, in a bigger and far more important way, we are the world’s leader in the transfer of power. The white, male, landowning, elite has transferred power to the rest of us. That is amazing. Just as George Washington was the first winning General to walk away from being a Dictator, I think that the American power elite was the first – and maybe the only, even today – power elite to transfer power.

Watching the Tuskegee  Airman being honored by President Obama, in the Presidential Viewing Stand in front of the White House, brought tears to my eyes. But, the bigger, more important, image was the Tuskegee Airman’s escort, a black, female, Army Major. A black female who, during her career so far – and she looks pretty young so she is probably on a fast track – has commanded white troops. They might not have all liked it, but when she said Jump, they all jumped. That is astounding!

The parade that the President watched contained his Power Base. The new Americans: Mexican Americans, Chinese Americans, African Americans. Without these Americans,  Barack Hussein Obama would not be President. Without the Gay Vote and their Money, Obama would not be President. Without Women, Obama would not be President.

As an aside, it goes both ways;, Tom Ricks over at The Best Defense, posted, I think I didn’t appreciate how important Obama’s inauguration speech on Monday was to gay Americans. This thought dawned on me as I was walking my dogs on Monday night and passed a local gay bar. The entire second floor of the building was covered by a huge American flag. I found that moving. I find it moving, too. End aside.

I know that there are members of the White Elite Class that don’t like this transfer of power, that resent it and are afraid of  the future, I know that there are some who want to take up guns and stop it. I know that there are those who want to go back to the Old Ways, but that will not happen.

 

The marchers in the street  have felt their power, the power of being part of the American Tapestry, and I doubt they will be willing to go back. I hope and I expect the interlaced threads will only get more inclusive. Stronger. This Inauguration made me very happy.

A thought on the debate

Obama, Politics

Watching the debate with an even more fervent Obama supporter than me, what I saw was pretty much the above. That is clearly not what most people saw, what most people saw was this:

A Presidential debate is not like a baseball game or a car race with their clear, arbitrary, rules for defining a winner: in a debate, the winner is who the most people think is the winner.  That was Romney and, as a card carrying member of the Obama Team, it has brought up all sorts of swirling emotions in me. From denial through anger, from bargaining to acceptance.

With acceptance – although it may be bargaining – I am trying to see how Romney’s debate victory will play out and I have come to the conclusion that it did not mean much in that it will probably not change the election.  Although Intrade differs, saying that Obama’s odds fell from 71% to 67% because of his weak show. (The odds do seem to be going back up as a result of today’s jobs report.)

In a way, the odd thing about the debates – the odd thing about news in general – is how ephemeral it is. The debates end and are a big deal: the next day they are gone.

But what I am still left with is how easily Romney seems to be able shapeshift. Or, if you prefer, lie. It is not that he has changed what he believes, it is that he has always believed the new pitch. I remember firing – a job I don’t like as much as Romney – a guy who just flat out lied about something he had done. I don’t remember the details but I do remember him looking me right in the eye and saying something like It couldn’t have been me, I was in Queensland at the time. It was stunning and I was completely flustered.

I think that Obama was flat, he looked tired, he was down; but – I suspect – he found it hard to cope with a guy who can say My health plan includes the elimination of pre-conditions. (It doesn’t for those who haven’t been keeping score.) Obama could say No it doesn’t – and he did – but Romney comes back and says Yes, it does. and there is no place to go except get in a He said, he said, argument or move on. It will be interesting to watch how this plays out next Thursday. .