BlackNotBlack.com

Deep Impact

I remember seeing the Hollywood film Deep Impact and thinking to myself how funny it was that Morgan Freeman got to play the President of the United States right when the world was ending. I joked about it with several friends, so I know it wasn't just me who'd noted the irony. Deep Impact was dreadful, I think we can all agree, but was it prescient? Here's scholar Cornell West concerning Barack Obama: "The empire is in decline, the culture is in decay, the democracy is in trouble, financial markets near collapse. It's almost Biblical. And you can imagine what the black brothers and sisters in the barbershops and beauty salons say: 'Right when the thing is about to go under, they hand it over to the black man.'"

So what now, America? What happens now that Obama has been anointed Commander-in-Waiting? Fact is, his hands are tied in almost every imaginable way. Health care? Not with a 700 billion dollar giveaway on Wall Street. Bipartisanship? It's a nice word, but here's a better one—filibuster. Peace in Iraq? If you want to call a pullout from that shattered land peace, then maybe some facsimile of the concept will actually fill the vacuum, but even if Obama does remove the American boot from Iraqi necks, he has said he intends to place it upon Afghani necks, and meanwhile launch strikes inside the sovereign territory of nuclear-armed Pakistan. This is truly frightening, but let's face it—a country doesn't maintain more than 700 military bases around the world because it is devoted to the cause of peace.

I assumed the Democrats would lose yesterday and even made a twenty dollar bet to that effect about a year ago. The financial meltdown changed the landscape in ways I did not foresee back then, but still I was wrong, and I agree with Obama supporters: he was a better choice than McCain. McCain tried to talk a populist game, but he was just another taxcutter and deregulator. After sufficient time for the American sheeple to settle down and start munching the grass again, McCain would have channeled his inner Reagan, declared that government is the problem not the solution, and herded us all toward the abattoir. I am always amazed that a deregulatory rubric ever came to dominate America. I mean, here is a mega-society, interconnected and interdependent, in which the actions of a powerful few have far ranging and often unpredictable consequences, and yet the prevailing economic belief is, in effect, every man for himself.

This idea is the nth degree of derangement. How it passes for economics is a mystery to me. When I think of economists, the joke about three-hundred lawyers chained together at the bottom of the ocean comes immediately to mind. Economists believe there is a direct and empirical relationship between differential calculus models and the real world. They use advanced math, but they're just soothsayers playing in chicken guts. Periodically, the coven sends out a wizened spokesman who reiterates that, left to its own devices, markets will always correct themselves. This neo-liberal pseudo-science was pushed like a drug to the elitist ignoranti who pass as leaders and, before you knew it, the entire planet was caged by an economic doctrine even a high-schooler could tell you was destined to implode. Don't get me wrong. It's possible neo-liberal theories have some merit—but only in a timeframe that is meaningless to living humans. Don't know about you, but I personally don't want to wait two-hundred years to see if unregulated employers will pay me a living wage.

Have you noticed that conservatives are constantly on the wrong side of history? Consider it. Conservatives didn't want to give up their slaves. They didn't want women to vote. They didn't want children to go to school rather than toil in deathtrap factories where they would lose their arms and eyes. They didn't believe there should be such a thing as the Fair Labor Standards Act, which brought about a minimum wage, eight hour work week, and time-and-a-half. They didn't want seat belts in cars, or insurance for workers. They didn't want limits on how much lead they could put in paint, or how much mercury they could dump in rivers, or how much CO2 they could spew into the air. They didn't want blacks to be able to vote, or go to college, or eat at the same lunch counters as whites. It goes on and on like a bad slasher flick. And this is a proud tradition?

My favorite example of ridiculous, dogmatic conservatism is this: conservatives didn't want returning WWII veterans to receive free college educations via Franklin Delano Roosevelt's G.I. Bill. This program helped create the American middle class, including a large proportion of the baby boomers who now call themselves Republicans. How's that for a slap in the face? Help some folks out and they become everything you oppose. It would be great if we could just take away rewards from people who don't deserve them, but that's core Republican thinking. Liberal programs, on the other hand, tend to spread beneficial effects to society as a whole, which is good because (see paragraph three) we are interconnected and interdependent. Health care reform—good for society, admittedly bad for a minority of insurers and physicians. Sex education—proven to keep teen pregnancy and AIDS rates down (which in turn suppresses crime rates, homelessness rates, and imprisonment rates), admittedly infuriating for a minority of religious nuts. Social security—good for seniors, bad for people who would rather see the elderly starve or freeze to death on the streets.

In the next four years, I guess we'll just have to see whether Obama is a socialist, as his enemies say, or a typical center-right Democrat, as his record seems to indicate. But I think I know the answer already. I won't give it away. I'll just say that the rightwingers screaming that Obama is a socialist are frothing proof that my dad is right—as usual. He says, "Give some people a plate of dog shit and authoritatively call it cream cheese, and they'll spread it on a bagel and eat it." The people calling Obama a socialist have brown stains on their napkins. What they're eating tastes uncannily like feces, but it must be cream cheese because John McCain't said so.

But here's a question—what if Obama were a socialist? In the Guardian UK some Ohio hayseed who had clearly never seen even .01 percent of the world was quoted as saying the U.S. was now going the way of European socialist states—down the tubes. As a person living in a European socialist state, I'll consider Joe-the-Yokel's perspective as I go out this evening and watch the waves break upon the beach, and watch grandparents, parents, children, and lovers walking the promenade together, and listen to the abundant church bells ringing, and do all this in a spectacularly beautiful city without seeing a single cop, nor worrying that in their absence I'll be drawn and quartered by ravening criminals. And while I'm doing this, I will join the rest of the world in hoping—probably against hope—that November 4th, 2008 really does make a deep impact, and heralds a new beginning for us all.

Labels: barack obama, John McCain

posted by Egan Ehlers @ 2:19 AM