ELECTION EMOTION

For me the most touching reports about Obama’s victorious campaign regard generational interactions. Who knows how true, but we heard many anecdotes of old folks voting for Obama because their kids were so adamant that they do.

As Chris Matthews said, “The parents and grandparents sacrifice to send their kids to college, so they must think a college education is important. So when their kids, who went, or are going to college, ask them to vote for Obama, the old folks listen.”

It makes sense, the kids will be paying the price for Obama’s decisions, the old folks have already enjoyed a standard of living that won’t be seen again for many generations.

In the 1960’s we heard a lot about “gaps.” Much of the 1960 presidential campaign concerned the “missile gap” between the US and USSR. Kennedy was the hawk. He contended that during the previous eight years of Eisenhower/Nixon, the Russians had deployed more ICBMs than had the US. This was total bullshit, and Nixon had the (secret) U2 photos to prove it, but Kennedy knew Nixon couldn’t reveal such.

Anyway, among the various gaps was the “generation gap,” between boomers and their parents, The parents had survived the Great Depression and World War II. The boomers were surviving, well, large class sizes.

My dad was 44 when I was born so he was 60 when I got my drivers license. My favorite toys, as a kid, were cars, I paid close attention to my dad’s driving and asked a lot of questions, so I was ready for my license years in advance. My 16th birthday fell on a Saturday, so I had to wait till Monday for my driving test, which I aced without question, having prepared my entire life for it.

[Click on image for source.]

Of course I was wild to drive, and I was surprised how much my dad let me. Things like going to the store, or church, or even longer family trips, my dad was happy to let me drive.

Having reached 60 myself, I understand why. My dad glad to have a competent kid take over a task which for him had grown less and less fun. These days I’m always happy to let someone else drive.

So when a really competent young guy says he WANTS to govern, some of us are more than happy to let him have a try.

I had predicted a McCain victory that would follow an apocalyptic trajectory, the question being “Do we pay off our foreign debt, or do we go to war with our creditors?” I thought for sure Americans would opt for survival of the fittest.

By simple calculation, our ten trillion dollar debt divided by three hundred thirty million Americans equals $30,000.00 per person, $120,000.00 for a family of four.

McCain’s ilk could argue that much of America’s national debt was incurred in furtherance of our role as protector of international order since World War II, and that the rest of the free world should indemnify us, i.e, forgive us our debt.

It wouldn’t even be a forgiveness of debt. We could prepare invoices to other countries for their previously unbilled debt to us, and enter our borrowings from them as “payments on account.” While our foreign debt is only part of the overall, we can charge other countries for the whole ten trillion, because, whatever America was spending, it was all about protecting the world.

This has a kind of Hitlerian ring to it, which will sound better and better as we slog through years of depression.

It looks like, for the short term, Obama wants to borrow more, with no repayment plan except a belief in never ending growth. If America will eventually renege on our foreign debt, then we might as well max-out all our credit cards first. The change promised by Barack wasn't regarding direction, but rather a somewhat slower rate of acceleration toward World War III.

For me, the honeymoon is already over.

Even a slave labor camp, populated by innocent political prisoners, can have better or worse management. The inmates might indeed rejoice when a new commandant is installed. The old commandant was terrible, and the incoming commandant has promised to increase daily rations from "slow-starvation" to "slightly-slower-starvation."

An improvement?

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OBAMA IRRELEVANT

Early yesterday morning I saw workers setting up temporary chain link fencing in the west end of Golden Gate Park.

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.

Fencing within Golden Gate Park is erected for events that require paid tickets. Such events, in my small mind, are antithetical to the idea of public parks, but nobody seems to care any more about that—everyone’s grabbing what’s left.

The area being fenced for a three day rock concert, which includes unprecedented nighttime performances, is a huge part of the park that includes the Polo Field.

Radiohead and Tom Petty seem to be the headliners. For such as they you pay $85.00 per day or $225.00 for all three days

I’m reminded of a previous concert at the Polo Field that included:

The Grateful Dead
Jefferson Airplane
Quicksilver Messenger Service (lead singer Janis Joplin)
Santana
Steve Miller Band

Additionally, there were appearances/speeches/readings from:

Dick Gregory
Allen Ginsberg
Timothy Leary

According to Wikipedia, Owsley made a special batch of LSD and distributed it for free at the event, which was billed as “A Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In.”

I didn’t get any of the acid which is probably a good thing. I was only three months past my eighteenth birthday facing enormous pressures regarding the draft, and just beginning to confront my gayness. My senses were already sensitive enough.

The word Be-In has entered our vocabulary without its pun value.

There were maybe twenty or thirty thousand people there, though I recollect that the venue seemed too large for the crowd. It was a brilliant winter day. There weren’t any particular problems.

It was free of charge. There was no temporary chain link fence. No tickets. This was in January 1967, five months before the “Summer of Love,” which began the conversion of hippie into a commodity.

Anyway, I got a mailer recently from Barack stating that a core Democratic value is that we want to give our children more prosperous lives than we had ourselves.

Besides the idiocy of this perpetual-motion idea, we all know that American prosperity reached its peak in the mid 1960’s, when state-college tuition was free and so were the Dead, the Airplane, and QMS (which legendary groups were billed on the above poster simply as “San Francisco Rock Bands”)

No one in this presidential race has uttered the words “human population growth.” Hell, in all the Olympic coverage we’ve heard nothing about China’s one-child policy.

The kind of prosperity experienced by regular Americans in the 1960s is largely an outcome of World War II. Unfortunately, short of the world finding a humane way to control its population, such prosperity will come again only on the other side of a major Malthusian event.

So it doesn’t matter who-the-fuck’s on the Supreme Court.

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OBAMA BOMBS

In a dichotomized system, voters get only one more

choice than they would under a totalitarian regime.

Wikipedia, "Two Party System"

In his Unity, NH, unity appearance with Hillary Clinton (who repeated her Goldwater-girl omission* yet again) Obama stated his Iraq policy as “responsible, gradual withdrawal.”

These are obvious weasel words that carry no clear promise. These words actually endorse the status quo in Iraq, since the status quo is something to be changed only “responsibly” and “gradually.”

Amazingly, this grim outlook is omitted from the list of Obama’s policy shifts to the right (NAFTA, FISA, guns, death penalty). Arianna breaks it down as well as anyone.

For instance:

In an interview with Nina Easton in Fortune Magazine, Obama was asked about having called NAFTA "a big mistake" and "devastating." Obama's reply: "Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified."

Overheated? So when he was campaigning in the Midwest, many parts of which have been, yes, devastated by economic changes since the passage of NAFTA, and he pledged to make use of a six-month opt-out clause in the trade agreement, that was "overheated?" Or was that one "amplified?"

Because if that's the case, it would be helpful going forward if Obama would let us know which of his powerful rhetoric is "overheated" and/or "amplified," so voters will know not to get their hopes too high.

Conventional wisdom is that Obama needn’t worry about his party’s left wing because those people (we) have no other choice. For us Obama’s message will be monotone: the awful consequences of a McCain presidency.

This is not unlike McCain’s main argument.

Fear itself.

So I’m voting for Nader, even though he can’t figure out Obama’s background.

Obama is not, as Nader so awkwardly stated, half African American. He’s half white-American and half black-Kenyan.

Whatever ancestral stories Barack Obama heard around the dinner table, they didn’t include American slave experiences, or Jim Crow experiences, because none of Barack’s ancestors were victims of either.

I gave up on Barack when he gave up on Reverend Wright. Barack wants us to know that he personally shares none of the Reverend’s anger and bitterness. Why should he? Obama can "turn the page" on historical wrongs much more easily than those who actually suffered them.

One of his rightward moves took place on Fathers Day when he chided black fathers for abandoning their children, as if this accounted for the disparity between US blacks and whites.

How ironic! Barack’s father cut out when Barack was only two or so. Yet Barack grew up to be a presumed Democratic nominee for president. It helps to have white grandparents who can provide entrée to white society, private schools, for example.

Anyway, I agree with 95% of everything Ralph Nader says about economic, social, and foreign policy. The difference between Obama’s policies and Nader’s are infinitely greater than the differences between those of Obama and McCain.

Neither McCain nor Obama promise any significant resistance to the corporatization of all human experience.

Two rudderless rafts are carried by powerful currents toward the edge of Niagara falls. One of the rafts is captained by Obama, the other by McCain.

* Hillary has been repeating her “four decades of political involvement” fib, so she can claim that her husband had two of the three democratic presidential elections victories in that period. Of course, Hilary’s political involvement began four years earlier with her work for Barry Goldwater’s campaign in 1964, won, incidentally, by a democrat, which she continues to omit.

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OBAMA: CONTINUE INT'L CRIME

Chris Floyd on Empire Burlesque quotes Barack Obama’s promise to continue America’s foreign policy of continued dominance. In a late March AP story, Obama says:

"The truth is that my foreign policy is actually a return to the traditional bipartisan realistic policy of George Bush's father, of John F. Kennedy, of, in some ways, Ronald Reagan...."

The rest of Floyd’s article is a bill of criminal particulars against the three presidents Obama names as models.

After making a thorough case for foreign policy despair, Floyd says this:

…an Obama presidency, like a H. Clinton presidency, will mean some measure of genuine mitigation of some of the worst depredations of the Bush Regime.

…but no one who openly embraces the foreign policy of Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush, or John F. Kennedy for that matter, is going to change in any substantial way the militarist-corporate machine that has already destroyed our democracy.

… “Should [we vote] to mitigate some small measure of the mass suffering wrought by this machine; or does that action, that participation, merely legitimize the machine, and strengthen it?”

That is the only question at issue in this election.

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ACE OF RACE

Judging from reports and soundbites it seems that Obama’s Philadelphia speech on race today could be a turning point for America’s quality of life.

There are some people who enjoy, approve, even benefit from the downtrodden status of so many African Americans. At the other end are moralists who cast shame on the US for its treatment of Black people.

For people in the middle, racial divisions are an annoying, troublesome aspect of our society that diminishes their overall quality of life. Wouldn’t it be great if our huge racial tensions could simply recede!

Barack Obama is qualified to promise the American people that no other candidate can promise—racial reconciliation. At least a process.

He’s both black and white, as he sort of said in his speech. He understands both sides, is intimately familiar with both sides. In fact, he is both sides.

Anyone can promise foreign policy stuff and economic stuff.

Only Obama can promise racial reconciliation. He has to come up with some sort of program and surrounding rhetoric, but he can own the issue.

Then, Hillary and McCain will be asked, "What is your program for racial reconciliation?"

Peace and prosperity, plus increasing racial harmony.

Dumb crackers played a race card. Obama holds the ace. I hope he plays it.

I can’t believe it… I hope!

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RECONCILIATION, NOT

One seeming miracle in my lifetime is Bishop Desmond Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which attempted to deal with the classic question of how do we end the cycle of retaliation spawned by historic wrongs.

Tutu and Mandela understood that the task of rooting out and punishing all of the wrongdoers from the apartheid era would consume the new government and drown the country in blood.

Somehow former perps and former victims have to live side by side. Whatever the success of Tutu’s commission, the mere attempt is occasion for some deep hope.

Simply ignoring historic wrongs disses the most recently oppressed, like, someone has to eat it, and that someone is you.

[Click on the picture of Tempie Cummins to read some of her testimony.]

That’s the situation we have in the United States regarding slavery and its social aftermath.

It’s awkward.

There’s been some truth, but there’s been very little reconciliation in the United States, so it’s considered rude to talk about it.

Barack’s pastor talks about it, apparently, all the time.

An early question about Obama was, “Is he black enough.” [Not my question, I’m just reporting this shit.]

Now, with the preacher video clips the insinuation is that Obama is way too black.

Which raises an interesting question: can an African American national candidate these days be both black enough and not too black?

I’m thinking that “black enough for black voters” might still be a little “too black for white voters.”

BTW: Watching the clips of Barack’s pastor, I find myself agreeing with almost everything he says. Hold the 9-11 crap. Hold the goddamn America crap.

Parts of this clip have appeared on TV, with white commentators, and some new African American commentators clucking their disapproval. In this clip, at least, I think Reverend Wright it right-on.

Reverend Wright is definitely too black for white folk.

Obama’s response so far is that of a kid who’s been caught. “Not me,” he pleads. Poor baby!

With so much time before the national election Obama seems to be in a rope-a-dope mode. Barack should remember that toward the end of each rope-a-dope round Ali threw a flurry of punches that kept the scoring close.

Or maybe he’s just on the ropes.

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THROW THE BUMS OUT

I have this vague memory of my mom explaining the meaning of the phrase, “Throw the bums out.” I was probably five years old.

She said that no matter who’s in charge, the people eventually get tired of them and want to “Throw the bums out.”

The same Sisyphean paradigm is central to Kenneth Burke’s The Philosophy of Literary Form.

It’s a cycle that repeats on it’s own.

In this context the Obama phenomenon finally makes sense to me.

When Obama promised a new kind of politics, I wanted to think he found a way to break the vicious Circle of Strife. I was of course skeptical.

Hope, I realize, is not a promise, it’s just a phase in a familiar, mostly dreary cycle.

Now I feel comfortable with what a vote for Obama means: Throw the bums out!

Bring the new bums in!

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THREE WORDS SINK OBAMA

In last Saturday’s New Hampshire Democratic Debate, there was a remarkable TV moment. Here's a one-minute clip.

The massage of TV is rhythm. Dead air, and stoppage are the mortal sins of broadcasting.

So, when local newsman Scott Spralding asked Mrs Clinton a question in which he stated that she is not likeable, the rhythm was broken. Hillary paused, and gave a human (as well as gently rebuking) reply, saying that the question had hurt her feelings.

Dumbshit Spralding apologizes.

Hillary praises Obama for being such a likeable guy, then begs for some reassurance.

We see Obama think, then speak:

You’re likeable enough, Hillary.

Talk about damning with faint praise!

Talk about ungracious!

Who the hell is Barack to pronounce on Hillary’s likeability.

When New Hampshireites saw this condescending superiority they didn’t like it. Those three words, I surmise, made up a lot of last-minute minds.

I guess nobody briefed Obama on New Hampshire’s thing about whippersnappers.

A gracious response from Barack or from Edwards would have been:

With all due respect, Mr Spalding, I think that question was rude. I like Hillary a lot.

Even stepping over and giving a hug would have been in order.

No, Obama and Edwards are at least as plastic as Hillary.

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IN HIS OWN WORDS

In this clip Obama announces his exploratory committee. Hear anything exciting?

While I don’t share the video-maker/poster’s politics, I share his conclusion.

“A new politics.

”Everything starts at the grass roots.

“We need to work together.’

While it might sound like a toss-off, the exact wording he uses to say nothing is carefully crafted to appeal to the voters who’ll make a difference in the primaries.

So it’s not just worthless crap, it’s highly expensive worthless crap.

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