Enjoy it Obama, but you’ll soon wave goodbye to the adulation
Thursday, 13 November 2008
"The shiny-eyed multitudes gazing upon you are in for a gunk.
The sense of betrayal will be steep and spectacular."
belfasttelegraph.co.uk
From The Belfast Telegragh
Obama’s supporters may be in for a huge disappointment. Below, with wife Michelle on election nightMy advice to fans of Obama remains: start murmuring, What a let-down! Get your disappointment in early, so as to ease the pain of later disillusion.
True, it was difficult even for a seasoned sourpuss to suppress the swelling emotion or staunch the blissful brimming tears as the certainty of victory came inexorably into focus and, on-screen, a middle-aged white man jitterbugged in streets awash with joy in the arms of a big black mama, and hordes of teenagers of every hue splashed across a Chicago park clasped their hands upon their heads and swooned in giddy wide-eyed wonderment, as if knowing but still not daring to believe they’d actually just done it, elected Barack Hussein Obama as President of the United States.
What a liberating moment for white Americans especially. And for us, too — liberating to be able to love Americans.
Obama’s coronation was a Princess Di moment for the world. Soon, there wasn’t a voter to be found who’d admit having plumped for McCain or anyone at all with a bad word about the black guy with the keys to the White House.
But that was then. This is now. Nine days into the Obamage. Time to cast a colder eye.
Billy X Jennings, historian and archivist of the Black Panther Party, observed as we shared a smoke outside Sandino’s on the night of the poll: “If they thought he represented real change, they’d have killed him by now. Maybe they’ll kill him anyway.”
So, Barack Obama, Prince of the World, enjoy your moment while you may.
The shiny-eyed multitudes gazing upon you are in for a gunk.
The sense of betrayal will be steep and spectacular. The dizzier the hopes generated, the more dismaying the subsequent plunge into gloom.
Obama will deliver on changes compatible with economic and political stability and which present no danger to the core interests of the elite. We can anticipate the closure of Guantanamo. He’ll keep the Supreme Court onside with Roe v Wade — the 1973 ruling which authorised federal funding of abortion. He will possibly pull troops out of Iraq more speedily than had been intended,(Edit: If he pulls any troops from Iraq he will simply move them into Afghanistan for operations against Pakistan and Iran. O, do i hear someone say 'But Osama is his target, that's O.K.' but i asked on how many many many many thousands of INNOCENTS have been killid by us in the name of getting Osama??? The U.S. military HAD Osama dead to rights, TRAPPED in Tora Bora, and , gees he got away. The explanation from the government are rubbish, saying they were given misinformation yada yada. How curious the 2,000 heart and core of Al Queda ESCAPED Tora Bora. Could it be the Neo-Cons HAD to do so they could SELL the invasion of Iraq. O would our good and righteous leaders EVER SINK that low????????? Answer: Damn right they would, and have done before. Studying up on what really happened at Tora Bora is a MUST,period--max) order an end to torture, take measures to discourage the export of jobs, and so on.
But he has moved already to dim expectations on more fundamental matters. The number of US homes in foreclosure is just over a million and rising. Bureau of Labour statistics show 9.5 million unemployed: white males 5.4%, Hispanic males 7.8%, black males 11.4%, women 5.4%, teenagers 19.1%.
A record 28 million Americans rely on food stamps to survive. The Department of Agriculture reckons the cost of feeding a family of four has risen 6% in the past year; the value of food stamps has remained static. But far from presenting a plan to bail out the people at the bottom, Obama has backed Bush’s $700bn bail-out of the banksters.
AND THEN THERE IS PALESTINE
And then there’s Palestine, the key to peace in the Middle East and relations with the Muslim world, the test of all protestations of benign belief in justice.
Former UN Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson told the BBC after recently visiting Gaza: “I was taken aback with the terrible, trapped situation of the families”; it was “almost unbelievable” that “the world didn’t seem to care about the shocking violation of so many human rights”. Well, maybe not the world, but Obama and his media cheerleaders certainly.
McCain was lacerated for allowing Bush to appear at Minneapolis only via satellite link; but Obama was given no grief for banning Jimmy Carter outright from addressing delegates at Denver — because he’d accurately characterised Israeli treatment of the Palestinians as “apartheid”.
Ralph Nader damned Obama for an “utter lack of political courage” when it came to the Palestine question. But hardly anybody reported that either.
The veteran Israeli writer Uri Avnery, who had entertained hopes of even-handedness, lamented Obama’s speech to Israeli lobbyists in Washington as having “broke(n) all records for obsequiousness and fawning”.
Of course, there has been change. The sly attempts of Republicans, following on from the Clintons, to appeal to white voters along racial lines failed utterly. If racism consisted only in personal attitudes, we could truly see Obama as substance as well as symptom of change. But racism is structural, too. Would Obama have had such a smooth ride to Washington if he’d pledged seriously to tackle racial inequality head-on: the disparity in unemployment rates, the fact that young black men are seven times more likely than whites to be in prison, that three times more black and Latino children than white children live in poverty?
The election of Obama reflected the fact that personal racism is fading fast in the US.
But the structural inequalities persist. Obama was elected because Americans are far nicer than America. |
