Transcending the 60's

Yes, the Baby Boomer Generation is an annoying self-indulgent group and seemingly blatant hypocrites, have you seen Dennis Hopper hooking for Wall Street lately?, but one thing the Boomers did do is put on the table the hard issues of the time-poverty, identity, imperialism-even though they were maybe the most affluent generation of world history. They could have sat back and counted their change but many didn’t. So why does Barack Obama want to get beyond the debates of the Boomers and "the 60's?" Because the Right has neatly, and effectively, defined the 60's as a time of loose morals, America hating and pervasive lawlessness-read, black people in the streets rioting and committing crimes. So Barack Obama, cleverly, wants to redefine the debate so that he can benefit politically from, as the academics say, a paradigm shift.

Barack Obama wants to become a transcendent politician. He speaks about it all the time and he embodies the idea personally. It's a nice idea but what does it mean in the context of 2008? Two issues, race and empire, are at the center of why his task will be a difficult one.

The recent flare up about Barack Obama’s preacher bundled the issues neatly but earlier we have seen it on Tim Russert’s weekly chat with the powerful on NBC and his questioning of Barack Obama at the Democratic debate with Hillary Clinton a couple months ago. At the debate Russert wanted a denunciation of Louis Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright and on Meet the Press in 2006 he asked Obama:

I want to talk a little bit about the language people are using in the politics now of 2006, and I refer you to some comments that Harry Belafonte made yesterday. He said that Homeland Security had become the new Gestapo. What do you think of that?


What’s Russert up to here? He seems like a nice muckraking type who asks the hard questions? But he is actually using the terms of the debate framed by the Right over the last 30 years or so. The Right wants to paint anyone who might question US foreign policy or question the institutional responsibility for millions of black and poor in the country as an America hater. There are many examples but the strategy has been so effective that wounded in action Vietnam Veteran John Kerry was easily dismissed as Ho Chi Minh’s secret agent even though the guy ran against a draft dodger. For Russert the way that he can show that he is a fair journalist is by outflanking anyone to the left of Joe Liberman by questioning their patriotism through association. And in this case the fact that his target of attack happens to be black helps link the idea that many black people are potential fifth columnists or sleeper cell Jihadi’s, isn’t that Barack Obama a Muslim? I am not saying that Russert is an active participant of the vast Right Wing conspiracy but that he has internalized the Right’s terms of debate and this makes him seem balanced in a media world that has been labeled liberal and biased.

Transcending race and empire then will be difficult for Obama then because of the way the Right has dominated the debate. If he brings up the issues of empire and the war in Iraq then he will be painted with the soft on “national security” angle. If he brings up race then he will be accused of playing the race card and being an angry black man that is soft on crime. The flag pin, no hand over the heart, is he Muslim flaps all are ways that these issues have been exploited. Combine these examples of Rosenberg type sabotage with a preacher on YouTube ranting “god damn America” and you have a decline in the polls for the transcendent hope.

The irony of the entire debate is that Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton for that matter, are no threat to the empire or fundamentally changing the way race is mediated in United States society. Obama is not calling for closure of the hundreds of bases around the world that help maintain US power across the planet, he actually is calling for an increase in US combat troops. He is not calling for a serious change in the way the economy is organized that concentrates poverty and incarceration in the minority population. He does have a plan that concentrates “a few billion” at rural and urban areas but an increasingly globalized capitalism will not be simply tamed by a few billion dollars and a Charter School in Detroit.

Obama will have difficult time changing our interventionist policies around the world and race relations for two primary reasons 1) his liberal program does not fundamentally alter the ends of US power internationally which supports the free movement of capital and a world of inequality and 2) the Right will challenge his patriotism and loyalty because they will oppose anyone who does not embrace their program of maintenance of an international war machine to support US corporate power and a policy towards race that blame the victim.

Obama Takes the Race Bait

Barack Obama made a fine speech yesterday but to paraphrase Bill Clinton on racial matters, he made it because of a “mugging” and he shouldn’t have had to have made it. The entire incident is a text book case of how the political class operates today and how woefully unprincipled many of them are both on an institutional and individual level. The news cycle is very quick these days and which issue has legs usually depends on the lack of “real” news-a major speech by someone in power, a celebrity/political sex scandal, explosions or a fast moving automobile in traffic, you get the idea. Not to say there isn’t enough chatter about all issues, at any given moment you could probably find a discussion on Canadian tariff policy on cable, but the news cycle is swift and if you get caught up in one you can easily be Spitzed.

Barack Obama’s “problem” with his middle class place of worship, the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, began in earnest with bluster from Fox News’s Offensive Noseguard Sean Hannity. Hannity’s researchers found some inflammatory rhetoric from a few years ago and off went running the usual suspects, including moral watchdog Bill Kristol who played it cool by saying Barack’s problem was not that he hangs out with radical Black Nationalist’s, which was Hannity and Tucker Carlson’s line, but that Obama is too much of a politician and Americans want more than that, this from the guy who supported George Bush. After the media storm front crashed down upon us the liberal types started the hand wringing at the New York Times, National Public Radio, and other sober bastions of normalcy. There line in general was that there is no place for such rhetoric in the United States where calm and balanced debate is the norm. Bull.

Contrary to what the political class is saying discussion of race in the United States is a raucous affair. At the workplace, at the bar, on call in radio, at school, at Thanksgiving dinner all types of people are having wide open, vulgar, racially insensitive, amusing, ignorant and insightful conversations about how the “other” lives. Debate out here with the hoople is honest, often ill informed and visceral. In everyday discussion people get annoyed, irritated and angry. Debate for the most part is a contact sport where bruises and scratches occur and most people have fairly stable positions that have been hardened over the years of investment. This is not to say that minds are not changed in this dialectic but rough point counterpoint is more the norm than a meeting of the minds.

That’s why the brouhaha over Obama’s former preacher is a red herring. Unless a complete tara-ra-goon-de-ay most people know that Black Nationalism is a major theme in discussion of race today. It’s a major theme in Hip Hop, in the academe, in literature and in the Black Church. It’s usually combined with a bit of self help; pick yourself up by your bootstraps rhetoric, a historical analysis of racial injustice and an appeal for social justice. It also has a little whitey bashing. Big deal. We all know this and to act as if it doesn’t happen, and worse needs to be denounced, is dangerous. It is actually a call for censorship. We all do not aspire to speak with the $8 words of William F. Buckley or speak in the mild tones of Tom Brokaw. Real debate makes people uncomfortable; it challenges the premise of your argument and hopefully in the long hall alters our views. In the 1960’s Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael demanded Black Power and made Martin Luther King look the moderate even though for the most part he was regarded as a trouble maker by the establishment. Without the pressure of social movements, both Right and Left, the center holds and nothing changes. Social movements are not led by the NPR types in the world.

Barack Obama is no radical and we all know it. He chose a moderate Black Church because he wanted some connection with his history. He is of both the white and black world and he has heard the honest discussion on both sides. Depending on where you work and live most of us have actually heard the honest debate. That’s actually a good thing. Let’s keep up that debate not try to be contained to the hushed tones of NPR. Otherwise nothing will change.

Gridlock!

Capital likes to talk about about how they can solve problems but we know what they mean is that they can take advantage of a situation and make money. A case in point, the absolute disaster that is transportation in the United States. We certainly can get around fairly quickly except at rush hour when we actually need to get places quickly, except at Christmas time when time is most important. The cost of this system is mind boggling. Even capitalists know that it is slowing the accumulation of capital. But like our health care "system" certain interests that make huge profits can block the greater good.

Here's a decent article on the crisis in transport in the US.

We know how to change it but our political system makes it almost impossible.

The Presidential Election and the "Left"

"Today, we can be sure that the Democratic Party, unless it faces a popular upsurge, will not move off center. The two leading Presidential candidates have made it clear that if elected, they will not bring an immediate end to the Iraq War, or institute a system of free health care for all.

They offer no radical change from the status quo.

They do not propose what the present desperation of people cries out for: a government guarantee of jobs to everyone who needs one, a minimum income for every household, housing relief to everyone who faces eviction or foreclosure."


Howard Zinn's take.

The Red Phone by Larry David

Here's an idea for an Obama ad: a montage of Clinton's Sybillish personalities that have surfaced during the campaign with a solemn voiceover at the end saying, "Does anyone want this nut answering the phone?"

How is it that she became the one who's perceived as more equipped to answer that 3 a.m. call than the unflappable Obama? He, with the ice in his veins, who doesn't panic when he's losing or get too giddy when he's winning, who's as comfortable in his own skin as she's uncomfortable in hers. There have been times in this campaign when she seemed so unhinged that I worried she'd actually kill herself if she lost. Every day, she reminds me more and more of Adele H., who also had an obsession that drove her insane.

A few weeks ago, I started to feel sorry for her. Oh Christ, let her win already...Who cares...It's not worth it. There's not that much difference between them. She can have it. Anything to avoid watching her descend into madness. So I switched. I started rooting for her. It wasn't that hard. Compromise comes easy to me. I was on board.

And then I saw the ad.

I watched, transfixed, as she took the 3 a.m. call...and I was afraid...very afraid. Suddenly, I realized the last thing this country needs is that woman anywhere near a phone. I don't care if it's 3 a.m. or 10 p.m. or any other time. I don't want her talking to Putin, I don't want her talking to Kim Jong Il, I don't want her talking to my nephew. She needs a long rest. She needs to put on a sarong and some sun block and get away from things for a while, a nice beach somewhere -- somewhere far away, where there are...no phones.

The Democrats and the War

By Norman Solomon

Maybe it sounded good when politicians, pundits and online fund-raisers talked about American deaths as though they were the deaths that mattered most.

Maybe it sounded good to taunt the Bush administration as a bunch of screw-ups who didn't know how to run a proper occupation.

And maybe it sounded good to condemn Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush for ignoring predictions that several hundred thousand troops would be needed to effectively occupy Iraq after an invasion.

But when a war based on lies is opposed because too many Americans are dying, the implication is that it can be made right by reducing the American death toll.

When a war that flagrantly violated international law is opposed because it was badly managed, the implication is that better management could make for an acceptable war.

When the number of occupying troops is condemned as insufficient for the occupying task at hand, the White House and Pentagon may figure out how to make shrewder use of US air power - in combination with private mercenaries and Iraqis who are desperate enough for jobs that they're willing to point guns at the occupiers' enemies.

And there's also the grisly and unanswerable reality that Iraqis who've been inclined to violently resist the occupation can no longer resist it after the US military has killed them.

If the ultimate argument against the war is that it isn't being won, the advocates for more war will have extra incentive to show that it can be won after all.

If a steady argument against the war maintains that it was and is wrong - that it is fundamentally immoral - that's a tougher sell to the savants of Capitol Hill and an array of corporate-paid journalists.

But by taking the political path of least resistance - by condemning the Iraq war as unwinnable instead of inherently wrong - more restrained foes of the war helped to prolong the occupation that has inflicted and catalyzed so much carnage. The antiwar movement is now paying a price for political shortcuts often taken in the past several years.

During a long war, condemned by some as a quagmire, that kind of dynamic has played out before. "It is time to stand back and look at where we are going," independent journalist I. F. Stone wrote in mid-February 1968, after several years of the full-throttle war on Vietnam. "And to take a good look at ourselves. A first observation is that we can easily overestimate our national conscience. A major part of the protest against the war springs simply from the fact that we are losing it. If it were not for the heavy cost, politicians like the Kennedys [Robert and Edward] and organizations like the ADA [the liberal Americans for Democratic Action] would still be as complacent about the war as they were a few years ago."

With all the recent media spin about progress in Iraq, many commentators say that the war has faded as a top-level "issue" in the presidential race. Claims of success by the US military have undercut precisely the antiwar arguments that were supposed to be the most effective in political terms - harping on the American death toll and the inability of the occupying troops to make demonstrable progress at subduing Iraqi resistance and bending the country's parliament to Washington's will.

These days, Hillary Clinton speaks of withdrawing US troops, but she's in no position to challenge basic rationales for war that have been in place for more than five years. At least Barack Obama can cite his opposition to the war since before it began. He talks about changing the mentality that led to the invasion in the first place. And he insists that the president should hold direct talks with foreign adversaries.

The best way to avoid becoming disillusioned is to not have illusions in the first place. There's little reason to believe that Obama is inclined to break away from the routine militarism of US foreign policy. But it's plausible that grassroots pressure could pull him in a better direction on a range of issues. He seems to be appreciably less stuck in concrete than the other candidates who still have a chance to become president on January 20, 2009.

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The documentary film "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death," based on Norman Solomon's book of the same name, launches its New York City theatrical premiere with an engagement at the Quad Cinema starting March 14.