The devices employed in US election cycles and its national politics, in general, are akin to the dramatic conventions of children’s theatre. Every two to four years, voters are instructed to clap their hands and believe in Tinker Bell ... But behind the stagecraft is oligarchy. President Obama took millions from Goldman Sachs, et al. If there is a Captain Hook in this show, it is those Wall Street pirates who threw the global economy to the crocodiles for their ill-gotten gains.And EVERYBODY in the country knows it. The decision to bail out the banksters ought to have turned even the kool-aid drinking Obama supporters into skeptics. It helped to create the impetus for the Tea Party.
How about learning one from the Gipper:
Of course, this is a tired, old show, riddled with shopworn devices, performed by a rotating cast of hacks. Ronald Reagan set the fool’s gold standard of a president playacting the role of populist, matinee hero — Clinton, Bush, and Obama all learned from him — as, all the while, he, in reality, went about the business of protecting and enhancing the holdings of the moneyed elite.
In Reagan’s case, this con game was both an act of inspired career advancement and banal casuistry. Reagan, b-grade actor that he was, was never deep enough to harbor any belief he wasn’t paid to evince. By professional necessity, he convinced himself he believed those bright and shining lies and polished platitudes he pitched to a public of credulous marks; for this is the mode of mind of effective salesmen and good showmen … having the ability to conflate shallow self interest with the good of all.
Such self-deception — played out as public legerdemain and state stagecraft — is now the modus operandi of media age presidencies. The effect of this transformation, from executive gravitas to virtual playacting, has been somewhat less than salubrious for the health of the republic...Listen my children, and you shall hear, of the truth that blinds as we get f#cked in the rear:
Thus far, Obama’s role has been to front the status quo. Whose interest do you think he had in mind when he picked Larry Summers and Tim Geithner as his top economic advisors? ...And the not-so-shocking "transformation" of Barack Obama - from the great oratorical hope to just another corporate-shilling mope - ought that to have surprised anyone with eyes to see or ears to hear?
Presidents, as is the case with all people, internalize the social and cultural architecture of their times. Reagan, the actor, had to find a way to believe what movie industry scriptwriters and film directors wanted from him insofar as the creation of character — and, during the cold war and McCarthy era witchhunts, when G.E. and other defense industry giants started writing his checks (after his movie career died a lackluster death) he performed his role as resolute cold warrior as requested. And he, as has every president since, became a shill and enabler of the national security state.
Barack Obama’s transformation from progressive hope-monger to status quo water-carrier should not come as a shock. It would be nearly impossible for the US populace, chief executives included, not to have internalized the tenets of the corporate capitalist/consumer empire. This corporate structure is as pervasive internally as it is extant. It exists as both outer architecture and inner psychological imprinting. Therefore, corporatism is as real to us as the deep forests and its woodland gods were to European pagans and The Church and its dogma was to the peasants of the Dark and Middle Ages.Is anyone else ought there feeling hopeless? Just a tad, perhaps? I'm not, although I'm also not particularly hopeful.
The circumstances of the present era, like the ancient belief in the acts of self-involved gods whose doings were heedless to the fate of mere mortals, are larger than us and will not cede to our demands to behave with compassion or even sanity. To name but one example: The earth’s oceans are suffering, many oceanographers say dying, due to the death cult calculus of runaway capitalism. In essence, we are confronted by a situation in which we experience abject powerlessness. An aura of unease and anomie prevails.The transformation of Reagan, the avuncular old guy who got shot (effectively ceding the running of the country to the disparate tripartite group of George H.W. Bush, Jim Baker, and Nancy Reagan) into saint, perhaps even god-like creature has been astounding:
This unease contributes to a desperate fantasy of the presidency as deus ex machina. The right’s deification of Reagan cast the fantasy into the realm of bughouse raving: The dead president as savor zombie. The belief that Ronald Reagan brought down the Soviet Union with 1940’s era movie jibes and bromides is such a preposterous fantasy … that it evokes one of my own: Ronald Reagan, endlessly imprisoned in a soundbite loop in Hell, throwing back his shoulders, doing that portrayal of manly resolve he wore out during his time in office … then bandying into the indifference of eternity, this variation of his patented platitude, “Mr. Devil, tear down this wall of fire.”And of course, the damnable democrats, those feckless flacks full of lick-spittle, who would not recognize a principled stand if it up and bit them on the lip, they have internalized all this, becoming bought and sold whores:
Democratic presidents, and their handlers and advisers, become possessed of this errant archetype as well. Hence, according to the fantasy, to be viable as commander-in-chief, they are driven to prove their toughness, preferably, in some he-man display of resolute stupidity. They must prove they have a pair of killer/redeemer god balls — which might be termed, Christesticles — by bombing somebody — anybody. At present, it appears this fraternity of hubris-blinded killer clowns has Iran in their cross hairs.But democratic presidents have been bombing somebody (anybody) since long before Ronald Reagan as president was a gleam in anyone's eye. Think Truman and Korea. Think JFK and Cuba; JFK and Vietnam; LBJ and Vietnam. Only Ike extracted us from a war, although Ronnie had the good sense to pick on somebody undersized; think think Grenada. A win's a win for all that. And the 'murican peoples, we likes us winning our wars.
Well, we can be fooled (or willfully led) into fighting them for a long time too - e.g., the war on drugs. Hell, just accept reality, and call it lost: The drug users WIN! (Not the drugs - they don't have an army, they don't have a navy, they don't have an air force, they don't even shoot back. Although, that is the kind of enemy the U.S. war propaganda machine really does need to fight. Hell, even Ronald Reagan when all surrender monkey on one war - the War on Poverty (WoP). "Poverty won" he proclaimed. But, what do you expect when you elect to fight a war on poverty, rather than overseeing things so that the hungry are fed?
The act of imagining enemies serves as distraction from the angst arising from the vast economic inequities of life in the contemporary US. This is the good versus evil, dramatic conventions of the children’s theatre of our politics: We boo the villains — and are instructed to clap our hands to bring about an intervention by supernatural forces … In this case, in the form of an action hero/magical being to do our killing: a deity — who is part Tinker Bell, part predator drone.And now, for the single most accurate and strongest indictment of Obama and the Dems:
Obama and the Democrats do not move. They do not act. They do not govern. They do not serve their constituents.Now, in France, for example, there are riots, there are strikes, people are ANGRY, and they ACT, they take action, which, of course, is roundly criticized in the press here stateside. Such an unsavory business. People taking to the streets, acting violently. Daring to challenge the powers that be. And we get a Tea Party movement. Two sides of the same coin.
Although, in reality, they do serve their true constituents … the corporate elite — the forces behind the rising level of authoritarian control over the lives of the people of the nation, both of ordinary citizens and the political class.
In situations of veiled coercion, where unspoken threats to one’s economic security and social standing are the primary motivating factors determining an individual’s response to an exploitive system, there is no need to threaten potential dissenters with crude, old school totalitarian methods of repression such as forced deportment to labor and reeducation camps. In the class stratified, debt shackled US work force, where the personal consequences of financial upheaval are devastating, the implicit threat of being cast into the nation’s urban gulag archipelago of homelessness coerces most into compliance with the dictates of the corporate oligarchs.
And how indeed to Obama "pass the test" to become acceptable to the ruling class?
The effects are insidious. In such an environment, there is no call for the Sturm und Drang of mass spectacle, replete with blazing torches and blown banners hoisted by serried ranks of jut jawed, jack-booted ubermensch: corporatism establishes an authoritarian order by way of a series of overt bribes and tacit threats. This social and cultural criteria causes an individual to become cautious. A Triumph of the bland reigns. Obama’s bland, non-threatening charm was cultivated in this hybrid, corporate soil.
As is the case with Obama, corporatism demands employees (and Obama is first among us underlings) render themselves fecklessly pleasant. This is the mandatory mode of being demanded of corporate hires — self-annihilation by habitual amiability. And Barack Obama has perfected the form.
In his memoir, Dreams From My Father, Obama stated that he learned early: Never scare old, white people … that is a good description of how he has dealt with BP and the banksters, and all the other old white men in their perches of privilege and power.
Just in case anyone is wondering why the democrats are facing a tsunami of rampaging, resurgent, republicans, poised to win in the November mid-term elections. It will have taken a stunning amount of complacency and non-action for the democrats to surrender the vast number of house seats they are predicted to lose. But, as so many of the most astute political commentators have said for so long, there is only one political party in the U.S: the republicrats. Although there are two factions - the feckless faction and the fulminating faction. The feckless faction maintains the status quo and coos the warm-friendly words of Mr. Rogers; they are content to continue to fight pointless wars, keep GITMO open, shower trillions unto the banksters, all the while attempting to make a big deal about raising the marginal tax rates on the most well off from 35% to 39%. Jesus weeps. The fulminating faction gets stuff done, they get taxes cut, they get deregulation, they get us into wars (which used to be the prerogative of the democrats, that that was then, and this is now).
Oh, but once upon a time there was a man, unlike any other: FDR. What made him so different? What made him a "class traitor?"
Obama, as was the case with Bill Clinton, will not challenge the corporate oligarchs. Both he and Clinton are gifted, intelligent men, but are products of their time. They are men of, what was once termed, “modest birth” who — out necessity to rise past the circumstances of their origins — studied, internalized, and made allegiance to the corporate structure. Why? Because, in the age of corporate oligarchy, they knew the only way to rise to power would be to serve its interests. In contrast, FDR came from the ruling class; he knew their ways … wasn’t tempted by the rewards and adulation that come with privilege. He was born into it, could never lose its advantages, and it held no novelty for him.
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Enter Obama when the bubble burst. The stage is set for sweeping reform. Instead, we have received faux populist bromides, as all the while, behind the scenes, he has gone about the business of accommodation, capitulation, and general lickspittle boot-buffing of the corporate class.
Does this mean Ralph Nader is right: Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us?
More likely, it means, once upon a time, a rich man came down off his throne to save his nation in so much peril. But that was a long time ago, and the likes of him, we ain't seen since, and are unlikely again to ever.
