This wouldn’t fit as a comment, so I posted it.
Thank you, Joe, for spreading the mental wealth with your free psychological diagnosis of my personality.
You might have found the answers to a lot of the (condescending) questions in your comments if you had bothered to read this blog before asking them. I have supplemented all of my arguments with at least a dozen articles by respected journalists and have provided countless ‘facts’ (put in quotations to prevent you from going apoplectic) about Obama’s advisers and their political pasts, his campaign contributions, his own stated political goals (from his website and his mouth), and Wall Street’s take on his candidacy. But, as is almost always the case with Obama supporters, you have responded with shrill attacks on my character and mental state rather than with counterfacts.
And so I will ask you. Did Barack Obama select Rahm Emmanuel as his chief of staff or did he not? And is it or isn’t it easy to look of Emmanuel’s positions and actions on NAFTA, welfare and war? And are those actions overhelmingly pro-NAFTA, pro-big-business, and pro-war, or are they not?
Or we could talk about Joe Biden. Has he or hasn’t he consistently legislated in favor of credit card companies? Was he or wasn’t he for the war? And on and on.
Or Barack Obama. Is he or isn’t he getting out of the war in Iraq? Has he or hasn’t he said he supported a border wall? Did he or didn’t he reject single payer healthcare?
These facts are not hard to corroborate, but you (and many others like you) utterly refuse to address them, preferring instead to deal in Freudian analyses about how my desire for people to be safe and respected is some misdirected mother complex or an English education gone horribly wrong.
If you had read my blog, you would know that I do not believe a president has much power. He is (or ought to be) a very limited political person. That is precisely why I always insist that a presidential election serves the same purpose as the medieval festivals that always cropped up whenever the poor started grumbling — festivals that allowed them to blow off steam and then return more subserviently to the same oppressive structures the next day. That is also why I did not take a break after the elections but have spent every day since drafting concrete plans for november5.org, organizing, as you suggested, thousands of artists and citizens to put pressure on Obama and Congress.
In every speech I gave on my speaking tour, I stressed that the president’s powers were limited. As such, I believe that the president’s main role is to set the rhetorical tone of the country. Before you bombard me with a thousand links to Barack Obama’s ‘inspiring’ speeches, let me interject. I am not talking about making grandiose statements on unity and hope. When I talk of setting the rhetorical tone, I mean that it is the president’s job to dispell harmful myths, take responsibility for wrongs, articulate new and just ideas, identify the roots of problems, make corresponding critiques, and — above all — to use one’s power to speak for victims who have no voice in the media, the political process, or the political philosophies that dominate the current discourse. As we are well aware, George Bush used this power of rhetoric to plunge us into a destructive fear that in turn led to actual and horrifying legislation. I believe that the reverse is also true: that the President could use words that demanded more from people – that led to a wave of peaceful legislation.
This is where you jump in and tell me how Obama has done just that: that he has inspired people to be unified and good and will usher in legislative peace. I don’t doubt that he has this effect on people, and I am glad for whatever good comes of it.
But my entire point — and my point since my first political post on my other blog months ago — is that I cannot support Obama because he does not take on the philosophies of suffering that safeguard the neoliberal kingdom. When asked about free trade, Obama does not condemn it as a system of exploitation based fundamentally on a disparty of wealth; he says he is for free trade and praises this philosophically-ensconsed greed as if it were the best we could do for the world. Nowhere is there a lament for the workers who suffer to make our clothes (cue Viper on the glories of globalization) or a MLK-esque reminder that human rights are universal, not nation-specific – indeed, that the nation-state is a myth that makes us forget this. When asked about immigration, Obama does not bother to explain that corporations have always depended on an illegal class of exploitable labor (that they then cunningly vilify to keep them illegal) to survive. Nor does he talk about the hypocrisy inherent when immigrants who stole land from rightful owners criticize new immigrants who steal nothing from them. But most importantly, Barack Obama does not use his voice to counteract the million-million epithets that these people have had to endure at the behest of our invisible hand and our smugly jingoistic sense of superiority; nowhere does he remind us of the most obvious and basic fact: that an immigrant is a father or mother who has been thrust into economic despair (most likely by us) and who come here only to lift their children out of that despair. When we talk of war, Obama does not explode the bloody notions of eye-for-eye Statism. He strategically criticizes specific wars as mistakes; he makes the distinction between “smart” and “dumb” ones, but he refuses the brave idea that we could stop going to war at all. But his beautiful “inspiring” words cajole and lull us until we forget what is at stake–until we forget that our buzzed sense of unity actually excludes millions of the voiceless, whether they are such because of the misfortune of poverty or the greater misfortune of not being an American.
Barack Obama similarly does not dispell dangerous myths. He capitalizes on them. If he stood up in a debate and questioned the American dream — if he criticized it as a hopelessly archaic and hopelessly self-centered philosophy at the heart of our environmental/economic crises and our exclusive trade philosophies –I would not only respect him, I would think he was doing his job as a presidential candidate. After all, that is exactly why I support DEMOCRATS like Kucinich and Gravel with no reservations whatsoever. But Obama does not. He says he admires Reagan’s policies. He spouts the American dream in a candied dialogue that is no less sinister for the absence of McCain’s iconic American Dreamer, Joe the Plumber.
As for the dangerous myth of realpolitik, of nation-statism and the utterly accepted violence of balancing (read: overbalancing) power, Obama is equally silent. He scales it back like we like him to, choosing George H.W. Bush as his foreign policy ideal rather than George W, but his foreign policy rhetoric is essentially the same: he bandies the word terrorism around with the same ideological caprice, supports the overall motivation for and execution of the war in Iraq, and–after a few ceremonial nods to diplomacy — leaves untouched the whole idea that we must live a Hobbesian nightmare on a national level in order to live our pastoral ideals on a personal level.
To remove any vestiges of confusion I will state my point for the hundredth time: I want a president who will speak to the suffering of the voiceless by criticizing the philosophies that allow us to legitimize our greed, superiority, and violence. Ralph Nader does that, and so I support him. Obama does not, and so I do not.
Apparently, this makes me a racist. Beyond being confusing (I will refrain from re-asking why it is racist to demand that someone fairly characterize the plight of Palestinians, Iraqis, immigrants, sweatshop workers, poor farmers, and resistance movements in South America), I will merely suggest that if I need Black intellectuals on my side to make me legitimate, I would prefer to take my cue from the reporters at the Black Agenda Report, who have tirelessly and actually advocated for Black causes and who have been intensely critical of Obama’s campaign throughout the elections. You can read their excellent and most recent take on the elections here.
Or, if it is still possible for a white person to make an acceptable critique in this ‘historical moment,’ you could read John Pilger’s recent analysis here (please do read it).
And thank you for your education suggestions, Joe, but I have already taken post-colonial literature classes. That is why I am acutely concerned with the voiceless many that have no clout or narrative at all in our political discourse — people like the immigrants who die in the desert, or the victims of CIA-backed death squads all over the globe, or the millions of other people who have been the unhappy recipients of our sugar-coated neoliberal violence. I am sorry that a few abstract phrases cannot fill that narrative void, and I am sorry if I do not believe that an amorphous and vague hope will get people to make (and then correct) the connections between our political philosohies and the real violence they sponsor. My post-colonial literature classes have also helped me to make the comments I made above: they have made me aware of the ways that the white power structure will continue to exert its power even as it turns the forms of power over to its ‘enemies’. Your criticism of me as a white person speaking for Blacks falls into the same camp as those who howl against racial epithets but not not care about structural racism. Instead of asking why I would dare to speak for Blacks, why not ask why white Wall Street magnates are speaking for Obama? That seems to be the more important criticism. And besides, I have traveled around the whole country talking to Black communities. At each stop, I told them how uncomfortable it was for me to act as a killjoy for their excitement — how uncomfortable I was about speaking to them. But I also said that my goal was to be honest about the facts as I saw them BECAUSE I respected them. We had lots of good conversations, in which most of them openly admitted that they did not feel Obama stood for them. But even if they hadn’t, why is it my job as a white person to stop making criticisms of racist systems? I never said that election night was not meaningful to Black people or that I couldn’t understand why it would be; I said that my allegiances were not to hype but to actual equality. And I would never doubt the power of a narrative. I believe that if Obama ends up becoming the president that people want him to be, it will be largely because of this powerful narrative we have told ourselves. But does that bar me from pointing out that I think the narrative is not based on fact? It shouldn’t.
None of this is fundamentalist. This is empathy for human suffering that rejects the philosophies that say I must condone it. It is not an opinion I have recently developed. It is the way I have always felt. Ever since I was very little, I remember turning on the television and wondering what all these suited people were talking about. It didn’t mean anything to me because I felt they were missing the point. I still feel that way. The only difference now is that I know that there are actually politicians who are willing to speak in a way that gets to the point, and that out of relief and respect and a real sense of hope I must vote for those people.
If you asked me, I would tell you how much I have personally agonized over the subtleties in this election. I have written at least fifty single spaced pages in my journal about it, and I have spent hours arguing with people on my own campaign about the issues. Just yesterday I had a long conversation with a co-worker about George Bush’s motivations and whether religious people have an obligation to forgive him.
It is not that I am unwilling to be subtle. It is that I am angry that I must constantly defend a minority idea against a smug, self-assured majority that tells me that my ideas do not even count, which does not do much to encourage subtle conversation. If you are so concerned about inequality and exclusion and histories of oppression, you might take some time to understand how third parties feel about elections, or how people who vote for third parties feel about a person who finally represents THEM. But third parties, apparently, are not worth our empathy and do not get their historical moments. Instead, they are asked by the very people who have slandered and dismissed them for months to buck up and act excited when the person they don’t want to win, wins.
