Blacks and Patriotism
27/06/08 09:25
The following also appears at Huffington Post.
On the topic of patriotism, Barack Obama wrote the following for Time Magazine:
“When I was a child, I lived overseas for a time with my mother. And one of my earliest memories is of her reading to me the first lines of the Declaration of Independence, explaining how its ideas applied to every American, black and white and brown alike. She taught me that those words, and the words of the United States Constitution, protected us from the brutal injustices we witnessed other people suffer during those years abroad.”
I can’t imagine what it’s like to be physically identifiable as black, and have a white parent—particularly a mother; both of mine were black. I was old enough to watch the height of the civil rights movement and my ambitious, striving parents were furious enough to ensure that the eyes through which I saw it were filled not with today’s nostalgic pride at America’s eventual move forward, but with the Movement’s rage that we had to suffer death, beatings, jets from water hoses and white men and women’s spittle to gain our rights as human beings.
Like Obama’s mother, they could have read the Declaration of Independence to me. But it would have been with a rage and sadness that the ideas, in application, did not apply equally to those like us.
Michelle Obama is attacked for saying she was proud of her country for the first time in her adult life. Some white conservatives expressed outrage that anyone could harbor such a sentiment. Some such critics are probably ignorant of history. Some desperately seek to “disinvent” a history that is counter to their preferred American narrative. All of them, in the immortal words of Jack Nicholson, “can’t handle the truth.” They can’t handle the truth of America’s past. They can’t handle the truth of that past’s continued existence in the African-American present.
My father was a career Army officer. In the fifties, black officers battled suspicions of communist sympathies. It was quite a dance: Whites treated them as second-class, and then dared them to seek an alternate path so that they could attack them for not loving the country that treated them with contempt.
There’s an updated dance for black politicians. They have to go the extra mile to prove that they “love” America. Conservative Republicanism is the surest route. If you tolerate a party that owes its modern political good fortune to racial fear and hatred, then you must love America. If you’re willing to eat that much shit, you’re one of the “safe” ones, one of the “good” ones.
Since I’m not a politician, I don’t have to pretend. I am not one of the “good” ones. I cannot say that I “love” America. I do not know what that means. Raised as I was, when I was and by the parents I inherited, America has always been an abstraction to me. It certainly was not the “land of the free.” It was not the cradle of freedom and liberty. It claimed to cherish those ideals, but it denied them to me. America has always been where I live. It is what I know. I admire a great deal about it. As my home, I would defend it.
But I don’t consider America’s grandest actions to have been taken on my behalf, in my generational stead, or in my name, and so I do not take personal pride in them. Love? I love those things that I trust well. I love those things that I know in my heart love me in return, and that I know in my heart would never knowingly harm me. I can attest to none of that about America.
As black, the bulk of America’s history is, to be blunt, a hundreds-year insult to me. While black Americans have successfully battered our way into America’s mainstream, I principally credit black Americans with that accomplishment, not “America.” If America wants thanks for “allowing” us our rights, look elsewhere. Only the personality disordered narcissist insists on congratulations for not doing evil.
Imagine you were born where you and your parents did not have the rights of most, in which you witnessed the majority laugh at coon-faced parodies of people like you, in which your young self knew that the majority of your countrymen did not consider you quite as human as they were, and felt justified in treating you accordingly. It leaves a scar. It’s a scar many Americans don’t want to see, so they attack those like Michelle Obama who draw attention to it. They call it “grievance.” In fact, it’s just history—yours and mine. There are other scars in America’s history, but few that are treated with such revulsion.
Time Magazine asked MIT neurobiology professor Matt Wilson, “Why do we remember unpleasant events better than ordinary ones?”
He replied, “We think of memory as a record of our experience. But the idea is not just to store information; it's to store relevant information. [The idea is] to use our experience to guide future behavior.”
And there’s the rub. America is asking black politicians to prove that they will not use African-America’s brutal and humiliating historical experience to guide their behavior.
I guess they just want to make sure that black politicians don’t treat America the way America treated blacks. Ironic, isn’t it? So many Americans insist that blacks forget our history in America, but it obviously remains at the top of their minds.
Obama's FISA Cave and a Reverse "Souljah" Moment
23/06/08 08:31
The following also appears at Huffington Post.
As he morphs from St. Obama of the Primaries to Village Barack of the General, Obama is quickly abandoning the liberal savior guise that got him from point A to point B. He went before AIPAC and to out Likud the Likudniks to the point where he had to backtrack from a testament that Jerusalem would be Israel’s undivided capital. Echoing his previous support for the execrable Joe Lieberman, he cut a radio ad supporting Georgia’s Bush-loving, conservative Democratic Rep. John Barrow against a progressive challenger. He remained silent for a long while, and then issued a weak tea statement on the abominable FISA legislation essentially legalizing Bush’s surveillance illegalities.
Obama’s moves are tactical and strategic shifts away from the Washington Reformer he was during the Democratic primary and toward the Washington Establishment figure he seems to believe will win him the general.
On the FISA move, blogger Digby stated, “I am tempted to say this is a Sistah Soljah [sic] moment, wherein Barack makes it clear to the Villagers that he is not one of the DFH's [Dirty Fucking Hippies], despite all their ardent support. Nothing is more associated with us than this issue. It may even make sense on some sort of abstract level. He's obviously decided that he has to run to the right pretty hard to counteract that ‘most liberal Senator’ label.”
He’s also taken some pretty hard hits on FISA from progressive blogs like Glenn Greenwald’s and Talking Points Memo, the latter headlining, “Obama Backs Surveillance Cave.” Atrios awarded Obama the coveted “Wanker of the Day” award.
Obama will obviously do what it takes to gain the Presidency, and that is fantastic. Only a hard-assed pol is going to win this thing. But seeming abandonment of progressivism puts him in a bind. He is alienating the base by flouting the principles he had convinced them he held dear—and he hasn’t the strong progressive history to winkingly signify that he’s only joking.
When Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos admiringly wrote, “Obama, by the way, repudiated [the centrist Democratic Leadership Council] three times,” was the praise only for political strategy, or did it include progressive policies as well? On the latter, Obama has traveled a long way on the good faith of one anti-war vote, placed at a time when he had much less to lose.
Since then, however, he has failed to draw a line in the sand. On what progressive issue has he taken a risk and placed his leadership and principles on the line to say, “This is what I believe in and this is what I’m willing to fight for?” Obviously, the Constitution doesn’t do it for him, nor does the idea of “more and better Democrats.”
When other candidates tack left or right between the primary and election day, it’s a form of Kabuki; we all know what they really stand for. They’ve left legislative paper trails that show us. We knew who George Bush was. No one with a brain bought that Compassionate Conservative horseshit. We know who John McCain is and have a good idea of how he will govern—and it ain’t pretty.
Obama has a short paper trail—most of it self-penned in the form of two autobiographies. He has a single anti-war vote, which, yes, took courage to cast, even for a junior senator. But is that enough to tell us that he is more than “not McCain?” Is that enough to grant him the liberty to turn his back on progressive ideas and candidates? Are we comfortable enough to know that when it comes to the big things, he will fall on our side of the fence, as he has not done on FISA, as he has not done when it comes to supporting—or at least not undermining—progressive challengers to conservative Blue Dog Democrats?
Obama’s whole strategy seemed based on generating enough progressive enthusiasm to redraw the electoral map—bringing new, young and minority voters into the booths. These groups went wild for St. Obama of the Primaries. They helped him raise unprecedented sums of money.
I wonder if these new voters will be sufficiently energized by Village Barack of the General come election day? If he’s hunting for his Sister Souljah moment, he’d better turn around and hunt for its reverse—a reintroduction to his base.
Getting Whitey: Michelle Obama's Secret Negro Agenda
10/06/08 11:12
The following also appears at Huffington Post.
There is a rumor circulating among the right wing tin hat set that a videotape exists of Michelle Obama saying derogatory things about white people. Newsflash: Train a camera on just about any black person long enough and you'll get footage of him/her saying something derogatory about white people. You are, after all, friggin' everywhere! You are frackin' inescapable. (One of you has even crept into my bed and has been there for nearly 17 goddamn years!)
Of course we say nasty things about you. But just like Christians and gays, just because we say nasty things about you doesn't mean we hate you. Good Christians hate the sin and love the sinner. We love white. We just hate whitey.
Michelle and I actually had a conversation about getting whitey at the first annual International Black Get Whitey Conference. It was a wonderful event. All the help was white and everyone treated them really, really badly. There were cupcakes with an image of Farrakhan dribbled on the icing. Delicious! There were twin crackers with mayonnaise sandwiched in-between. Get it?--"mayonnaise sandwich-eatin' crackers." And they were served by... well... right! It was catering gone downright meta. What a hoot!
After Jeremiah Wright's invocation damning white people to hell and a complimentary screening of "Sweet Sweetback's Badasssss Song," we got down to business. The first (atually, the only) item on the agenda was revenge--how to pay whitey back. Some of you have obviously been dreading this since the end of Reconstruction. Obama practically has to tattoo the flag on his ass to convince you he's not out to get you. Judging from your behavior, I suppose you've just put yourselves in our shoes and realized that if the roles were reversed, revenge is all you'd think about.
Of course, there were embarrassing choruses of "Kill Whitey" from the gallery, but in the spirit of Martin Luther King, they were quickly silenced. "After all," an afro-sporting Condoleeza Rice admonished, "we are not Republicans, for God's sake." (Oh yes; she's been pretending all along. It IS a wig.)
Of course, we considered reparations, but decided that after eight years of the Bush administration, the US treasury had neither the funds, nor the borrowing power. We considered bringing back affirmative action. White folks just haaaated that. But we didn't want to repeat ourselves. Barack is all about "change." Then Michelle herself devised a most ingenious solution.
We're moving in. In an Obama administration, any black person will have the right to walk into the home of any white person and eat, sleep, drink, and spend the household income to his or her heart's content. You'll wake up, and my tighty whitie-clad ass will be hanging out your fridge 'cause my head'll be in it. You'll shudder and tsk at the injustice, but you will not protest, for denying my right to "get whitey" will be a criminal offense, punishable by the deposition of additional black people into your home. Bitch loud and long enough, and we'll be hangin' out the windows. You won't be able to walk from the bathtub to the sink for Negroes.
That Michelle is a genius. We all celebrated by bumping our knuckles together. It's not a "terrorist fist bump" as Fox News suggested. It's the International Get Whitey Bump. Just make a fist and bump, bump, bump your knuckles against your neighbor's.
You should practice, practice, practice. There will be a test.
The Old Rules Are for White Guys; Obama Needs To Make New Ones
09/06/08 07:54
The following also appears at Huffington Post.
Barack Obama tried to pander the other day. Suffering attacks on his policies toward Israel, he went before AIPAC to reinforce his commitment to our Middle East ally. In doing so, he chose the old politics. He tried to out neo-con a neo-con and declared that Jerusalem should be the undivided capital of Israel.
Per the New York Times, that statement, "generated a storm of protest in the Middle East, with one Kuwaiti daily calling it 'a slap in the face' to Arabs." Obama's been forced to backtrack. His opponents have pounced. This standard-issue pandering only served as ammunition for those who claim he's a foreign policy/national security neophyte.
In the New York Times, Chris Suellentrop pointed to a trenchant note from National Journal's Ronald Brownstein:
"Obama almost certainly presents Democrats with a better chance to redraw the electoral map and expand their coalition if all goes well. In a year so tilted toward Democrats, Clinton might have represented a safer bet to accumulate the bare minimum of 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House. Compared with Clinton, 'Obama has a much bigger upside,' says Robert Borosage, co-director of the liberal Campaign for America's Future. 'And a much bigger risk.'
"'For Obama to win, he probably will need to blaze new paths,' Brownstein concludes. 'That doesn't mean he can't, or won't, do exactly that. It just means that in a year that Democrats might have been tempted to play it safe, they have opted for a candidate who could transform American politics -- or leave his party second-guessing itself for ages.'"
Already, the punditocracy's concern trolls demand Obama make traditional appeals to the great "center" by whipping it out and waving it around. George Will, in full spittle-spraying Clinton-hatred mode, kindly warned him that picking Hillary as a VP would make him a pussy. (He didn't specify what taking George Will's advice would make him.) The Great White Sage of Washington, David Broder, had the same message:
"Obama still has great gifts and substantial assets. So the first imperative at this point is to stop retreating and regain the initiative -- starting with a clear assertion of his absolute right to choose his own running mate and not be pressured into a decision by the Clintons or their friends.
"As it was for Ronald Reagan at the Republican National Convention in 1980, who had the wisdom to reject the plot to install Jerry Ford as his vice presidential nominee, this is the big-time decision that could define a leader and lead to a victory."
"Be a Real Man. Be a Reagan. Talk Tough..." Obama will never fit these men's idea of a "leader." A biracial man who has adopted Afro-American culture, he is something new under the political sun. In the primary, he has used the intricate convolution of his racial and cultural backgrounds to his benefit. Now he must do the same for the general.
Yes, he will don flag pins and go bowling, but the typical pandering to this constituency and then that will not fly. That's the downside of a bi-everything background. The single-issue pander becomes a minefield; he simply isn't truly "one of us," whomever "we" happen to be.
Listening to a black American man use terminology such as "preserve Israel's identity as a Jewish state" was just...well, kinda icky. He could have used the terms "Palestinian homeland" and "Jewish homeland" without the exclusionary suggestion. 20 percent of Israel's population is Arab--not Jewish--and his language implied 'no non-Jews allowed,' partly because the guy using the language was black and American and so conjured historic images of exclusion. It rendered his plea discordant and unconvincing despite its vehemence.
The presidential political rules were written for white men. He needs to change them to suit himself. He is in a position to go far beyond serial single-issue pandering to develop a coherent, unified narrative around his theme of change that includes energy, education, healthcare, and foreign policy/national security. His face and background can be part of its embodiment.
He can start by revamping the tired-ass convention format into something other than a cheap Vegas floor show cum irrelevant anachronism. Perhaps it incorporates town hall meetings on various issues, utilizing moderators like Oprah Winfrey or Phil Donahue to up the marketing ante.
Gifted speakers become hits on YouTube and sell videos by the millions. Use their model to offer expert multi-media presentations (not speeches) from telegenic, leading thinkers on education, healthcare, the nexus between healthcare and economic development, and energy policy.
Conduct an education roundtable on how the U.S. education model compares to that of other countries. Which are more successful than ours? What aspects of other systems can we profitably co-opt?
Obama can put himself at the center of many of these gatherings, presenting himself as the CEO of a brain trust of positive, 21st century change. He can take the visionary rhetoric and expand it in the popular mind to include identifiably bold and practical ideas.
The Democrats have doubled down in nominating Obama. To pay off, his candidacy will have to be equally bold. Obeying the old boys' rules just won't cut it. In case he hasn't noticed, the likes of David Broder and George Will are not on his side.
Harry Potter and the Political Class
02/06/08 10:10
The following also appears at Huffington Post.
National politics is like magic. It makes rules--and people--disappear. It can turn truth into lies and vice versa. But as any literate teen can tell us, magic has a dark side--one that turns deadly. Yet supposedly adult voters continue to venerate politicians. We anoint them Heroes or Everymen or Saviors and then project our hopes and fears upon them. Instead, they and their followers, by the very fact of seeking such enormous and potentially dangerous power, should be eyed like living wizards--as otherly and worthy of diligent suspicion.
Scott McClellan proves that yet again. As a matter of fact, he shows us--again--that individuals who seek to play in the international superpower sandbox easily become so entranced by warm thighs of power and the powerful that they justify the lying and the cheating. They justify the acts that lead to killing. To maintain the embrace of those magic thighs, to serve the Dark Lord, the screams of the dying--yours, mine, your children's, and those of brownish foreigners who don't even deserve a passing mention their lives are so worthless--the screams become no more than gnats' buzzings. Barely worth a swat.
Colin Powell walked into the United Nations after what his deputy described as diligent removal of overt lies from the information they were charged with giving the world. Powell has expressed his regret. However, several in-depth critiques of Powell's statements against the information he held suggest that he played the "good soldier" too well. It suggests that, in deference to the power he served and with which he identified, he helped lie us into a war.
Mother Jones ran it down:
"On that February 5th in front of the UN Security Council, was Colin Powell certain what he was saying was accurate? He certainly was:
POWELL: My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.
Later, regarding whether Iraq had reconstituted a nuclear weapons program, he said:
POWELL: [T]here is no doubt in my mind...
That's in public. What about in private? Larry Wilkerson, Powell's then-chief of staff, explained to CNN in 2005 what Powell had been thinking two years earlier:
WILKERSON: [Powell] had walked into my office musing and he said words to the effect of, I wonder how we'll all feel if we put half a million troops in Iraq and march from one end of the country to the other and find nothing."
Measure that against this, also from Mother Jones:
"Powell played an intercept of a conversation between Iraqi army officers about the UN inspections. However, when he translated what they were saying, he knowingly embellished it, turning it from evidence Iraq was complying with U.N. resolutions to evidence Iraq was violating them. This appears in Bob Woodward's book Plan of Attack: '[Powell] had decided to add his personal interpretation of the intercepts to the rehearsed script, taking them substantially further and casting them in the most negative light..."
One hand worries of needlessly sending men and women to their deaths, while the other dutifully embellishes the information with which to do so. He was just too weak to betray the powerful forces he served, no matter how base.
Had he been less deferent to great power he could have saved so many. No less an Insider than Maureen Dowd said, "If Colin Powell and George Tenet had walked out of the administration in February 2003 instead of working together on that tainted U.N. speech making the bogus case for war, they might have turned everything around. They might have saved the lives and limbs of all those brave U.S. kids and innocent Iraqis, not to mention our world standing and national security."
Powell's deputy, Lawrence Wilkerson, has openly broken with and attacked the Bush administration for its various sins, but according to his interview with Steven Weisman of the International Herald Tribune:
"It was in early 2004, the beginning of President George W. Bush's re-election campaign, that Lawrence Wilkerson first printed out a letter saying he wanted to quit as chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell.
"In essence it said, 'Dear Mr. President, I find myself at variance with a majority of your foreign policies and even your domestic policies and therefore I respectfully submit my resignation,"' Wilkerson recalled recently. But the letter remained in a desk drawer for the rest of Bush's first term."
He continued to luxuriate within the hallowed halls of almost limitless power. He has stated that he felt he was working for the only sane member of the administration. But that seems a reason to quit, not a justification for staying.
Now little Scottie McClellan emerges after years of telling Bush administration lies. According to press reports, his great disillusionment came after Karl Rove and Scooter Libby bitch-slapped him on the Valerie Plame affair. Had he not been so enamored of the power with which he'd managed to surround himself, he'd have known he'd been their bitch all along.
That texbook of wizardry--the Harry Potter books--warn us that power is most effective and seductive when it's wielded most ruthlessly. And Washington is all about power--getting it and keeping it. And that puts them all within kissing distance of what is fairly called evil. Any one of them could, with little effort reach out and slip the dark magic some tongue. So seductive...
McClellan reportedly paints Cheney as Voldemort, making plans, pulling strings, and leaving no fingerprints. He has his coterie of murderous Death Eaters--David Addington, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz. He even has his Bellatrix Lestrange in Mary Matalin. There are innumerable contemptuous Lucious Malfoys running around, from Charles Krauthammer and Tom Friedman to the right wing screamers. The mainstream press played the Ministry of Magic, lily-liveredly propping up, covering up, and turning a blind eye to this administrations lies and extra-constitutional activities.
Harry had no choice. He was born a wizard. But still he had the decency to acknowledge and fight the darkness within himself. But all of these men and women--they choose to be politicians, and manage to behave as if anointed by no less than God to do good. They have the delusionality or foolishness to act as if nothing else were possible. By now, it shouldn't take a Scott McClellan to teach us differently. Wizards, and the political class are dangerous things, blessed with power and cursed with the desire to wield it. We should be wary of them even in the best of times.