“... I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth. This was the moment — this was the time — when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves and our highest ideals.” Barack ObamaDavid Seaton's News Links
I confess I cannot understand how someone who dares to use this type of language is not greeted with a shower of tomatoes -- as any horticulturist knows, it is hard to find horse manure in sufficient quantity these days -- or at least with raucous horse laughter.
To employ this tone with a straight face, one has to be either the most cynical demagogue who has ever graced our fair Republic, or bat shit crazy... or both.
People are lining up to vote for him?
No problem, we are talking about the same folks that first chose John Kerry as electable and then reelected George W. Bush.
Your honor I rest my case.
Quite logically, several of my readers have asked me, that since I think Obama is such a sinister figure, who then do I suggest voting for. I am very flattered they ask.
Look, I am just standing around here on my street corner ranting, you're on your own, but, if you really are interested in my opinion, this is how I see it.
I am always joking about my "inner Lenin" and, like Humpty Dumpty in Through a Looking Glass, "when I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less," however, one of the meanings could be the steady, unyielding pursuit of transformation and great tactical inventiveness and flexibility in designing the route to that goal.
What is the goal?
My goal, in any other country, would be as mild as sparkling rosé, but in the United States of America it is as corrosive as white lightening. What, in any other rich and highly developed country, would be only mild and natural reform, in the USA would rival the October Revolution. I am talking about creating a welfare state on the Scandinavian model on America's fair shores: womb to tomb, from sea to shining sea.
On the rocky road to that paradise of social justice, one figure, soon to be of blessed memory, has been been a true giant of transformation: George W. Bush.
People don't give President Bush enough credit... Nobody has ever gotten more Americans of all ages reading Noam Chomsky and his ilk and asking awkward questions about what the United States really is and what it is really doing, than George W. Bush.
Ugly though he is, Bush reeks of reality.
Obviously the empty and rhythmic strokes of Barack Obama's sterile, red-herring, Lampedusan rhetoric is the system's way of draining the life out of all that Chomskian curiosity, of siphoning off all that energy and of lobotomizing all that restlessness. Marcuse's word made flesh.
"Change we can believe in" bears the same resemblance to real change as Disneyland's "Main Street USA", has to the downtown of a real, American, rust belt village: it is just another shrink-wrapped, vacuum packed, pre-digested, pre-sanitized, 'just add water and stir', American "experience".
Real change in the United States will come from within the society itself or it will never come at all. People's heads have to change and only they can change them.
The system itself will never "heal" anything.
The system is corrupt and decadent... The trained seal performance of the candidates for the world's most powerful office, as they groveled before AIPAC, should erase any doubts in that respect.
The culture must transform itself, this is the time for artists, intellectuals and philosophers to step forward, not peddlers of vacuous drivel. A truly great novel, an essay or a film or the appearance of another MLK might change America much more than a hundred president Obamas.
What to do in November?
Irreparable hardship must be avoided, especially for women: in order to keep the Republicans from appointing the Supreme Court justices that would shoot down Roe vs. Wade, I recommend voting for Democrats straight down the line for the Congress and Senate.
The Democrats should have a majority sufficient to block those Supreme Court Neanderthals and to override a presidential veto and pass a true health care package, mandates and all.
For President, McCain. If he could work with Russ Feingold and Teddy Kennedy, he should be able to survive in such an environment
Since, sadly, the old fellow seems quite a sensible chap, I don't imagine he will lead so many Americans to reading Chomsky as Dubya has, but he may come close to that "third term" we need so badly in order to bring the goal of true social change just another step closer. DS
John Kass: Obama's mettle was forged in city's dubious furnace - Chicago Tribune Abstract: International change agent Barack Obama stood in Daley Plaza on Friday and paid public fealty to the political machine boss who holds this city in a wrought iron fist. Obama waxed happily about Chicago possibly hosting the 2016 Olympics and joked about finishing his second term as U.S. president and hanging out with the boss, Mayor Richard Daley, a fellow who doesn't mind great change in Washington, as long as Chicago remains impervious to reform. "In the interest of full disclosure, I only live two blocks away from where the Olympics are going to kick off in 2016, and so I am just going to be able to walk over there. I might have to rent my house," Obama said, meaning the house he bought when he was pals with Tony Rezko, not the White House where he'll be living. "I don't know how much it's going to be worth."(...) These days, with vague Orwellian slogans like "change" and polling and a national media obviously in thrall with him, there seems to be an effort to ignore Obama's Chicago political connections, to consider him as having been hatched, perhaps immaculately from a floating soap bubble, spotless and clean to the world. But Chicago was where he was boiled down and honed, where the community organizer was rendered, where the politically independent junior senator began cozying up to the Daleys and their machine and the new presidential Barack was formed. Illinois politics are dirty and slimy and known to all, but I'm sure Arizona politics aren't all that clean either, not when it comes to federal military land swaps for developer friends and fundraisers of Republican John McCain. McCain has the war hero record, but he's also got SunCor Development Co. hanging around his neck. USA Today reported that he helped secure millions in federal funds for a land acquisition program that benefited a developer whose executives were big-time political donors. If true, it sounds like a story that could have come out of Illinois politics, right out of our own state GOP, with the boss hog Republicans cutting deals with City Hall Democrats, everybody's head in the trough except for the taxpayers who fill it. READ IT ALL
7 comments:
"Irreparable hardship must be avoided, especially for women"
There are many reasons why I find this statement ironic coming from you... You have support the one candidate for president who believes in continuing this war and is predisposed to starting others.
I might add that your concern for women comes a bit late.. I saw not one word of rebuke on this site about the hateful treatment that HRC received from the press.
I agree that HRC was treated very shabbily by the media. From a point of view of "generic" woman it was terrible. From the point of view of HRC as an individual I think that she is as tough as an old boot, like Indira Gandhi or Golda Meir and can take anything they dish out.
Ah, David!
You forgot that there hasn't been a legitimate National Election, where the people elect the president in 50 years. The people did not elect GWB. He was selected. Qui Bono?
She is tough because she and her family have had a lifetime of abuse from the press and the wrong wing of the rightwing. She would have died long ago if she had not found a way to cope.
It does not excuse their actions or your silence.
Well, six months ago I read you and you suggested McCain, and I moved on. At present I'm assessing his negatives (I like to tell Obama suporters that - it gets them going and they're fun to watch but not to read or to listen to, like Obama). I think the whole SCOTUS thing is a ploy - indeed the SCOTUS during FDR's presidency was more conservative than this one. But I think OBAMAMA is bad news, and the last politician I said was bad news cost 1.2 million Iraqis their lives, and he had more experience than OBAMAMA. It's interesting to hear his supporters argue this away using the same words Bushistas used in 2000. Some of them weren't even into adolescence in 2000!
Andre
This, David, is what you should be backing:
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/6/prweb995824.htm
regards
Richard
Also, it's interesting you mentioned Golda Mier and Indira Ghandi. I think of those two often when thinking about a Clinton presidency. They both had wars going at any particular times during their tenures. but I think Clinton is a far better politician that either of them, though Mier is close. I think you fail to see the benefits of a Clinton presidency. The tenacity is astounding, and she actually holds a few of the same views as I do. It might be worth waitng to 2012. She'll be 64 then, the same age I am now. If I were president at this age I wouldn't give a flying fuck what anybody said, I would do all things necessary to put through , first and foremost, nationalize health care, and work on other things from there. Hillary has become a better politician during this primary season, so I think she might be worth waiting to 2012 for. Several commenters have said she's in the same situation as Regan in 1976. We'll see.
Andre
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