"If the climate was a bank the US would already have saved it." Hugo Chávez in Copenhagen
David Seaton's News Links
When it is possible for Hugo Chávez to deftly sum up the United States administration in one short and witty phrase, things are not going well.
I went to the movies last night with a European -- whose identity I shall protect -- who like most progressive Europeans has been completly besotted by Barack Obama for months and months and has given me no end of flack for my own lack of enthusiasm for "The One".
Right before the feature started they put on the trailer of Michael Moore's new film, "Capitalism - a Love Story" and in it, George W. Bush suddenly appeared, horrible smirk and all, and I was amazed to hear this person exclaim, "I miss Bush!"... There was no time then to ask why, but a couple of hours later, out in the street, I got the chance: "You miss BUSH? Why do you miss BUSH?"
"Well", this person shamefacedly said, "it's hard to explain, it came over me all of a sudden, I hadn't seen him since he left the White House, and there he was on the screen and it was just like when he was president, I knew exactly who he was and more importantly I knew exactly who I am and with Obama I don't." I thought that was as good a definition of the situation right now as any I am likely to get.
My theory is that my friend's confusion was exactly what the meteoric rise of Barack Obama was all about: a political version of the old shell game.
Bush's problem was that it was always much too clear under which shell the pea was lurking and too many people were catching on to the game. What was needed was to substitute a tied tongue for a silver one. It worked like a charm at first, but now the natives are restless.
As Bush himself said, "Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again".
Frank Rich of the New York Times doesn't cut to the bone as playfully as Hugo Chávez, but he hits pretty hard with this phrase:
I went to the movies last night with a European -- whose identity I shall protect -- who like most progressive Europeans has been completly besotted by Barack Obama for months and months and has given me no end of flack for my own lack of enthusiasm for "The One".
Right before the feature started they put on the trailer of Michael Moore's new film, "Capitalism - a Love Story" and in it, George W. Bush suddenly appeared, horrible smirk and all, and I was amazed to hear this person exclaim, "I miss Bush!"... There was no time then to ask why, but a couple of hours later, out in the street, I got the chance: "You miss BUSH? Why do you miss BUSH?"
"Well", this person shamefacedly said, "it's hard to explain, it came over me all of a sudden, I hadn't seen him since he left the White House, and there he was on the screen and it was just like when he was president, I knew exactly who he was and more importantly I knew exactly who I am and with Obama I don't." I thought that was as good a definition of the situation right now as any I am likely to get.
My theory is that my friend's confusion was exactly what the meteoric rise of Barack Obama was all about: a political version of the old shell game.
Bush's problem was that it was always much too clear under which shell the pea was lurking and too many people were catching on to the game. What was needed was to substitute a tied tongue for a silver one. It worked like a charm at first, but now the natives are restless.
As Bush himself said, "Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again".
Frank Rich of the New York Times doesn't cut to the bone as playfully as Hugo Chávez, but he hits pretty hard with this phrase:
"Though the American left and right don’t agree on much, they are both now coalescing around the suspicion that Obama’s brilliant presidential campaign was as hollow as Tiger’s public image." Frank Rich - NYT
Maybe the roughest of all is Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone:
What's taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history.
What I find amazing is the surprise.
Rolling all this around in my mind, I suddenly remembered a wonderful advertisement I saw quite a few years ago. I wish I had cut it out and saved it, but quoting from memory, it went more or less like this. The ad appeared in the soft-core porn mag, Hustler, and it was for pills, creams and lotions guaranteed to enhance sexual pleasure and performance. At the bottom of the ad in big, bold letters it said, "These products are genuine placebos".
Assessing the havoc that Bush had wreaked upon America's power and prestige and the rather awkward questions so many Americans were driven to ask by his bumbling and fumbling, it seems clear that the good and the great who decide this sort of thing realized in their wisdom that what America needed was a "genuine placebo" and that Barack Obama was just what the doctor ordered.
It is obvious to me, that when he proclaimed "a change we can believe in", either Barack Obama was trying to fool everybody or that he was fooling himself, but most probably it was a combination of both.
However, somewhere, some people, knew exactly what they were doing and what was going on. Matt Taibbi's article in Rolling Stone is probably the clearest, easiest read, road map of what it was all about and who these people are.
H.L. Mencken proclaimed that "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public" and a movie producer once said that "when the American public walks its knuckles drag on the ground." The desire to simultaneously fool and be fooled, which is universally human, is especially pronounced in Americans... Think Madoff and Madoff victims, some of them thought to be America's shrewdest people...I repeat, what surprises me is the surprise.
Maybe it's my age, the Spanish say that the devil knows more because of his age than because he is the devil, maybe it's that, but as my readers know, I never expected anything else. The United States is a "regime" if ever there was one, and thick-skinned, solid, interlocked and long lived oligarchical regimes like America's die hard.
I was a close observer of both the Portuguese "carnation" revolution and the Spanish transition from Franco to democracy and both were near run things, with a lot of unfinished business til this day and many explosive situations still hanging fire.
Anyone that believes that such an old and established, battle-hardened system of privilege as America's can be changed only by a mass of enthusiasts voting one day and then going home and waiting for it to happen by itself is just like the person who is sitting at home waiting eagerly for FEDEX to bring them their "genuine placebos".
I think my friend was groping toward an important truth, to wit: the Bush presidency was a lovely "teaching moment". There was an excitement in learning, as my friend said, "who he was and who I am".
Some of those who came out for Barack Obama will be made cynical by what is happening now, but others -- hopefully a critical mass -- will be made serious, on reflection. The first conclusion they should come to is that until the American people themselves become the biggest of all lobbies and pursue their interests with the same concentration as Wall Street, the Insurance lobby, AIPAC and the NRA do, there will never be any change that we or anybody else can believe in.
That simple, that difficult. DS
Rolling all this around in my mind, I suddenly remembered a wonderful advertisement I saw quite a few years ago. I wish I had cut it out and saved it, but quoting from memory, it went more or less like this. The ad appeared in the soft-core porn mag, Hustler, and it was for pills, creams and lotions guaranteed to enhance sexual pleasure and performance. At the bottom of the ad in big, bold letters it said, "These products are genuine placebos".
Assessing the havoc that Bush had wreaked upon America's power and prestige and the rather awkward questions so many Americans were driven to ask by his bumbling and fumbling, it seems clear that the good and the great who decide this sort of thing realized in their wisdom that what America needed was a "genuine placebo" and that Barack Obama was just what the doctor ordered.
It is obvious to me, that when he proclaimed "a change we can believe in", either Barack Obama was trying to fool everybody or that he was fooling himself, but most probably it was a combination of both.
However, somewhere, some people, knew exactly what they were doing and what was going on. Matt Taibbi's article in Rolling Stone is probably the clearest, easiest read, road map of what it was all about and who these people are.
H.L. Mencken proclaimed that "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public" and a movie producer once said that "when the American public walks its knuckles drag on the ground." The desire to simultaneously fool and be fooled, which is universally human, is especially pronounced in Americans... Think Madoff and Madoff victims, some of them thought to be America's shrewdest people...I repeat, what surprises me is the surprise.
Maybe it's my age, the Spanish say that the devil knows more because of his age than because he is the devil, maybe it's that, but as my readers know, I never expected anything else. The United States is a "regime" if ever there was one, and thick-skinned, solid, interlocked and long lived oligarchical regimes like America's die hard.
I was a close observer of both the Portuguese "carnation" revolution and the Spanish transition from Franco to democracy and both were near run things, with a lot of unfinished business til this day and many explosive situations still hanging fire.
Anyone that believes that such an old and established, battle-hardened system of privilege as America's can be changed only by a mass of enthusiasts voting one day and then going home and waiting for it to happen by itself is just like the person who is sitting at home waiting eagerly for FEDEX to bring them their "genuine placebos".
I think my friend was groping toward an important truth, to wit: the Bush presidency was a lovely "teaching moment". There was an excitement in learning, as my friend said, "who he was and who I am".
Some of those who came out for Barack Obama will be made cynical by what is happening now, but others -- hopefully a critical mass -- will be made serious, on reflection. The first conclusion they should come to is that until the American people themselves become the biggest of all lobbies and pursue their interests with the same concentration as Wall Street, the Insurance lobby, AIPAC and the NRA do, there will never be any change that we or anybody else can believe in.
That simple, that difficult. DS
