Sabri wrote: > What hope Obama promissed to begin with?
Frankly, this question strikes me as one of those taken from Saturnino Calleja Fernández's tales, where people challenge each other's sense of reality. Obviously, as a community, PEN-L must have its own collective sense of sanity and insanity. I'm not questioning it. If I remember well, at least five (of the twenty or less) frequent posters on PEN-L viewed the election phenomenon in terms similar to mine. But I will take Sabri's question at face value and spell out the answer, which so far I have assumed to be self evident. After 8 years of Bush, with the whole imagery of his campaign -- the slogans, the logo, the way it was conducted it, the emphasis on grass-roots involvement, etc. -- Obama offered the *Hope* of *Change*. The philological, logical, casuistic textual analysis of Obama's speeches and statements is fine and dandy, but a small thing in comparison. It is hardly an insight to say that, traditionally, politicians use vague abstractions like Hope and Change with deceitful intent, or that people in desperate straits are -- or appear to be -- gullible. The real issue to me is the collective self education of working people, how people process their experience. Because Change does happen, and it is ultimately powered from Below. Millions of people -- many of them involved in politics for the first time, many of them from the most alienated segments of the U.S. working people -- mobilized and voted for Obama in the Hope that his election would inaugurate a new era. Since early on, the bulk of organized labor provided financial and organizational support to the campaign. Many people in the left, at least among those leftist organizations and individuals who don't view their role as confined to propaganda, took part in varying degrees. I'm not making this up. These are empirically verifiable facts. From his position of power, the guy was *expected* to promote or at least enable important policy changes. The collective expectations acquired a measure of social hardness or objectivity, in the sense that they became independent from us -- and even from Obama -- as individuals. Therefore, it is significant that, this early in his administration, some of Obama's most enthusiastic original supporters have gotten frustrated, disillusioned, and angered with his actual performance in office. This says two things to me: (1) the disposition of working people to meet their needs (economic security, a sensible relation with the rest of the world, etc.) is robust; people are not giving up on them, and (2) Obama's policies are not meeting, but frustrating, these needs. If this is not something worthy of note on PEN-L, then I don't know what is. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
