On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 9:56 AM, raghu <[email protected]> wrote:
> I just never thought he would be nearly as awful as he has turned out to be..
I have to confess to expecting slightly better but not much. It's not
about Obama, really. It's about the institutional constraints under
which an Obama is about the best you're going to get. What is "an"
Obama? An Obama is basically an articulate, conformist technocrat who
probably believes he is God's gift to the downtrodden, who knows what
side his bread is buttered on and who is quite cynical ("realistic")
about the compromises that must be made in the name of progressive
small change (and butter for his bread).
President Obama is hardly alone in his penchant for accommodation.
Labor union officials, non-profit executive directors, university
professors and all kinds of other nice folks daily walk the line
between making a living and making a scene. In most cases, the
paycheck predominates.
I would attribute the awfulness of Obama's tenure more to the void and
vacuity of fundamental resistance. Not to Obama personally, but to the
creaking, groaning, putrefying political and economic institutions of
the U.S. Most of what I hear from the left are arguments for utterly
conventional (bastard) "Keynesian" palliatives paired with disembodied
rhetoric about a hypothetical socialism (although often unnamed as
such) that really boils down to state ownership of the means of
production when stripped of its fuzzy, anti-racist, anti-sexist,
anti-imperialist, anti-dogmatist coalition-building vagueness.
One of the more childish tropes I hear from supposed progressives is
nostalgia for the New Deal. Does anyone actually believe that the
unemployed or low-paid workers in 1935 were better off, in absolute
terms, than the unemployed or marginalized workers today?
In some alternative universe, an alternative President Obama ordered
the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, proposed and
vigorously campaigned for a much larger stimulus package and a
publicly-funded health care program. He prosecuted the Wall Street
swindlers and sought to tax the rich in proportion to their undeserved
gains. In that alternative universe, is the alternative Obama still
breathing, let alone still President? If so, and if all his
initiatives have been implemented, is the alternative U.S. now a
kinder, gentler society with a thriving economy... and with liberty
and justice, mom and apple pie, for all?
Oh, and have those carbon emissions voluntarily transformed themselves
into sparkling water?
But what if somebody proposed a REAL alternative?
--
Sandwichman
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
