Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2009.
I made the above photograph back in the halcyon days when “change we can believe in” was still considered a possibility rather than an especially infuriating Big Lie. I used an elderly but seemingly indestructible Pentax K1000 and an even more agedly enduring Tokina f/4 70-210mm with Kodak 800 Color Print film. The lens was at maximum extension and because it was late in the day was opened to either f/5.6 or maximum aperture. The picture was one of many I shot last August during the health care reform “town hall” assembly held by Rep. Adam Smith (D/WA).
Though the image was extremely appealing to me personally – I returned to my socialist roots some time ago -- it was not sufficiently representative of the crowd to be among my initial choices; the attendees, though mostly supportive of reform, tended toward far more moderate signs and slogans.But in light of our subsequent betrayal by Obama and the DemocRats in general, “Tax the Rich” becomes all the more compelling, and I publish it here tonight because it seems to offer an excellent counterpoint to the reactionary, capitalism-uber-alles tone of President Obama's State of the Union speech earlier tonight.
Exactly as we have come to expect from our newest presidential celebrity – the nation's top officeholder as winner of the ultimate American Idol competition – Obama's speech was indeed a masterful display of showmanship, a truly Shakespearean recital all the more notable for being performed in a political theater usually dominated by carnival burlesque and bumpkin histrionics.
But I have little doubt this speech will prove to have been no different from Obama's other performances: charged with rousing emotion fostered by eloquently stated promises that eventually dwindle to nothing.
Perhaps because I am old enough to remember not just the breathtaking achievements of Franklin Delano Roosevelt but to have shared the now-inconceivably empowering belief John Fitzgerald Kennedy would resume the long quest for humanitarian governance FDR had begun, perhaps too because after the horrors of Dallas I recognized in the person of Robert Kennedy the last remaining hero who might have saved us from ourselves -- I would so much love to be proven wrong about Obama.
Indeed were I given to prayer, I would actually pray to be proven wrong. But since I long ago recognized the god of Judaism, Christianity and Islam as nothing more than a viciously sadistic adult version of Santa Claus (his true malevolence vividly demonstrated in Haiti), my prayers would probably provoke his punishment and unquestionably his rejection -- much as, ironically, an (avowedly secular) magazine now apparently rejects all input from my e-mail address -- no doubt because I denounce the DemocRats as freely as I condemn the GOPorkers.
The publication is The Nation. One of
its reports, disseminated last Thursday via the excellent news site
Common Dreams, asked members of its
“community” to give their assessment of Obama's performance,
adding “you can share your take on Obama's highest and lowest
moments in the form provided...Here is historian Howard Zinn's
response":
“I've
been searching hard for a highlight,” wrote Zinn. “The only thing
that comes close is some of Obama's rhetoric; I don't see any kind of
a highlight in his actions and policies.”
The Zinn piece – all the more important since it was one of his last works before his death a few hours ago – is linked here: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/01/21-7
Since I have commented on enough Nation essays to consider myself part of its “community,” I wrote the following reply, which instantly bounced. (Not that I'm surprised; some DemocRats are already again citing my support of the Second Amendment as proof I'm a “Nazi,” exactly as they did when they drove me out of the party c. 1987-1989. Such is political discourse in Moron Nation, where GOPorkers and DemocRats alike invariably scream “Nazi” at anyone who rejects their factional orthodoxies.)
In any case – and now with a huge sense of loss evoked by Zinn's demise (I did not know him personally but profoundly respect him as the I.F. Stone of historians) – here is what I attempted to submit:
As to the negative elements of President Obama's first year, I am in substantial agreement with Howard Zinn, though unlike Zinn, I am now convinced "change we can believe in" was a Big Lie from the very beginning.
Of course I voted for Obama -- my only other rational choice was not to vote at all -- but I did so with the research-bolstered skepticism of a half century in journalism and thus with the profound sense my vote was nothing more than the gesture of a shipwreck victim grasping for flotsam.
And now I have discovered -- again "of course" -- that what I had hoped would be life-preserving debris was actually the dorsal-fin of a shark.
Following Obama's serial betrayals of Working Class economic resurrection, health care reform, Employee Free Choice, restoration of the Fourth Amendment, gay rights, even (by his refusal to intervene against Stupak-Pitts) women's reproductive freedom -- each betrayal proven by research to have been carefully engineered in advance -- I have begun calling him "Barack the Betrayer," this in my blog, Outside Agitators Notebook.
Nevertheless I believe history will eventually recognize that the strategy by which Obama achieved election was surely the most brilliant, most daringly Machiavellian ploy in U.S. history -- quite possibly in all of human history.
Alas it was a brilliance exclusively in service to oppression.
Playing on the white-racist belief all African Americans are somehow genetically Left-leaning, Obama gambled he could mobilize this passive bigotry -- which despite its seemingly positive content is merely the political variant of the “natural rhythm” myth -- and exploit it to leverage Main Street's economic despair into electoral victory. Hence the generally unspoken but implicitly Left-leaning promise of "change we can believe in."
Once elected -- and absolutely in keeping with the obligations he incurred as recipient of the largest bounty of Big Business funds ever recorded -- Obama has since betrayed the entire Working Class.
Thus he flings Main Street into the bottomless pit of "jobless recovery" even as he fosters Wall Street's blitzkrieg onslaught toward infinite wealth and unconstrained despotism.
Thus too like every other president since JFK, Obama has proven himself merely another another imperial figurehead, a human symbol of the singular post-JFK purpose of the United States: the expansion and protection of monopoly capitalism regardless of the human cost -- absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and bottomless poverty for the rest of us, eventual extermination by abandonment and neglect of any of us deemed no longer exploitable for profit.
So ends forever -- that is, until the human species dwindles to extinction -- the American experiment in constitutional democracy.
LB/27 January 2010
(-30-)