davydog

Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.
- Jesus Christ, Matthew 10:16, King James Bible

The point in history at which we stand is full of promise and danger. The world will either move forward toward unity and widely shared prosperity–or it will move apart.
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt

It finally hit me Wednesday afternoon, the day after the election. Tears flowed as I listened to people all over the globe rejoice–with a mixture of awe, disbelief and enormous gratitude for a fragile faith, partially and tentatively restored–as a fervent hope they dared to nurture became real. Americans woke up, turned a corner, and elected a genuine human being to the presidency of the United States.

I couldn’t help but flash back almost sixteen years ago, to January 20, 1993 when Bill Clinton was sworn in as the nation’s 42nd president. Tears flowed then too as it finally sank in that a twelve year American right-wing nightmare seemed to come to a close. Those tears were at once more innocent and somewhat selfish. And a bit surprising too. Certainly I recognized Clinton as an establishment politician–another “lesser of two evils” in American presidential politics. But I’d become so accustomed to the never-ending presence of trigger-happy, sociopathic thugs in the Oval Office. Pornographers peddling a greed is good, trickle-down consumerist utopia where the downtrodden are punished with a ferocity eclipsed only by the slavish devotion for heaping every conceivable advantage upon the already over-privileged. The possibility of anything different hadn’t sunk in until that moment.

As the Clinton administration came to a close eight years later the temptation to shout “and good riddance to you” before slamming the door was tempered only by the reality that Americans must once again deal with another two foul-smelling presidential candidates we found shoved under our collective noses. As usual, the eternal “two evils” were handed to us with instructions that we squabble amongst ourselves to decide who is the lesser evil, then go back to our shopping, celebrity worship, or whatever it is we do out here in “you don’t matter” land. Only this time it was different. This time we’d ultimately get told that we were too incompetent to pick out the lesser evil all by our little selves. So thank goodness that we had a Supreme Court to guide us! Unfortunately the Supreme Court fucked up too. It picked the greater evil.

No Legacy (Easily Or Quickly) Left Behind

When we look back someday at the catastrophe that was the Bush administration, we will think of many things: the tragedy of the Iraq war, the shame of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, the erosion of civil liberties. [But the] damage done to the American economy…will be felt beyond the lifetime of anyone reading this page.
- Joseph E. Stiglitz, “The Economic Consequences of Mr. Bush”

I didn’t know much about George W. Bush in those days. Truth be told, I was fairly disgusted with center-right democrats who rarely missed an opportunity to eagerly lick the bloated ass of any plutocrat to come within kiss-’n’-sniff range. I reasoned that four years of purgatory with the dim-witted boy of one of our lesser presidents should sufficiently shape up the electorate. At least well enough to take greater care not to botch the next election so hideously as to provoke another Supreme Court verdict. At least that was my excuse to myself for not protesting more vigorously after the Court announced its decision.

I did, however, try and engage a handful of my friends and family members in a discussion about what had just happened, asking if they also found it troubling that the Supreme Court would pick our president for us. My half-brother, Max, along with Bill, our dad (who both voted for Bush) immediately shot down my concerns, calling me a “sore loser.” I reminded them that I was certainly no Gore enthusiast, and had only voted for him because he seemed slightly less horrible than Bush. That really didn’t impress either dad or Max, so I attempted to assure them that I would’ve had a similar reaction if a Gore presidency had been “decided” by Supreme Court edict. But they had already lost interest even before those syllables had fully left my lips.

But my ex, Deanna, was not so sanguine. I tried to assure the mother of Sofia, our daughter, that America could almost certainly muddle through the next four years despite being burdened by this down-home dullard. How? Why a quick slap to the head while blurting out a hearty, Homeresque “D’oh!” any time the Boy Blunder made an especially stupid move ought to do the trick. If not, we could always try grinding our teeth. Deanna’s downcast gaze and almost inaudible murmur of “oh, I just don’t know” was somewhat troubling, but I got no sense of the actual doom her response implied. Note to self: pay careful attention to anything a woman in your life attempts to communicate. Even if she’s already tossed you overboard.

Now, eight nightmarish years later, fully taking in the entire scope of an America–and a world–laid waste is nearly impossible. The usual commentary on this period launches itself with solemn references to September 11, 2001. On that day my sister Melody (having herself emerged from our mom’s womb on December 7th, the Pearl Harbor Day anniversary) gave birth to Martin, one of my many nephews. Exactly three years earlier Melody had also given birth to Justin, Martin’s older brother. So out of deference to “big bro,” let’s begin our accounting of recent history by going all the way back to September 11, 1998, the day Melody delivered Justin into our world.

On that Friday the tech heavy Nasdaq closed at 1641.64, up 56.31 or 3.55%. America was in the midst of a “dot com boom” and the party was just beginning to get really wild. The internet and its world wide web had become media, business and cultural sensations. Internet, web and other high tech enterprises seemed to spit out a new billionaire every three minutes. “New economists” declared the defeat of the business cycle while assuring the credulous public that we could all relax now that the “new economy” was just about to make every person on the planet filthy rich.

The biggest orgasm from the dot com orgy came on Monday, January 10, 2000 when a crappy internet service provider (America Online) announced its plans to buy the mighty Time Warner media empire for roughly $182 billion in stock and debt. By the time the deal was completed, on Thursday, January 11, 2001, the former dot com “boom” had already degraded into a bursting “dot com bubble.” There was a new president about to be sworn into office, Silicon Valley stopped handing out multi million dollar checks to goofy dot com startups brandishing worthless business plans, and any future dot com billionaires were aborted while still in utero.

The Feel Bad Years

It’s easy to think back on the mid-to-late ’90s as the “feel good” years. Bubba Bill Clinton was feelin’ good, and wanted us to feel good too. Hell, he even wanted Monica to feel good…well, sort of… But the botched presidential elections in 2000 ushered in the “feel bad” years as ominous clouds began gathering over the incoming Bush administration. Although the bursting dot com bubble and subsequent economic slowdown contributed to this feeling, little did anyone understand just how horrible the “feel bad” years would become. Or how quickly “feel bad” would degrade into “feel worse.”

Human knowledge tends to increase but humans do not become any more civilized as a result. They remain prone to every kind of barbarism, and while the growth of knowledge allows them to improve their material conditions, it also increases the savagery of their conflicts. …
The methods of torture employed in Iraq targeted the culture of their victims, who were assaulted not only as human beings but also as Arabs and Muslims. In using these techniques the US imprinted an indelible image of American depravity on the population and ensured that no American-backed regime can have legitimacy in Iraq.
- John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia

And now, eight years later, we can survey the damage done to ourselves, and to the world. Even the most basic list must include our hideous response to the September 11, 2001 attacks. Shocked people from all over the world extended their hearts out to us. We quickly repaid their display of profound empathy by stomping all over their hearts as we proceeded to destroy our own souls.

What followed became the seemingly eternal nightmare. The invasion of Afghanistan. The blitzkrieg on Baghdad. “Mission Accomplished.” The looting, chaos and slaughter in Iraq that quickly degenerated into civil war. An opium-free pre-invasion Afghanistan transformed into the post-invasion opium capital of the world. Fallujah, Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay. The Swift Boat Vigilantes for Pathological Lies. Blackwater. Hurricane Katrina and the horror of watching an American city’s most vulnerable citizens utterly, shamefully and inexcusably abandoned in their time of most dire need. Waterboarding and the Bush Administration’s horrific machinery of torture and abuse. The Patriot Act, illegal surveillance, wholesale destruction of the U.S. Constitution and assault on American civil liberties. Political and corporate hyper-corruption, croneyism, and the deadly nightmare of psychotic neoconservatism mixed with the most malign evangelical fascism. Extravagant hubris, self-dealing, theocratic piety, and robbing the poor to further enrich the already wealthy. Topping off this unrelenting horrorshow is Wall Street’s massive assault on domestic and global economies with toxic financial weapons of mass economic destruction.

In his commentary “Good riddance, Mr Bush: sadly, your legacy remains” The Herald Online’s Ian Bell sums up the aftermath of Bush’s legacy with this observation: “America has the chance, yet again, to reinvent itself. Or, rather, there is an opportunity to return to first principles. The rule of law, restraint imposed on the executive, a respect for rights and liberties, a legislature to scrutinise and counterbalance: these were never bad ideas. Mr Bush treated each of them as impediments to power. He has been a bad President, an incompetent President, a President–contrary to the apologias of Mr Blair–of persistent, surpassing stupidity. But he has also been a dangerous President.”

Time To Get Real: Organize, Empower, Mobilize

Dear Brother Obama,
You have no idea, really, of how profound this moment is for us. Us being the black people of the Southern United States. You think you know, because you are thoughtful, and you have studied our history. But seeing you deliver the torch so many others before you carried, year after year, decade after decade, century after century, only to be struck down before igniting the flame of justice and of law, is almost more than the heart can bear….
- Alice Walker, “An Open Letter to Barack Obama”

We congratulate you on this momentous occasion, and we have high hopes for your administration…. During the campaign, you said that, if elected, you would face powerful special interests trying to block change, and that you need a citizen’s movement to support and push you. Today, UNITED SIKHS pledges to be part of that movement [to] seek social change, community empowerment, and protection of rights, [and] also hold you accountable to the things you promised. We urge you to give high priority to certain key issues, and we will support you in your efforts to:
Overcome poverty among unprivileged people in the United States and around the world. Your efforts to resolve the economic crisis must include those at the bottom, the poorest among us….
- “United Sikhs Writes to (President Elect) Obama”

Gripped by Obamamania, Europe tends to see the Democratic candidate as a left-wing liberal who would reverse Bush’s foreign policy. In fact, by European standards Barack Obama would be considered centre-right and his foreign policy posture would be seen as excessively assertive.
- Marcin Zaborowski, Bush’s legacy and America’s next foreign policy. | Institute for Security Studies (European Union)

It’s a time of possibilities, and it’s a time to organize and put [on] the pressure.
- Mahmood Mamdani, Professor of Government and Anthropology at Columbia University.

The reality of a President-elect Barack Hussein Obama reveals many paradoxes. New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg points out that this “election was so extraordinary in so many ways that its meaning will take many years to play out and many more to be understood. But there is already the feel of the beginning of a new era.” It’s hard to overstate how immediately lucky we are to have pulled this off. Or how grateful we should rightly feel. Perhaps it’s only a reflection of my personal attitude, but it was my sense was that every major American city might have exploded in outraged fury if the election–clearly favoring Obama–had somehow been thrown to “elect” McCain instead.

However intense the domestic fury, it almost certainly would have been quickly eclipsed by an even more outraged world so infuriated with our inability to seize a once-in-a-forever opportunity to redeem ourselves that it’s impossible to speculate where that global rage might have gone. Mercifully we once again proved Winston Churchill’s admiring-yet-backhanded observation that “Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing…after they have exhausted all other possibilities.” Personally the last eight years have sorely tested my faith in Churchill’s assurance that Americans would eventually muddle our way out of any self-dug ditch. And we’re not out yet, not by a long shot. That the possibility even still exists, however, is miraculous in its own right.

Obama’s win is a profound and wonderful development in American politics in an almost inexhaustible number of ways. For many Americans, myself included, Obama was the first major American presidential candidate to inspire any enthusiasm whatsoever. This enthusiasm was especially pronounced among younger voters and citizens “of color.” But it’s a friend–Chihiro Wimbush, a former staffer with KBOO, Portland’s community radio broadcaster–who I must thank for urging me earlier this year to take another look at Obama. Until then I hadn’t considered the potential “transformational” quality Obama’s candidacy represented. Instead I saw him as just another mainstream, corporate-supported politician. Certainly Obama’s “transformational cred” grew mightily after “A More Perfect Union,” the soaring speech he delivered in Philadelphia last March, where he called on Americans to move beyond our “racial stalemate.”

Therefore it’s still hard to believe that the current American political system–dominated by two political parties, corporate-owned media, big business, big finance and oceans of cash–was able to deliver someone of Obama’s caliber into the nation’s highest office (assuming we make it all the way to his swearing-in on Tuesday, January 20, 2009). But it’s here we find first paradox: despite Obama’s enthusiastic support from huge cross section of Americans, he was also clearly the favorite of the saner portion of corporate, financial and other elite interests. As a political consultant writing under the pseudonym of “John Brown” warns, the “primary task of serious progressives over the next few months must be to prevent progressive votes of this Tuesday from being turned into another corporatist victory.”

The most delusional accusations from the American right-wing psychopathia sought to portray Obama as a socialist Muslim who hangs out with domestic terrorists. Back in the “reality-based” world, Obama is clearly a mainstream centrist who is rapidly putting together a pro-business, free market “transitional team” as he dresses up for his big date at January’s inaugural ball. In light of this reality, Brown worries that “as progressives spend their time fighting over tickets to the inaugural ball, the Wall Street and K Street branches of the Democratic Party will win the war of priorities and ideas of the new Obama Administration in a rout.”

A Tad More Than A Dime’s Worth Of Difference
The United States effectively has a one-party system, the business party, with two factions, Republicans and Democrats. There are differences between them. In his study Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, Larry Bartels shows that during the past six decades “real incomes of middle-class families have grown twice as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans, while the real incomes of working-poor families have grown six times as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans.”
- Noam Chomsky, “Anti-Democratic Nature of US Capitalism is Being Exposed”

So what is the response from much of America’s “progressive left” (which also includes a number of non-Americans)? The majority of so-called progressives, of course, are truly grateful (at least for now) for Obama’s victory. But the complaints, hand-wringing and self-righteous whining from a sizable portion of the left–much of which began long before Obama won the election–runs counter to the joy felt by so many Americans who are still celebrating Obama’s election. Yet it’s here where we find our next paradox: many of the “progressive left’s” criticisms are accurate. Even justified. The complaints, however, tend to overlook one essential reality: if Obama weren’t a mainstream politician, but instead the progressive’s “dream candidate,” he wouldn’t have come close to winning the Presidency. Certainly not in the context of America’s current national political system. Instead Obama would’ve remained, at most, a marginalized political figure with virtually no political support.

A bad politician can surely bring hell on Earth, but no good politician can lead us straight to heaven. What will the enthusiasts say after Obama will pragmatically make his first prosaic decision? Let us remember, politics means first of all, pragmatism.
- By Michele Brambilla, “He’s Just a President. Not the Messiah.”

Let’s Fight With What We Have

If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a small chance of survival. There may even be a worse case: you may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.
- Winston Churchill

Shortly after the election I called Gabrielle Chavez, a friend who serves as pastor of Christ the Healer, a small “peace church” out in Oregon City. CtH is a member church of the United Church of Christ, the Christian denomination that Obama’s former church, Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago’s South Side, is affiliated with. I wanted to ask for Gabrielle’s thoughts about her denominational brother made good. She was delighted, of course, but at the same time concerned about all the compromises Obama felt he was forced to make during his seemingly quixotic quest for our nation’s highest office. Naturally Gabrielle was saddened that Obama felt the need to jettison any further association with his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., after the media-generated controversy over the latter’s occasional moments of intemperate bombast from the pulpit became more of a distraction than the candidate could afford to let continue. And like many anti-war activists, Gabrielle was even more troubled by the new President Elect’s public posturing vis-à-vis Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan.

I answered Gabrielle’s valid concerns with the latest fretful gibberish to take possession of my tongue: a feverish speculation that Sarah Palin would skulk off stage right, only to reappear a few years hence clad in a flat black uniform styled to suggest a fashionable Sundayschoolmarm by day and brutal dominatrix by night. Leading the formerly disgruntled mob–now firmly whipped into storm-trooper shape–that once booed and hissed John McCain’s election night concession to Obama, Palin would goose-step right back onstage as the new leader of a revitalized American Nazi Party. In no mood for my usual “downer Dave” babblenoia, Gabrielle quickly passed the phone over to her husband, Thomas, so he could deal with my lunatic rantings. But before doing so she admonished me with one simple reminder, that we constantly strive to become as “wise as serpents” while remaining “harmless as doves.”

Working tirelessly from the “trenches” each day–week after week, month after month and year after year–Gabrielle and Thomas Chavez represent some of the finest “community-building” values that America’s “progressive left” has to offer. But the tendency of so many “progressives” to immediately point fingers and accuse, complain or blame others who don’t meet their exacting standards–while showing little willingness to engage in any real movement building–is an observation one is hard-pressed to avoid making. To the extent this observation is valid, such self-defeating whimpering from America’s “left” is worse than useless. To (slightly) paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, perhaps we should fight now with the tools we have rather than wait eternally for some collectivist fairytale to magically materialize. We might also do well to forget about self-righteously puffing up our chests to bellow out “truth to power,” at least until we’ve become more accustomed to acknowledging truth to ourselves.

America today is not the regime of democratic equality that de Tocqueville described and praised. Nor is it the society of expanding opportunities which the post-war New Deal embodied. It is a country riven by class conflicts, fundamentalist movements and low-intensity race wars. Political solutions to these ills presuppose reform of the free market. It is doubtful whether such reform is a real political possibility in America today. …
Like the Utopia envisaged by Lenin, the global free market aims to bring into being a state of affairs that has never hitherto existed in human society…. In a global free market the movements of goods, services and capital are unfettered by political controls imposed by any sovereign state, and markets have been detached from their original societies and cultures. This is a Utopia divorced from history, hostile to vital human needs, and finally as self-destroying as any that has been attempted [over the past] century. …
Like the [Soviet Union’s] Bolsheviks, the shock troops of the free market are resolutely hostile to any tradition that stands in the way of what they view as economic progress. If their goals demand the sacrifice of a few cultures on the way, it is a price which free marketeers do not shrink from paying. … The chief victims of the global free market, [as with the former] Soviet system, are peasants and–to a lesser but still notable extent–urban industrial workers and the professional middle classes.
- John Gray, False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism

Yes, I certainly do my share of complaining and strident, self-righteous bellowing. But in more thoughtful moments I also recognize that any real change comes only when a sufficient body of citizens–American and global–roll up our sleeves and build a movement strong enough to push away the militant, vacuous consumerism we’ve heaped upon our hapless communities for much too long. We do this by constructing a world worth living in, a world of life-centered communities that we nurture and maintain. We take this responsibility into our own hands and keep it; we don’t simply hand it off to some exploitive, life-sucking overclass.

Assuming my ears did not deceive me, Obama himself, while delivering his acceptance speech on election night, invited us to join him in building a better America. With the economy–both domestic and global–in a tailspin, wars raging in Iraq and Afghanistan, the world’s ecology teetering on cataclysm and an endless sea of troubles brewing everywhere, we have ample opportunity to dive in and get to work. The time to begin our work is now.