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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 6/10/13

"Homeboy Security"--the Foundation of Uncle Tom's White House

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Due to NSA whistleblowers, the word is out on the street. Frequently as liberals exonerate Obama as a naà ¯ve kitty facing devouring Republican lions, it's now quite clear our presidential puss wears jackboots. "Puss in jackboots"--a phrase well worth contemplating, as I plan to do here. For I strongly suspect the Uncle-Tomming puss that Obama was historically doomed--short of a moral heroism exceeding even MLK's--to be, is psychologically compensated by a resentful gangsta homeboy greedily ready to "cap" folks. And while those folks for now must remain Muslims (about whom most Americans don't give a damn), I really suspect Obama would prefer to cap progressives. As progressives pose the gravest danger to fascist power, that impulse is one presidential bud I sincerely hope O's mounting scandals can permanently nip.

Now, it's certainly weird to think of Barack Obama as a "homeboy." I mean, the only "street creds" he can legitimately claim are with Wall Street and K Street, though here his bona fides are solid indeed. I guess much of the attraction of associating "homeboy" with Obama is the sheer satirical fun of imagining him hanging behind closed doors with a fawning posse that dubs him "Dr. Drone," perhaps with a top-flight lobbyist nicknamed "Special K," his patroness Penny Pritzker ("Sistah Soulless" or "Money T*ts"), Eric Holder ("Sin Eatah"), John Brennan ("Captain Torture"), or even his secret homies the Koch brothers ("Pet Coke" and "Dilbit"). One can imagine endless variants of the Big O. Posse.

But whatever the snicker factor in imagining Obama a homeboy, he's clearly not exempt from a certain gangsta fondness for capping people--at a safe bureaucratic distance, of course. Hence the Dr. Drone moniker. One could almost imagine him loosening his tie and tongue with his mainly white posse--aware through his Hah-vahd education that Nobel Prize founder Alfred Nobel also invented dynamite--referring to one of his preferred weapons as his "Nobel piece." Maybe, if some liquor has flowed or the gang has huffed TransCanada's pipes, even breaking into a rap on the subject. Something like "I'm gonna blast yo ass/With my Nobel piece." To which his fawning posse, not quite culturally evolved beyond the Blaxploitation flicks of the 1970s, cooingly responds "DY-NO-MITE!"

But beyond offering my sneering inner juvenile a satiric romp, I have weighty adult reasons for tying Uncle Tom Obama to the gangsta Obama who revels in "Homeboy Security." Partly, it's the sheer necessities of political power, for no one can constantly break electoral promises and endlessly thwart a democratic majority's cherished aims for the sake of a greedy, antidemocratic, planet-destroying 1% without eventually turning into an overt fascist pig. The brainy Obama plainly "groks" that, so he's logically exploited the pretext of fighting global terrorism to stealthily battle-fatten that same fascist pig. But beyond Obama's obvious need, as tool of elite White Power, to crush democracy and dissent, his probable resentful recoil from enforced Uncle Tomming supplies a potent psychological motive for "cottoning" to Homeboy Security. Though I'm clearly now playing amateur political shrink, I've never heard a more compelling account of the riddling psychological "black box" presented by our first black president.

Part of the puzzle is indeed explaining the "puss in jackboots," or how Obama can be such a "vicious wimp." In fact, I think the wimpiness is vastly overrated, for a man who was a shrinking violet would hardly offer himself for the very conspicuous (and personally dangerous) position of first black U.S. president. Granted, Obama has never shown the high courage needed to resist the entrenched white 1% at its worst--as represented by Bush and Co.--but asking that from ANYONE (and with the immense pressures of a first black presidency to boot) was an incredibly tall order. Which is why, with hindsight's wisdom, we never should have elected Obama when we did.

Now, if we accept as valid the hypothesis that the elite, largely white 1%, in severe disrepute after Bush but with its control of U.S. politics (after a long, successful one-sided class war) at a maximum, would NEVER have accepted a first black president who really cared about blacks--or reform--I think we've solved the riddle of Obama's "wussiness." It simply doesn't exist, or represents a conscious decision made much earlier. See, Obama as president was NOT a well-meaning but weak-willed progressive who caved to the immense white elite pressures and turned Uncle Tom; he came to the office pre-vetted and "pre-Tommed." What the 1% cherished about Obama was his talent for playing a progressive on TV--a priceless talent after Bush. Whatever Obama's 2008 mandate from voters, his REAL mandate came from the 1%: to repeatedly, enticingly offer the prospect of change without ever actually delivering it.

Now, to fulfill that role as brilliantly as Obama has requires a special sort of person--a really twisted piece of work. Repeatedly lying in public and then IMMEDIATELY doing the opposite of what you promised--as Obama did with promises to reform Wall Street and punish Bush's war crimes--takes a special sort of twistedness. As does promising the most transparent government ever and delivering the least. But the lack of transparency should hardly surprise us, and not simply because it's the stock in trade of every regime turning fascist. Quite simply, Obama entered the presidency--and even earlier, his candidacy--with a LOT to hide, above all, his commitment to Uncle-Tomming. Perhaps his upbringing as a mixed-race person, unable to comfortably trust either whites or blacks, helped create the needed penchant for secrecy. But the habit of secrecy--combined with having so much to hide--well explains Obama's bent so for labeling every document Top Secret, along with his unique viciousness toward whistleblowers.

But other aspects of Obama's viciousness remain unexplained, and I suspect the key lies in resentful recoil from his own Uncle Tomming. For at some level it must deeply bother Obama that, however rich the rewards he reaps, he must perpetually remain the tool of the white 1% and never his own man. No, it would simply never do--it would unravel the carefully woven skein of his whole life--to take out that resentment on the 1%. So here the well-known psychological mechanism of displacement kicks into play. But instead of having a bad day at work and kicking the dog, Obama has a good--but deeply dishonest--day at work, and wreaks his revenge for his forced dishonesty (even WHILE still at work) by kicking progressives. When long-time Democratic strategist James Carville declared that Obama likes ticking off his liberal base, I don't think he grasped the true depths of his own perception. Obama lies to and almost immediately frustrates his base with a persistence--with a relish, almost--that seems like a form of hatred. I deeply suspect his much-ballyhooed terrorism speech, which has thus far produced NO discernible attempts at reform, will prove another instance of the same.

As psychologist Jonathan Haidt points out in his brilliant book The Righteous Mind, human moral reasoning apparently evolved not as a method of finding moral truth, but as an inner "defense attorney" for justifying ourselves before society. A consequence of this is that when we've behaved unjustly toward a person or class of people, instead of acknowledging our injustice and correcting it, we frequently try to justify our injustice by seeking reasons to hate or vilify its objects. Having from political expediency embraced the war on terror and its accessory the surveillance state, Obama has already acted, through the mechanisms of "Homeboy Security," with hateful viciousness toward Middle East Muslims and U.S. government whistleblowers. Unless the growing crop of civil liberties scandals turns the tide on his Uncle-Tomming fascism, won't progressives--particularly when they resist his approved construction of the Keystone XL pipeline--be his next, hated victims?

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Patrick Walker is co-founder of Revolt Against Plutocracy (RAP) and the Bernie or Bust movement it spawned. Before that, he cut his activist teeth with the anti-fracking and Occupy Scranton PA movements. No longer with RAP, he wields his pen (more...)
 

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