If Obama wins I hope to God that he will be an effective, constructive, honorable, humane president, and that he will be able to work effectively with the Congress. I can't seem to get a feel for him - that is, who he is behind his very smooth exterior. His words are fine, but there seems to be an opacity that troubles me. We know something about Hillary Clinton, but our so-called knowledge of Obama seems to me largely to be an expression of our own hopes and fears, painted by ourselves on a largely blank canvas. Like Pygmalion, we are enamored of our own creation, and are driven by our hopes and fears (read: sense of personal impotence) to seek a White (in this case black) Knight who will save us. History suggests that this is a dangerous pipe dream. But we never learn. I wonder who Obama really is.... And finding that out after he becomes president could be a terribly expensive lesson in hope and despair versus reality, as we discovered with Bush. And as so many millions have learned through the long sad chronicle of human history.
So my sense of the Obama bandwagon is that we are investing him with a largely untried, and probably entirely unrealistic, Ability to Save Us. We actually have little idea of who the man really is, because he hasn't been on this planet, and in the Congress, long enough. Hillary Clinton might not be Glinda the Good Witch of the East, but neither is she some unspeakably evil b*tch. I believe that she would do a good job in an impossible venue (the presidency) and that she understands the limits of power, and what actually can be done. She learned that the hard way, during her health-care debacle. That is, she is a realist. And we are not Munchkins looking for Dorothy's house to fall on the evil witch and save us through the caprice of fate.
The guy who really frightens me big time is McCain. He is somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan. It is extremely dangerous to give a man with a well-documented, unpredictably explosive, temper control of the nuclear weapons and military of the most powerful nation in the world, And also control of its domestic law enforcement and anti-terrorism organizations.
I think it was Nelson Rockefeller who said that all an election does is give the people a choice of who will screw them for the next four years. And Hitler observed that it was fortunate for the politicians that the people were stupid.
Many people have commented on the fact that the Holocaust profoundly affected the Jew's perception of God, and of their heretofore unquestioned conception of being a chosen people. (Chosen for what? Abuse and extinction?) George Bush and his administration, that group of amoral and unspeakable criminals, plus the corrupt and venal complicity of Congress and the horrifying rise of religious fanaticism in his country, have profoundly affected my perception of the viability of this nation as a democracy, and of what I always was taught to believe in as the "democratic process of checks and balances." Our actions since 9/11 have not shown us to be a reasonably humane and dependable force for good in the world. Surely these past eight years have been, for me and many others, a dark night of the soul.
Many people have commented on the fact that the Holocaust profoundly affected the Jew's perception of God, and of their heretofore unquestioned conception of being a chosen people. (Chosen for what? Abuse and extinction?) George Bush and his administration, that group of amoral and unspeakable criminals, plus the corrupt and venal complicity of Congress and the horrifying rise of religious fanaticism in his country, have profoundly affected my perception of the viability of this nation as a democracy, and of what I always was taught to believe in as the "democratic process of checks and balances." Our actions since 9/11 have not shown us to be a reasonably humane and dependable force for good in the world. Surely these past eight years have been, for me and many others, a dark night of the soul.
If Obama wins, then I pray that he will serve this country well. If Clinton wins, my prayer is unchanged but the details are very different. If McCain is nominated and wins the presidency then we shall have voted our fears, as we did with Bush, and we shall have four more years of this unspeakable neo-conservative political and economic philosophy. Many, many more young American men and women will die in far away places, and the United States will continue its horrific slide into the abyss of sabre-rattling economic and political impotence. We seem to have forgotten, or never learned, the Great Truth that in a prolonged war of attrition, the big guy will defeat the little guy, regardless of how technologically sophisticated the little guy might be. That is the lesson the Russians taught the Germans on the Eastern Front in WW II. That is the lesson, both economic and military, that the Asians and Chinese will teach us (except that the Chinese are, themselves, becoming quite sophisticated).
The genies of Muslim fanaticism and Asian economic preeminence probably would have emerged from the bottle sooner or later, because this planet is a dynamic, albeit it homicidally dangerous, place. But the forces of hate and destruction that this administration has unleashed throughout the world have a peculiar level of implacable rage and enmity that seem to go far beyond the ordinary expressions of economic and political pride, ambition and nationalism. Bush and the neocons have inflamed and exacerbated hatreds that have lain dormant (but not extinct) since the worst reciprocal excesses of the medieval Crusades. This is part of the international legacy of this administration.
In a 2003 New York Times op-ed piece (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F04E5DF103FF934A35750C0A9659C8B63), Paul Krugman sums it up perfectly:
"Why does our president condone the swaggering and contemptuous approach to our friends and allies this administration is fostering, including among its most senior officials? Has 'oderint dum metuant' really become our motto?'' So reads the resignation letter of John Brady Kiesling, a career diplomat who recently left the Foreign Service in protest against Bush administration policy.
''Oderint dum metuant'' translates, roughly, as ''let them hate as long as they fear.'' It was a favorite saying of the emperor Caligula, and may seem over the top as a description of current U.S. policy. But this week's crisis in U.S.-Mexican relations -- a crisis that has been almost ignored north of the border -- suggests that it is a perfect description of George Bush's attitude toward the world."
''Oderint dum metuant'' translates, roughly, as ''let them hate as long as they fear.'' It was a favorite saying of the emperor Caligula, and may seem over the top as a description of current U.S. policy. But this week's crisis in U.S.-Mexican relations -- a crisis that has been almost ignored north of the border -- suggests that it is a perfect description of George Bush's attitude toward the world."
Neither Obama, Clinton, nor McCain can reverse this with platitudes. It seems possible that the situation worldwide has gotten so far out of hand that no good offices, on anybody's part, will suffice to restore sanity to this planet. Perhaps the game, terrible as it is, must be played out because it cannot be stopped. Perhaps when the last Muslim militant detonates the last suicide bomb and destroys the last American or Israeli, and the last fundamentalist minister or mullah has preached his last sermon of hate, and a soft radioactive glow suffuses what is left of the planet, when only microorganisms unleashed by some insane militarist, and roaches, remain to inhabit the wreckage, then perhaps peace at last will come to this most bloody and terrible arena.
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