Deep thoughts on Obama

Or maybe shallow ones, I don't know.

Obama's like chicken. Or maybe tofu. He takes on whatever flavor you marinate him in, especially for progressives. Last Tuesday it was like the return of Jesus Christ here in the Big Apple - people crying, hugging each other, being nice to complete strangers. And if you know New York, you know that's just freaky and bizarre.

So what's the deal? He's not a crazy, right wing religious wingnut like Bush (who thinks that voice in his head is god), but he's been painfully clear that he believes in traditional marriage. He's morally opposed to abortion. Yes, he's talked about pulling troops out of Iraq (in the most vague way possible, which is something even Bush did)... but that's so's he could send 'em all to Afghanistan and Pakistan. And maybe toss a few over to Iran too, along with some nukes. And as far as the oppression of black people goes, his response to the cold blooded murder of an innocent man by the cops is... "Oh well. That sucks... But we have to obey the law. Yep, even the ones the ones that justify the brutalization and unprovoked murder of innocent civilians by the police."

In short, on every issue important to progressives – from women’s reproductive rights and the rights of gay people to be treated like human beings, to the oppression of black people and ending the war for empire, Obama has outright said he’s going to do the complete opposite of what they hope he’ll do. They’re like women who stay with abusive husbands – Bush and the Neo-Cons have been so horrible, and the hopes of progressived so lowered, that just having a president who isn’t a right wing fascist nut job is cause for partying like it’s 1999. Oops, sorry, I’m mixing up another mixed race black man with Obama.

Last year, gay conservative (that phrase makes me want to spew almost as much as “black conservative”) Andrew Sullivan wrote an article in The Atlantic on the conservative take on why Obama’d make a good president. Not because he’d support gay rights, or any other progressive position for that matter... but because he’d hamstring resistance, both here and abroad, to the US’s imperialist program:

"At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a momentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce...

"What does he offer? First and foremost: his face. Think of it as the most effective potential re-branding of the United States since Reagan….

"Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can."

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200712/obama

And boy, howdy, has this worked. How many times have I heard – even from black writers! – that now no black kid has an excuse for “failing.” OMGWTFBBQ??!!!! Because a black man was elected to office (fucking finally!) racism and all it’s underlying causes disappear? Or is this supposed to be a sign that they’ve disappeared? This means that black kids aren’t getting inferior educations anymore, or resumes with black sounding names suddenly won’t be rejected over those with white sounding names and records of felonies, or that overwhelmingly black and latino people aren’t being gunned down and the racist cop perpetrators getting away with it? All this has suddenly stopped?

Or maybe it’s that the powers-that-be agree with Sullivan and have realized that this is a great way to have people pointing the fingers at themselves when shit happens to black people. And progressives get to make all sorts of excuses for the man when he doesn’t do what they expect him to do but he's never said he's going to do.

There are gay republicans. Yes there are. People like Andrew Sullivan who support the fuckers who want to see them all dead! Or at the very least treated like inhuman carriers of disease. Just like the Nazi’s did with Jewish people (and gay people, let's not forget). Those who abandoned morality and justice and betrayed their own people so they could could get a little more. There are gay republicans, black republicans, female republicans. People like Sarah Palin who oppose women’s reproductive rights while they hypocritically benefit from the advances paid for by feminists of the past so they can join with those who would drive us back into the kitchens, barefoot and pregnant.

There’s also Barack Obama. Who might turn out to be the worst thing that’s happened to progressives who will feel they have to support him as he carries out Bush’s Neo-Con program, but more successfully than Bush ever could have because of his fucking face.