The Cynic and Senator Obama

[Socrtease]

http://www.esquire.com/features/barack-obama-0608

This is a pretty long article by Charles P. Pierce about Obama. On the hard copy cover of Esquire it says "What we nee now is not a leader to assure us or our greatness, but one who will challenge us to reassert it." For me it was a very eye opening article because it challenges those of us who support Obama to look at why and what it is we think he will bring to the office of President.

Some excerpts of from the article:

More than anything else, the presidential election ongoing is -- or, as a right, ought to be -- about ending an era of complicity. There is no point anymore in blaming George Bush or the men he hired or the party he represented or the conservative movement that energized that party for what has happened to this country in the past seven years. They were all merely the vehicles through whom the fear and the lassitude and the neglect and the dry rot that had been afflicting the democratic structures for decades came to a dramatic and disastrous crescendo. The Bill of Rights had been rendered a nullity by degrees long before a passel of apparatchik hired lawyers found in its text enough gray space to allow a fecklessly incompetent president to command that torture be carried out in the country’s name. The war powers of the Congress had been deeded wholesale to the executive long before Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz and a passel of think-tank cowboys found within them the right of a fecklessly incompetent president to make war unilaterally on anyone, anywhere, forever. The war in Iraq is the powerful bastard child of the Iran-Contra scandal, which went unpunished.

The ownership of the people over their politics -- and, therefore, over their government -- had been placed in quitclaim long before the towers fell, and the president told the people to be just afraid enough to let him take them to war and just afraid enough to reelect him, but not to be so afraid that they stayed out of the malls.

We have not been a great country for a very long time, the cynic believes, and it does us no good to claim otherwise. We are not an honest and decent people in our politics, in the way we deal with one another as a political commonwealth. We will trade away our most precious rights in exchange for a bag of magic charms, and even when we find out that these include the black prison, the waterboard, and the secret microphone, we’ll think we got the better of the deal. We’ll swap our obligation to intelligent self-government for any huckster’s trick that makes us laugh or keeps us entertained in our cars for the evening drive-time shift. We hold this truth to be self-evident -- that all men are out to get what’s ours.

Patriotism, the cynic read. There were “questions” about Obama’s “patriotism.” (Reading the elite political press had long ago forced the cynic to think with quotation marks.) The cynic knew where the “questions” about Obama’s “patriotism” were coming from. They were coming from the “conservative America” that Obama had told the Democratic convention four years earlier didn’t really exist, from the fat little delegates and their fat little wives who thought the Purple Heart Band-Aids were oh so very clever. They were coming from the people who did their best to disqualify black people from voting and gay people from marrying, in those red states that Barack Obama had told the Democratic convention were only an imaginary construct meant to divide us, as though the country didn’t open its eyes wide and walk into the divide, skipping and whistling like the children of Hamelin.

“Patriotism?” the cynic thought. “Patriotism” to what? To the forms of democracy and not the tattered remnants of its substance? To the words of the Constitution but not its neutered spirit? Blind, stupid, deaf, and dumb loyalty to shapes and colors and band music and bright shiny flag lapel pins, but nothing left for the bedraggled ideals dragged through the mud at Guantánamo and Bagram and a hundred other places?

I hope some of you will read it all. It is truly a cynical look at the Obama campaign, and how what he represents for a lot of people is absolution, but absolution without contrition and without confession.