Is a socially just civilization possible?

Despite the real elation behind the Barack Obama presidential victory, the US has installed the Goldman-Sachs candidate to run the country: old wine in new bottles. Progressive historians will look back at this and hopefully note the real elation should be placed at the huge, diverse coalition that worked to elect this man, and not the man himself, who presently ponders how to follow the errors of the British and Russians by digging deeper in the Afghan desert. Or, the US's own error in Southeast Asia.


OK, I'm feeling pessimistic. So I've been submerging myself in my bottle-of-choice: the Pacific Ocean and my penchant for rough-water swimming. It's during these swims I can exercise my body and exorcise a few demons. Obama is not a demon. He first deeply impressed me in the LOGO channel debates in 2008, where he alone struck me as someone who spoke the LGBT language, even more than my personal favorite, Rep. Dennis Kucinich. I thought someone so versed, so exposed to the complexities of the US community was better than the parochial men of our past.


But in the several months of the Obama Administration, fair and balanced is grossly skewed to the ruling, corporate elite and not the workers, the poor, the disabled, LGBTQ community, and what Prof. Ogbe called "involuntary immigrants" - Black and Brown communities. Commentators enchant about a second Camelot, straining comparisons with John Kennedy, but this man is more comparable to Lyndon B Johnson, whose Great Society architecture was seriously undermined by our evil war against Vietnam and a federal police run by J. Edgar Hoover.


I am not a Christian but the cards dealt me were that I was born in a Christian country, and it behooves anyone so unfortunate to know the lingua franca of its master class. Yes, Christianity is essentially a rationale, a poor excuse for the Dark Age, the Inquisition, and massive ethnic cleansings. Still, it's better to know your enemy and his "good news." So on a recent swim some words from the Old Testament came to mind, from Ecclesiastes: "Vanity of vanities."


It would be the height of arrogance to think I am the first to present a certain angle on, say, capitalism or the public option or the insidious ruling class. Like flesh, all is recycled. Marx inspired Henry George, and it was this American author of POVERTY & PROGRESS who convinced a young George Bernard Shaw to become a socialist.


At my current job, I have gotten my fill at seeing coworkers sitting on the morning shuttle deep in the pages of their Holy Bible. In private conversations, I hear them quoting passages to one another. I hear them citing with academic precision those men supposed to be the followers of the Jewish teacher who has been appropriated as a Christian prophet.


No one quotes Karl Marx. Marx being either a Hollywood comedian or an Unknown, I may see him cited only in my online life, in discussion groups of the left, progressive, and socialist/communist persuasion. Our prophets: Lenin, Stalin, the Fabian Society, CLR James, or Walter Rodney, George Bernard Shaw or Annie Besant, Emma Goldman or Rosa Luxemburg. Fidel and Che. Poor Angela Davis is not even reduced to being an iconic Afro; just another unknown.


Nearly 2,000 years of Christian doctrine and maybe 200 of communism, and where has it got us except feeling a deep, false sense of satisfaction? Where's the progress?


Is knowledge really power? History proves that in brittle minds knowledge is equal to the ashes of the burned libraries of the Dark Ages, blowin' in the wind.


What have these opposing doctrines, thoroughly studied, committed to memory, inspiring murder and revolution, brought to the final analysis of human psychology? Yes, the Christian doctrine, as it is so construed, stands opposed to communism, as it so constructed. This is not to say Jesus is at issue: I have said again and again that Jesus was not a Christian but a rabbinical social justice, communist hero.


Are human beings, Shaw queried, hopelessly depraved? He said we are certainly lazy, as we have not dared attempt to implement the Jesus Program, which would more likely be found in those ancient synagogues of East Africa, which predate Jesus, than in the palace at the Vatican. But why bother with history?!


And Marx or Marxist-Leninism or Stalinism or the Fabian Society's parliamentary socialism? The first successful socialist revolution was invaded by the Western powers and arguably not allowed to succeed or fail on its own merits. Today, Cuba is held up as further proof of the failure of communism, but to me it only proves the stubborn lengths to which the West will go to starve a whole aspiring people who want to re-order the economic order. Tropical Communism has not failed; it has never been allowed to flourish.


So communism as written by its Framers and the admonishments as spoken by Jesus, while they seem to be rigorously studied - you may see me with my worn copy of Fidel's speeches sitting next to a coworker with his worn Bible - neither civilization has been achieved.


If the US weren't on its deathbed - and it is - we could go another 200 years in this Dark Age. I do not presume its disintegration will hearken a Golden Age any more than the demise of the USSR ... for, as the Book says, there is nothing new under the sun.