The fat, sweaty white guy sitting in front of me on the employee shuttle seemed to be trying to push into fifth gear in his four-gear, lithium-deprived brain: something, as they say down yonder, had got into his craw, and he was in full, incoherent, angry flow about the US president.
Of course, this is all taking place in Orange County, the western-most seat of the Ku Klux Klan and the American NAZI Party [American and NAZI being empirically rather redundant, in fact].
The shuttle was practically empty, except for his loud mouth, a white woman in front of him who politely made occasional eye contact with him as he pretended to talk to her, me, a Latino man in the back, and the low-paid East Indian shuttle driver. So, for all this thick-necked buffoon's loudness, I took his rants as performance art, not for the white woman whose attention was at best remote, but rather for the darkies to whom he had to declare his independence.
The half-wits flew out of his mouth like little birds.
"Obama hates this country!" The right-wing always address the presidents they despise by their surnames; while the chalk-brained Reagan is forever "President Reagan."
"His only goal is to ruin our Constitution."
"He's put this country so deep in debt, we'll never get out."
"If Obama's car ran over a pot hole in the street, he'd blame President Bush."
But amid all this King Georgesque madness, there is an astute narrative, but this man, and, it seems, most of my country of whatever shape, color, hue, or sexual fetish, is grossly unaware. The enemy is personified, never institutionalized. So every four years, it's Groundhog Day!
When Noam Chomsky was asked if there was anything of the country for which a citizen could be proud, Chomsky conditioned his response on what the person meant by the "country". If this means "the government": No. Governments are purely instruments of power, states are violent institutions; you can never be proud of that. Not any government, he said.
This revelation that our institutions are corrupt and contaminate any who enter them seems never to have occurred to that Aryan sector of Orange County for whom a Black man aspiring to be president could never have been born on this Holy Ground - or for any of its walled-off Aryan sectors [in Los Angeles or anywhere else segregation still holds firm].
Only now, the government as headed by Barack Obama is deemed a nefarious enemy of gun owners, full of waste, and its machinations to create Death Panels to exterminate us widespread.
Why did we let this Foreign-born, Muslim Socialist become president?
Vicious white racism is only different than the European variety because of simple dynamics: while the West was being won - built up, industrialized, amassing wealth, and breeding psychotic billionaires - the whites on these conquered lands were forever having to fight range wars. The Native inhabitants and the imported Africans would not comply easily to the strange ways of this European trash and its gutter religion, and they kept rebelling. These dark people can never, therefore, be trusted.
The Untouchables for the European Powers were in the Congo, India, and other far-flung places. Queen Victoria could have an Indian servant as a pet, but this didn't disturb anyone outside the upstairs-downstairs of Buckingham Palace. The elites in the US literally had the natives everywhere breathing down their necks, ready to storm the back doors.
Obama enters the US consciousness of a people hunkered down in the trenches of a race war, which, lost, threatens to dismantle their apartheid system. Like most of my screeds - to use the right-wing expletive - notions of race wars is not newsworthy but just my anger, and to be dismissed. Dismissed like those swathes of urban poor, Black and Brown, and the persistence of worst poverty among Native descendants. Unlike my screeds, the science and philosophy and Opinion that justifies our apartheid is perfectly acceptable, because, after all, weren't the Blacks savages in Africa until Europe civilized them?
Many lies have become agreed-upon truths, made careers, and justified the worst penal system in the world. That's Big Business, and it has used science and philosophy and Opinion because it owns them.
What that fat man and his Klan cousins are too slow-witted to realize is Obama is not the source of this hegemonic system: he is its servant. And this is the tip of the iceberg these Aryans refuse to see.
The months prior to the 9/11 attacks, Bush's poll numbers dropped precipitously, the economy continued to stagger ever downward like a Greek tragedy in need of a deus ex machina. In the wake of the 2000 election fraud, this should have provoked a lot more discussion than it did. But barely a newspaper of record investigated.
Then our Reichstag came. War would follow. More than 10 years of war and counting, longest in US history for a hot war [unlike that long, long Cold War].
The presidency's task is to keep this steam ship rolling along, which really means to do nothing at all to solve real problems. The steam ship is commerce. This impotence to do little else is not an accident.
The founders of the US asserted that those who own the country ought to run it: so much for not letting the daylight in on the magic!
The French and English revolutions cut off the heads of kings to progress the exceptional values we hold so dear, for freedom and democracy to flourish. This is what we are taught.
The truth is otherwise. These were merchant - not popular - revolutions: that is, they were basically attempts by the merchants, investors, and bankers to liberalize [meaning: pry open and out of the hands of the locals!] the economy to increase their market share - in slaves mostly.
Mass, insurgent attempts after the English Revolution to challenge the authority of the state, to question the dominance of Parliament and the Military frightened the bankers so much they needed to do something to protect their privilege from mass scrutiny: so the monarchy, the one institution shielded from the electorate and popular pressure, was duly restored. The religious order was re-established.
Perhaps indoctrinated with a hierarchical, patriarchal religion, logic dictates that Fathers must head families, Government school teachers are omnipotent, Bosses run workplaces, the King can do no wrong, and the state is on a predestined course to do Good. From the myths, lies are born.
This is why religion is not only an opiate but also a lobotomy.
Like any corrupt institution, our modern states will only promote those men and women who will serve its functions, to advance commerce, increase market share, beef up quarterly stock reports. This is not conspiracy theory but rather an obvious institutional analysis.
Anyone who gets in the way will literally, or figuratively, get a head chopping.
That angry man on the shuttle will put the weight of the world's problems on the shoulders of a Black man without hesitation. The poor, the dark, the colonials, are always ripe for blame over what ills our Chosen People. But he will not see what links us as workers in a country whose government wants to compete with slave-labor shops, like China. He will make no connection between the system that ended one service contract for a cheaper one, with cheaper shuttle drivers, earning what your average WalMart associate earns, which is equally alarming, to our elite's fascination with sweat shops and seeking lower and lower wages, breaking more and more unions, and driving more and more people into poverty.
This angry man will hit a pot hole and in fact blame Obama for it, not the failed state.
This is not about Obama any more than it is about Bush, Clinton, or Reagan. They all serve their function, which is increasingly to the detriment of wider and wider swathes of the population.
But Barack Obama is in a pretty precarious spot. While he is constitutionally qualified (so is Sarah Palin), he's clearly not up to the tasks of the people having sold his political soul, or of Wall Street, who does not trust a man of this color to make the country safe for more sweat shops.
The country is enduring a worst malaise than that of the 1970's, an economic Depression has hit whole sectors of our economy, and Obama can do nothing. History will regard his presidency comparable to Jimmy Carter's, who made a success at being an ex-president. So there is hope for Obama in his professional afterlife.
Meanwhile, Obama plays with a rather dull collection of toys from a Cracker Jack box, and the Mormon with his offshore accounts will balance the books as easily as Queen Victoria did with those Irish she starved to death.
They paw at each other through the hazy gossamer veil between them. Neo-campaign politics.
Congress doesn't want to get anything done - like the president, it has essentially gotten out of the way, vacated its posts, so the banks and financiers can maximize their trade routes. Commerce. The US Supreme Court, rarely a defender of the rights of people and communities, has become the legislative body de jure of our state capitalist, failed system.
What a shame, as Gordon Ramsay would say understatedly, examining a ruined expensive entree. Obama began as somewhere on the left - with much of the rest of the country. He supported universal health care, like every first world country has; he supported gay marriage; he stood against our wars, against the human rights, Geneva Convention violation of Guantanamo; he was against the blockade of Cuba, which the UN General Assembly has repeatedly condemned [only Israel, naturally, supports us].
For all Obama's vapid, empty campaign rhetoric of 2008, the expensive entree is what people wanted in power, before our own twilight extinguishes in the same ruins as our supposed nemesis, the Soviets. But since Wall Street selects our presidents and directs policy, Obama had to do an about-face. It was an error, we were told, that he supported gay marriage. Guantanamo has made a war criminal of him as has his strange assassinations of US citizens without any trial. Assassinating non-US citizens we are expert at, and something we must all reckon with.
The people - that shrinking half who vote - are further demoralized. The elites are anxious to accelerate neoliberal failures at home that they once imposed in the global South, and like their redneck underlings they don't trust this president to do it. Their money has been filling the campaign coffers of the Mormon with offshore accounts, a chilling forecast indeed.
What to do? Elect the Mediocrity from Lego Land or the Mormon with Offshore accounts? Either way, it seems the Mayan forecast is spot on, an End is near, though just not the literal one the religious zealots peddle.
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