THE OBAMA PARADOX
by Joyce Marcel
American Reporter Correspondent
Dummerston, Vt.
May 17, 2009
Printable version of this story
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It was a joke when he said, "My next 100 days will be so successful I will be able to complete them in 72 days. And on the 73rd day, I will rest." Right? Wasn't it a joke?
When President Barack Obama debuted his comic styling at the White House Correspondents Dinner on Saturday evening, yes, he was making fun of himself, the Washington press corps, and the people who think he can walk on water. I'm not one of them, but still, I love this guy.
Why? First and foremost, he's not ex--President George W. Bush. And First Lady Michelle Obama isn't Laura Bush. Instead of dumb, pained and rigid, we get fun. "In the next 100 days I will strongly consider losing my cool," Mr. Obama said, and he made me laugh. This is a happy couple. Their kids are happy. And happiness anywhere makes me happy. That's why I cry at parades.
Second, Mr. Obama's not Darth Vader Cheney, who's been making the rounds of the television networks wishing for America the Beautiful to fail just so he doesn't have to go to jail. President Obama makes me glad that the dark clouds of the last Administration have been dispersed. As the great poet and singer Leonard Cohen says, "There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."
Mr. Obama also shows class. He understands that journalism is under enormous stress.
"Your ultimate success as an industry is essential to the success of our democracy," President Obama told the crowd. "It makes this thing work... . A government without newspapers, a government without a tough and vibrant media of all sorts, is not an option for the United States of America."
Mr. Obama has done other very good things. Removing religion from science. Closing the Guantánamo prisons. Speaking to our enemies as well as our friends. Putting the health industry on the defensive. All good.
There's also much I don't like. He won't consider single-payer health insurance, which is the only way we'll ever solve this health care crisis. He won't put Bush and Cheney and their ilk on trial for treason, when even a dummy like me could make the case.
He recently tried to broker a deal between Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan, when even I know that Karzai controls, at the most, Kabul and not much more, while Zardari appears impotent to protect his people (not to mention his nuclear warheads). Here, President Obama appears to be a dangerous innocent. We should be getting out of Afghanistan, not sending in more troops.
I wish Mr. Obama was more creative and progressive, but I'm not as angry as writer Chris Hedges, a man whose work I respect enormously. He calls President Obama "an empty brand," someone "designed to make us feel good about our government while corporate overlords loot the Treasury, our elected officials continue to have their palms greased by armies of corporate lobbyists, our corporate media diverts us with gossip and trivia and our imperial wars expand in the Middle East."
According to Hedges, "Brand Obama is about being happy consumers. We are entertained. We feel hopeful. We like our president. We believe he is like us. But like all branded products spun out from the manipulative world of corporate advertising, we are being duped."
Hedges' greatest fear is that if Mr. Obama fails, people will be so disillusioned they will flail out in anger and search for demagogues to come to our rescue. America will become a Mad Max world.
We should be aware that this is a real danger for our country. After eight years of right-wingers fanning the flames of hatred and intolerance, demagoguery is definitely an option if and when things get really bad.
However, much of what we call "the economy" is a confidence game anyway. This was illustrated most brilliantly in last Sunday's "Dilbert."
Dilbert and a vendor are talking. "If we lease a machine from you, how can we be certain you'll say in business to service it?" Dilbert asks. "How can we be sure you'll have the money to pay the lease?" the vendor replies. Dilbert: "You could check our financials." Vendor: "I'm pretty sure your financials are as fraudulent as ours." At the end of the exchange, cartoonist Scott Adams writes, "And thus ended capitalism."
President Obama has confidence in abundance, whether he's an empty brand or not. He is able to transmit that confidence to us. If we believe him, we will act in positive ways that might just uplift the economy and our own quality of life.
Yet, as military columnist Joseph L. Galloway recently wrote about forgetting the lessons of Vietnam, "Arrogance and ignorance are almost always a fatal combination."
And that, my friends, is the Obama Paradox.
Joyce Marcel is a journalist who can be reached at joycemarcel@yahoo.com.
Copyright 2012 Joe Shea The American Reporter. All Rights Reserved.