With Deepest Regrets…
Posted on 30 November 2009
Michael Moore’s letter, the videos from yesterday – these are the LAST things I wanted to be putting up on this little website of mine. Frankly, I hate politics, but what does one do when they see a president who has turned out to be (as I had begun to fear a few months back) really just like most of the others that came before him.
Were we in some strange racist place during the elections to believe something different might happen because he was black (and so articulate)? Not that Hilary would have handled things better, or McCain. But here we are with the Lyndon Johnson of the 21st Century in a war that drains our treasury after Bush and friends (then Obama and pals) allowed Wall Street to take the bulk of it already.
Is this the way the way a Republic (finally) ends?
I would rather be writing poetry. I would rather be doing little, strange videos. I would rather be doing anything but this. But this, I believe is what has to be done. And soon what will have to be done is marching in the streets, I’m afraid – which takes even more time (and is riskier) than writing this stuff. And after that probably bringing down this black president who lives in that White House, a house which seems to do the same thing to other good people who get too much — too much fame, money, power, etc. “Too much” seems to hollow the heart, seems (to often, but not always) make people forget about other people; forget about the people who just live lives (poetry in itself), who raise children and fix plumbing and camp out and cook small meals and (sometimes) starve and (sometimes) believe and hope and dream despite what unfolds all around them.
The dream of Obama is now dead. Someone has to be saying this – the dream is dead – as many people as possible now need to say this who aren’t right wing maniacs– the dream that was once Martin Luther King’s (the dream that Obama traded on, got elected by) is now (I believe) about to turn into a nightmare.
So why write this? Why even try?
Because as the nightmare unfolds (in it’s own nasty way) let it be clear that we saw it coming, that we can see where things can go (if we look carefully and allow ourselves not to rationalize our way into fantasy). That as the nightmare continues to descend on us we don’t panic or get depressed or give up, but that we keep our eyes and minds clear so that we can clear up (slowly, slowly, because that’s the only way it’s done) the mess that lost people (like Obama and those around him) are in the process of creating.
For there will be a time after this President (who has now fully and completely lied to us re his campaign promises), there is always a time after any president…
8 responses to With Deepest Regrets…
It’s difficult to figure out whether (and if) the train as completely gone off the tracks. In the best iteration, a couple of days after the election the spooks from the CIA and NSA took him in a room and scared the bejesus out of him. In the worst, it was a con job all along. I prefer to think the truth is somewhere in the middle. The guy who was always too smart for the room thinks the oval office is just another room. He’s always been a facilitator, so he thinks facilitation is the only true path. The problem is that facilitators tend to be consultants, not leaders. We have Merlins out the wazoo. We need an Arthur. Maybe if he gets his health care bill passed, he will feel a little less heat from history and take a few chances with his legacy. Or maybe he is still smarter than the room, and we will all have to eat humble pie. I for one have not yet washed off my fork.
Thank you for posting Michael Moore’s letter, and for articulating what many of us are saying behind closed doors- those of us who campaigned for Obama (after Hilary lost to him). You are right that our youth, who worked so hard to get him in office, will quietly turn their backs on politics as the same old same old. We sit in quiet despair as we again watch our country go down the tubes., Our generation has had to bear witness to way too much, including Vietnam, to go through this madness again.
Stephen: I know you care deeply about politics. You always have–your claim of poetic indifference to the contrary notwithstanding.
However, reading you and Michael Moore and his (and your) savaging of President Obama, it smacks of the on-going and long-standing differences between the pro-Obama left, the anti-Obama left, and the indifferent-to-Obama left. Would you have preferred McCain?
And then there is that tell-tale imbalance in both your thinking. You and Moore denounce Obama’s views on Afghanistan and the general “war on terror” and you hope for the next election to see different leadership (results). But on the basis of what Moore (and you) have written, all context with regard to the differences between the right and left are ignored. Again, would you have preferred McCain?
You both simply want Obama to move further left, beyond positions Obama has taken since well before the election. No other litmus test of legitimacy is offered or acceptable. Perhaps we would all do well to remember that no president (or candidate in the next election, for that matter) will move further left (or right) than their base demands and public opinion allows.
I don’t agree with all that Obama has done, or contemplates doing. I certainly do not favor an open-ended commitment in Afghanistan without a concomitant strategy for winding down the effort. But I suggest it is rather early in the game to call us to the barricades, tear up the cobblestones and join the revolution, as you (more than Moore) would have us do.
I look forward to your next effort at poetry instead.
I have engaged in politics for quite awhile, but not because I have ever wanted to. I feel I have had to as a citizen of this country. No real choice when things have so often been so lost. i never wanted to march in Washington during Vietnam. It was a pain in the ass (I don’t want to march now, but I will – I will NOT join barricades, though, and never said I would. I will not tear up what’s left of the cobblestones. I will march, though – peacefully, angrily, clearly. Political protest and revolution are too vastly different responses. I do NOT believe revolutions work (and have written about that before. Will write about it again). Revolution really is the same old thing — the concept that power (and violence) work — time after time it’s been proven (except for in the short term) that violence never works. Evolution works and that takes time and a kind of mysterious care.
My reasons for attacking Obama so strongly are that I think all his plans are not going to work and therefore he will not be re-elected. I think he has lost the progressive left and the vibrant young hopefuls that got him elected. I want him re-elected. I want him to learn. I had hoped (as many of us had hoped) that he had actually employed the same strategy of his predecessor, Bush — had gotten elected by sliding to the center and then would move to left which is the only approach (I think) that would have gotten anything done.
But a smart left (not always a given, God knows) — a left that would have supported the workers of GM and Chrysler and not the management that had screwed up (and are still screwing up, except for their salaries) those companies.
No “socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor” (Biden’s recent words) — socialism (or at least some real care) for the people and capitalism for the capitalists — AIG, Goldman Sachs, etc all should have gone under.
I could go on and on, but the point is that the reason I am taking these strong positions is because I believe that they are correct (as it seems to some degree you feel as well) and that this President needs to hear this from me (here and in the Huffington Post, etc) and from others. Millions of others. And yes — let’s get ready to start marching on Washington so that (unlike Johnson Obama won’t have a heart attack and quit so that Nixon comes in) but so that Obama changes and becomes the President that he should be…
Alan Pendleton’s gentle dissent reflects my own views pretty accurately.
The big questions here is not what can be done or not in Afghanistan, because there everything will go back to the centuries old traditional bad times with warrior generals, opium smugglers and women in slavery as soon as the planned retreat is done.
No, the first important thing is, as one moderate Democrat said in one debate yesterday, the cost of war for a country already in recession.
The second important thing is what happens to all those very young men who serve there when they come back home. What I mean seems to be very well illustrated in son Jake’s movie having its première this week. As David Letterman said to Natalie Portman; “‘The finest movie made in the last 12, 20 years”. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmtxRxD7PuY
H.
Swedens biggest single-copy sold daily newspaper, “Aftonbladet” (“Evening Paper”) with a circulation of over 350.000 copies per day, has today Tuesday published a translated copy of Michael Moore’s letter to president Barack Obama in their “debate section”.
I do not know how they got to know about it from the beginning, but I can tell you that I sent a copy of your blog-address mentioning his letter and your “pre-amble”, Stephen, to one of the senior editors, whom I know as a former collgue in the Press Service of our equivalent to your State department.
He was for one year a press counsellor at the Swedish Embassy in Madrid, but left his post and went back to the left wing liberal, a.k.a. social-democratic on the editorial department, Aftonbladet, where he often writes editorials.
Here is the link: http://www.aftonbladet.se/debatt/debattamnen/varlden/article6219095.ab
BTW, the learned Olle Svenning left the service because he thought it was much too formal. This was some 25 years ago.
H.
Just a short remark- I have been active in MoveOn.org for years, since its inception, campaigned with them for Obama’s election. I thought I could take some time off from them until yesterday when I got an Urgent Call to Arms to contact/call the White House to protest sending more troops into Afghanistan. At lease someone is keeping an eye on things. Stephen, so many of us agree completely with you. We have to continue to try to keep things honest.