Global Research, November 19, 2008 |
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I happen to like Americans. I’m legally one of
them, but I wasn’t born here. Most of the Americans I have known in the
four decades I have lived here have not been warmongers or racists or
contemptuous of culture and intellect. Even the so-called uneducated
ones have a core of neighborly decency and tolerance that seems rooted
in a cheerful attitude of live-and-let-live. Their culture is malleable and adaptable and
eventually inclusive. They have refined the discourse of human rights,
feminism, and anti-authoritarianism. They have developed great
universities. They are indefatigable inventors and innovators. They
have perfected the rhetoric of rights and actually enjoy some of them.
They are not snobs. And they are quick on the uptake when lies and
chicanery are in the offing. The last eight years in the vertiginous
rise and fall of Bushist triumphalism and bluster attest to that. But. These are the people. Their government is
something entirely different, and they are beginning to realize it. It
frightens them -- this pending gap and potential divorce between
themselves and their government. The election of Barack Obama restores
hope -- after all, they have elected a black American, and, to them,
this is a huge paradigm shift. In the horrible, long, and contorted
history of racialist America, this single act gives them the illusion
that their government can now be trusted again to be in tune with their
sentiments because it includes an outsider -- a person of color. Except. Barack Obama is not an outsider. He has chosen the
establishment over the people. But this is hard for Americans to
understand because they have no concept of class -- which is to say the
concept that class is a relation of power. They think in racialist
terms. They think that color determines politics. Or maybe they don’t,
but they have no other tool of analysis than race. How else to explain the enthusiasm over Obama, a
man whose policies and advisors are indistinguishable from Clinton’s,
who was a dismantler of welfare, a neo-liberal free-trader, and an
ardent warmonger? A man who put power and profits before the people? This is a tragedy in the making. Possibly the last
disillusionment. After all, this new president is never going to say
what Martin Luther King said when the awful truth about the war in
Vietnam caught up with him, “The greatest purveyor of terror in the
world today is my own government.” How could he when he has chosen to
defend that power in a relation of class solidarity with the economic
elite? And it needs to be said again. Or nothing will change. Source: Globalresearch.ca