Appropriate that which is Appropriate

It's important to understand we're in the appropriation phase of "civil rights", a period of wealth confiscation and privilege transfer from white to non-white. From culture to commerce new terms and limits are being rationalized as necessary racial justice as professions, cultural domains and even physical spaces are carved out from which whites are to be excluded. The language is all theory and romance (and sinister; at some point black "scholars" started talking about the white "role"in the New America to come) but the result is very much material and economic.

It began in earnest with the Obama Administration, and was well on its way to finalizing a sort of post-white order, with whites serving as a legacy oppressor even as their numbers dwindled. Most importantly it was about the orderly transfer of that wealth and power--it had to go to the right people after all. Needless to say Trump derailed all that, if only for the moment.

This is what all this talk of cultural appropriation and representation is about. It's why Google is convulsing right now under its own attempts to transfer half of its employment opportunity to favored groups. It's everywhere, and a proper economic analysis of its cost, and the costs to come if we continue on this path, would probably make our collective head explode.

The initial fervor that greeted Obama's rise was based for many whites on the notion it would solve America's race problem, reassuring black Americans finally of our sincerity and inspiring them to do better. It's as if the average liberal really understands it isn't white racism holding people back; he just thinks black people don't know it yet. Once they do, things will sort out. Eight years after Obama black people show less signs of catching on. The myth of white racism is more jealously held than ever.

If blacks generally hadn't been paying attention to the culture's positive encouragement Obama certainly had. He took up the archetype he learned on TV and it worked better than any amount of authenticity. A little fake inflection here, a little pretending to like hip hop there. Authenticity is overrated.
The notion that he, in turn, would inspire, finally, black America to pull its weight resembled something like an economic stimulus program, without even the temporary bump. The "Obama Effect" purported to find its positive effects, and quickly fizzled out. Another social justice perpetual motion machine never got going.

Not that blacks weren't inspired by Obama's election. Urban blacks responded right away, discovering and improvising on the flash mob concept. There was a new confidence and energy in black America, but it wasn't expressed by black America becoming more law abiding and successful, whiter; it was expressed--but of course--by more confident blacks being blacker.  As usual, blacks had a whole different idea of what things meant than their white "allies".

Their position as a group will not be improved through thrift and industry--even if mere discipline and effort were all it took to equalize us economically and every which way, in so succeeding it would remove the source of black America's unique power and position: their suffering.
But they can't compete with whites at being white and most importantly they don't want to. What they want is to be themselves, to assert themselves, to mold their world--just like anyone else--to make it more amenable and less alien. You can't blame them.
Authenticity--the authenticity Obama lacks, can never attain, is more important than any quality of life metric. To the extent to which the average person feels alienated from his culture--and who doesn't now?--might be directly proportional to the degree to which that culture has been absorbed by other cultures. Consider the degree to which black culture has molded American culture.
Black America's position as a group is improved through political power–they’ve already managed to carve out an out-sized degree of autonomy and influence purely through political action and demagogy. That demagogy--BLM and the rest of what passes for black civil rights--complements perfectly the pre-existing violence and mayhem that produce its martyrs.

The malice behind Obama's toothy grin came out after the Democrats got pummeled hard in Obama's first mid-terms. The fake gloves came off. The Trayvon Martin campaign was whipped up heading into the 2012 elections and produced Black Lives Matter, by 2016, whipped into a frenzy by the presidential campaign, its supporters were assassinating the same police working security at its demonstrations.
At the same time the seemingly petty grievances grew greater in number and fury. In Google trends the term "cultural approproation" went from obscurity to relevance 2012 with Obama's second presidential run, increased up to the administration's second mid-term elections and remains at that plateau now in the time of Trump.

Even the kitsch element in black politics, always profound, got cornier--Ta Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me came out it 2015.

Another conversation we won't have: the failure of the promised Obama Effect and the scandal of the actual Obama Effect. The reality is racial resentment has gotten so much worse over the last eight years it's hard to measure because the terms of debate have had to change that much to keep up with it--resistance not being an option.

The effect of eight years of Obama has been to render the race problem insoluble. On the good side, his policies and rhetoric hastened the rise of the alt right and Trump.

The Curious Case of Bradley's Button

Yesterday Steve Sailer noted today how Chelsea (nee Bradley) Manning's gender dysphoria, having gone from footnote to forefront during his incarceration along with the rise of the trans rights movement, is now seen by fashionable convention as a legitimate sympathy factor favoring President Obama's commutation of his sentence, as evidenced by the New York Times:

It's a cliche that politics are mostly, if not entirely, about social identity, as individuals vote in line with their perceived in-group values and needs. Needless to say, in the US social identity in politics and beyond has so long been pathologized for whites and encouraged, even romanticized, in minorities until it has become unchallenged convention that majority interests are inherently suspect and white interests nonexistent or evil. An astounding notion. It's hard to say how much of this is cynical manipulation and how much is the obliviousness of the elites' true-believing middle management corps.

In a nation with a dominant ethnic majority social identity politics arrange along class lines. In ours for a long time now they've arranged themselves around ethnic (now sexual and sexual preference) identity. Obama promised his election would transcend this. There was a curious, very un-progressive appeal to order inherent in it; even, that progressive bugaboo nostalgia played a part (reeling from something like a national identity crisis after President Bush squandered so much national prestige in his ill-fated Iraq invasion, we were encouraged to revisit what has become, however stupidly, our imagined greatest achievement--black civil rights.) We would be one, finally by squaring the circle of racism.

 Over his time in office we've come not only to see the impossibility of this, but the fact the elite wants nothing to do with it. Division is the point--diversity after all means division. It was social identity for me but not for thee, white people. This is what half the country rejected with Trump's election.

With the reaction to Trump's success--itself a reaction to this long process--this shaming dynamic of de-legitimizing white majority interests and valorizing minority interests reached its nadir, and, after a half century of unopposed triumph, it failed grandly in last year's presidential election. Maybe the de-legitimization of white interests represents less a transformation of politics than the death thereof, part and parcel of the surrender, led by Buckleyite conservatism in America, to the globalist order that is at the moment reeling from the one-two punch of Trump and Brexit. The interests of white Americans and Europeans were the very problem, it is now openly declared (though it's important to note this would have been considered insane at the beginning of this progress of slow-walking us to our demise), as witnessed by American slavery and the Holocaust. Now it isn't just populism that is the  enemy, but the population--to be corrected by the demographic diversification of that population into competing ethnic groups under an imperial multi-pole represented by Washington DC, New York and Brussels.

It's part, maybe the essential part, of that death of meaningful democratic politics in the West. As Kevin Grace said, "politics, as conventionally understood, died in that bunker in Berlin when Hitler put a bullet in his brain."

But politics go on, divorced from policy and meaning (for it remains to be seen if the Trump phenomenon, as much as anything else an insurgency against this order, will pan out). And that means politics as advertising. Advertising itself is advanced political method. And advertising is less about social identity--that gauche recognition of practical reality and real interests--than it is about aspirational social identity. Buy this product and display your status, or front a higher status, or even ascend thereby to a higher status (for perception is all--politics has taken this quite to heart). Status of course includes moral status--show your social "awareness" by buying "green" or "non-conflict" diamonds (wealth and virtue combine in the ultimate display).

A short conversation with the average anti-Trump civilian will quickly illustrate for you how much politics have become, for the fashionably conventional, aspirational social identity striving.

But with the transformation of Bradly Manning, hero or traitor, to Chelsea Manning, unassailable virtue-victim, represents a new aspect of social identity in politics. Now we are expected to identify and apply a premium or penalty depending on the social identity of the subject class or individual. The classes warranting a political, cultural and--apparently now with official recognition of Manning's identity--can only be expected to grow (and compete with each other), while the classes for which a penalty is applied will remain static (and shrinking along with demographic and cultural change): white, male, straight. This does not end well--unless we end it now in defiance, somehow.

Cognitive Dissonance and Cowardice

When Lavish "Diamond" Reynolds live broadcast the death of Philando Castile some whites were puzzled by her calm demeanor in the circumstances, narrating events in a stereotypical ghetto monotone normally associated with passive aggressive customer service agents of a certain demographic. When I saw it on Twitter I thought at first it was a hoax; Reynolds comes across as a bad amateur actor. Her behavior is not normal. Anyone can see it's calculated. But no person of consequence dare say that, obviously. It looks suspiciously like Reynolds' calm is callousness and that she was quickly taking advantage of the situation. In the 'hood she would be described as One Cold Bitch. You have to admire the steely nerve it takes. I know: how dare I. Yet still.

The average white American still projects onto blacks as a group and individually his own innate sense of normalcy, produced over centuries of culture and evolution and reflected, for the time being, in the laws and customs of, for instance, the United States.

The average black American projects onto whites a cruder innate sense of value and normalcy, produced by the same processes. That's why blacks presume the worst intentions of whites regardless of good faith efforts. Much political agitation is subsuming the humiliation and frustration of living under restrictive and unnatural white norms, hence black America's continuing obsession with individual authenticity.
Anti-racism, armed with disparate impact theory, hasn't a chance. In the post civil rights environment of moral license, it can only chase black misbehavior downward and drag us to some extent along with it.

The consequences of this are now proving disastrous. Black behavior gets worse the longer it's un-moored from white norms, and one result is the daily urban body count. For those few, such as the president, capable of seeing and making the calculation, the carnage of an unrestrained black America must be an acceptable price of autonomy--perhaps they even understand its value, as a bludgeon by which whites are shamed into granting more autonomy, more accommodation of the black norms it represents.

 I appears few black leaders make this nuanced a calculation; they are either true believers or indifferent hustlers. White leaders like, well most of them, operate at a higher level of moral corruption. For the individual black American, authenticity and group autonomy are justly sources of pride, as they should be for anyone. But something's always got to give. In Obama's and Hillary's America it's--but of course--whites and all their decency, that is, White Privilege.

To accommodate black norms to achieve equality white America has been gradually conditioned to accept that which it once found revolting, collectively and individually. And it's killing us.

The problem is clearly that black America places a much lower value on life and property than white America, combined with a much higher value on group loyalty and honor.

Black Lives Matter is black America, with much help, trying establish a precedent: we can kill as many of ourselves as we want, as many of you as we want, but you can't kill one of us.

The Audacity of Expedience

From this NYT article on Obama's drone war:

They describe a paradoxical leader who shunned the legislative deal-making required to close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, but approves lethal action [drone strikes] without hand-wringing.
(...)
Yet the administration’s very success at killing terrorism suspects has been shadowed by a suspicion: that Mr. Obama has avoided the complications of detention by deciding, in effect, to take no prisoners alive. While scores of suspects have been killed under Mr. Obama, only one has been taken into American custody, and the president has balked at adding new prisoners to Guantánamo.
(...)
David Axelrod, the president’s closest political adviser, began showing up at the “Terror Tuesday” meetings [where that week's drone assassination targets are decided upon], his unspeaking presence a visible reminder of what everyone understood: a successful attack would overwhelm the president’s other aspirations and achievements.

Earlier I had taken to calling Mr. Axelrod "the Undertaker" because he looks like one with that somber visage, but now the moniker seems apt for other reasons.

All out of transformation: Chewing bubble gum and keeping the president's "aspirations" in the black.

The Roost is on the Left

Making themselves to home.

The latest alienated, homicidal incompetent to personalize the sort of racial pandering the president is presently cranking to eleven for the 2012 campaign was shot and killed by police today. And we're off:

"He used to do so much for the community. Something must have happened to make him flip out like this", said Pastor Oscar Dace of Bible Way Christian Center. "Everybody just can't believe that this has happened".

Recall Omar Thornton's (no doubt to his mind heroic) final testament:"this is a racist place". What child-like confidence he had in its power to absolve him of cold-blooded murder (racism is the universal moral solvent, present in all human agency); that confidence was quickly validated by the unconscionable coverage that followed.

The comparison to Thornton isn't apt, though. Omar was an apolitical dullard. Shareef Allman has been identified by his friends and neighbors as a "pillar of the community" and, with the grim-comic oblivousness only black Americans can manage, a "kind-hearted mediator of conflict" who hosted a public access show and even got to interview Jesse Jackson on camera. This was a black man politically active in his community, an intellectual and emotional imbiber of the Narrative,* exacting retribution for, as he sees it, discrimination. How much more explicit does racial-political violence have to get for the topic to be broached by the High and Serious of the media?

*At this point I don't know the level and nature of Allman's activism. Sure would like to get a look at those public-access shows (the crazy sh-t you find yourself saying!).

update: I just got my wish. This was not a politically sophisticated fellow. A standard issue idiot. Met a hundred of them. God help us.

A Belated Introduction to Your President

New and improved, 10/4
Updates below

The hits just keep coming for the Wonder Brother.

I discount the president's more explicit race-baiting; he's never more full of shit than when he's adopting that phony gospel intonation for such as the naive souls at Trinity United. Sinister as it is, the president's fervor is depressingly dull. He remains the void he set out to be--only we no longer project onto His Blankness the illusion of--whatever it was the liberals were on about--but now its disillusion. The former magnified his image, the latter reduces it. And still we ask--who is this man? His life has been about contriving an identity--now he has none.

The world's been turned upside down: now for advantage one assumes a black rather than white identity. But it's still true that you can pass but you cannot hide. Your life is a loop, you come from a mother and return to one. That's the inexorable pull that draws us to authentic origins--religion, ethnicity, family--as we age. To where will you return, Mr. President? Will there be anything there?

There is nothing exceptional behind that visage, other than a yearning ego, a sort of psychological greed. Obama never expected to do what his acolytes took for granted: to reconcile black and white America. He wasn't here to change anything, but to keep the movement on track, tightening the cordon around the white boys. That's what we get for being so good to him in Hawaii--perhaps we should have bullied him like the Indonesians. He took to the White House the plan and model he'd had for Chicago: the implementation and solidification of a permanent non-white regime, maintaining power by distributing your wealth throughout a network of identity-advocacy groups in league with corrupt business interests. What an asshole.

The president and his attorney general are small men (preceded by small men) who cannot see far. Whatever imagination they have is spent on their private psychodramas. But Holder and Obama's aggressively racial-political Justice Department letting those buffoons off for their voter-intimidation stunt* looks more enticingly actionable than ever. Darrell Issa just lost control of his bowels.

*update: that is in light of these new allegations of one "Malik Shabazz"* signed in as a visitor to the White House. Imagine what a Nixon meets Elvis moment that might have been. I'll pay good money to any reporter who'll ask: "Mr. President, did Mr. Shabazz wear the fascist get-up for his tour?"

*correction: not new at all, and previously explained by the White House as "another" Malik Shabazz, along with another Bill Ayers, when releasing the logs as a transparency gesture (presumably a separate visit--I mean, if you brought too many of the more ferocious elements of Obama's base together at the same time it'd resemble the bad-guy casting call in Blazing Saddles, complete with scowling reconquistos declaring their contempt for the rule of law).

That voodoo you do. BHO exhorts the multicultural minions of Project Vote: "To stamp out runaway decency in the West..."

I wonder if anyone has seen the actual signatures, which might be subjected to verification--because if even the absurd appellation M. Shabazz can belong to anyone now (I mean how far can you take this: "Oh, that's another Bernie Madoff"?), then the gesture's transparency only reveals it to be hollow.

"Log book? We don't sign no steenking log book!"

Paranoid-in-Chief

Via Drudge, it appears the White House is calling on some of its strengths from 2008--the power of the Internet, the gullibility of Youth, the paranoia of progressives--to compile a massive enemies list, with a fervor and reach in which Richard Nixon would find evidence of mental instability.

They've set up a "watchdog" website employing a vaguely sinister stark-alarm aesthetic (think SPLC's "Hatewatch") where you can report suspicious activity unfair criticism of the President's policies, politics or person. They have a list of refutations of common smears--first up: "...the President is a friend of Israel..."* (Ben-yo's finger-wagging notwithstanding).
USA. Mad from the top down.

*Somebody tell Manhattan's Jews not to worry: America is the nation Obama is intent on destroying through the displacement of its majority ethnicity, not Israel. Sillies!

Barry Bugs Out

Tom Englehardt nails the true nature of President Obama's address to cadets at West Point:

Certainly, the choice of venue, and so the decision to address a military audience first and other Americans second, not only emphasized the escalatory military path chosen in Afghanistan, but represented a kind of symbolic surrender of civilian authority.

Rush Limbaugh's wistful musing about a military coup is more oblivious than devious: after a perfunctory, brief struggle, the coup is victorious (Of course, if the president had been arrested at West Point and replaced with a military junta, I'm not entirely sure Limbaugh wouldn't find a way to justify it. Are you?). Under political duress, the president has accepted the role of conditional, if not yet nominal, Commander-in-Chief, surrendering an authority he doesn't want and wouldn't know what to do with anyway. Now he bites his nails and waits, like the rest of us.

But it's not the president's prerogative to divest himself of command over the armed forces to avoid its political consequences--elite convention notwithstanding. The extraordinary executive power over war itself remains, insulated from legislative or judicial interference, nominally vested in an elected president, wielded by a cabal. This is dereliction of duty of the highest order. The Commander in Chief has abandoned his post to cower in the rear while his mutinous subordinates take command.

But okay, this is all retrograde and simplistic, I know. Just the sort of thing to set elite eyes rolling, like taking the Constitution and sovereignty too seriously. Let's crassly accept the "political reality" and acknowledge the asymmetry between the White House and the the military establishment :

The Pentagon dictates policy directly to the Republican Party, Fox News, conservative radio and Internet, while fighting to a draw in the contested middle that is the the unallied media.
Obama, on the other hand, leads a party divided on the war and has a more conditional alliance with a media complex--MSNBC, NPR, etc.--that is both less powerful and less subservient than their adversaries. It's no great boast, but the liberal media and Democratic Party have, on this issue, shown superior independence and character. The difference casts in relief the decadence of the Republican Party and its staunchest media organs.

Meanwhile, in the Boy Wonder's White House Joseph Biden, garrulous and glib, self-imagined Caesar to Iraq's Gaul, is what passes for a pragmatist and sage. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (her position the product of a previous political capitulation), known for taking flight in hectoring recrimination before the galling indignity that is the unscripted media encounter, is sent abroad to placate a resentful world. The charmless representing the clueless. God help us.

Deconstructing Eric, or, Little by Little

Abraham Lincoln once said that "If you're a racist, I will attack you with the North," and these are the principles I carry with me in the workplace.
--Michael Scott

Our Attorney General is right. We are a nation of cowards, fearing an honest discussion of race. But, unless he's breaking utterly with rigorously observed convention, he's dead wrong about what that discussion would look like. A newly open conversation about race and public policy is the last thing an Eric Holder wants.

In fact, Mr. Holder's intent was to preempt just this possibility, which he reasonably fears as an unintended consequence of Barack Obama's remarkable success. That success shatters the very assumption upon which it is most dependent--that America is inherently and uniquely racist, forever incomplete thereby. Holder finds himself tasked with performing the traditional February rite of reinforcing this assumption--as the first black attorney general serving the first black president. That's one hell of a contradiction. It's going to take a nation of millions to obscure it. Thus Attorney General Michael Scott's suggestion that every day be a nation-wide Diversity Day:

...if we are to make progress in this area we must feel comfortable enough with one another, and tolerant enough of each other, to have frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us.

When I saw the scare-quote screen crawl (I shall start calling them scare-crawls) on a television across a room, "Atty General Holder Says US 'Nation of Cowards'," I assumed Mr. Holder had renounced the fear-mongering on behalf of "security" that has overtaken the Nation since 9/11. Something about the courage required by liberty and the cowardice required by tyranny. Perhaps he even had the nerve to suggest the terrorist threat has been exaggerated by those seeking power and wealth. I imagined myself defending him to you. This is, after all, only what he should be saying. But Holder wasn't there to calm a panicked nation; he was there to panic a calm one:

If we allow this attitude to persist in the face of the most significant demographic changes that this nation has ever confronted -- and remember, there will be no majority race in America in about 50 years -- the coming diversity that could be such a powerful, positive force will, instead, become a reason for stagnation and polarization. We cannot allow this to happen and one way to prevent such an unwelcome outcome is to engage one another more routinely -- and to do so now.

But this is nothing new. The remarkable thing about Wednesday's speech was that the Attorney General broadened the mandate of the U.S. Department of Justice:

But we must do more, and we in this room bear a special responsibility. Through its work and through its example this Department of Justice, as long as I am here, must -- and will -- lead the nation to the "new birth of freedom" so long ago promised by our greatest president. This is our duty and our solemn obligation.

Mr. Holder did not reveal any plans for how he will "lead the nation to [Lincoln's] 'new birth of freedom' "; probably because he has none. Of course he may think we're not ready for them. As if this immodest language isn't disturbing enough, Holder combines it with an attempt not to merely prompt debate but to direct it:

I fear however, that we are taking steps that, rather than advancing us as a nation are actually dividing us even further. We still speak too much of "them" and not "us." There can, for instance, be very legitimate debate about the question of affirmative action. This debate can, and should, be nuanced, principled and spirited. But the conversation that we now engage in as a nation on this and other racial subjects is too often simplistic and left to those on the extremes who are not hesitant to use these issues to advance nothing more than their own narrow self interest

This is a false accommodation. That there "can be" a "very legitimate debate about the question of affirmative action"; is given, and not by the Attorney General. The implication is that current debate is heading for "illegitimate" territory, deliberately reinforcing white anxiety and black resentment that holds opposition to affirmative action as racist until proven otherwise.

To limit the debate is to control it. Holder, arguing like a good (or just fair) lawyer, needs to place the status quo he defends between two arbitrary "extreme" boundaries. Thus certain opinions are "simplistic" (of course he could be talking about the stubbornly crude logic of disparate impact and quotas--his call to frankness and depth included neither) or "extreme", serving "narrow self-interest."

It is a monologue Holder desires, alternating between narrow, meaningless poles toward a safely predetermined end, mouthed by a multitude distracted by false choices. The product of a collective, conditioned mind. But this much is obvious. What is more interesting is the unintentional but more revealing subtext, inaccessible to the author, incapacitated as he is by status, position and, appropriately enough, chauvinism. Holder's speech revealed the potential conflicts facing a civil rights movement-turned-industry by Barack Obama's stunning, rapid rise.
Those who most fear the reality of a "transformation" to a "post-racial" America are those who've most benefited from the decidedly racial nature of recent American politics--again, embarrassingly demonstrated with Obama's success. The end game of affirmative action and discrimination-through-litigation is revealed as long overdue. The intent of the "conversation" about race, now more than ever, is to de-legitimize that challenge by declaring it unfit for conversation.

If we should start taking seriously the "post-racial" nature of Obama's rise, we might start asking that it mean something beyond assigning a professional and political premium to certain individuals based on Obama's myth of "race and inheritance." But the obvious advantage that race played for the inauthentic son of slavery and segregation contradicts the myth. The notion of a white American jackboot forever on the neck of our culturally most powerful--black Americans--was questionable before Obama's remarkable campaign and the ecstatic reception of his inauguration. Now it is farcical.

But it isn't only that Barack Obama renders the white/black reparations dynamic absurd. The nascent Diversity State finds itself too soon and too totally triumphant. The bogey of white oppression threatens to become no longer plausible, and those groups assigned varying stature within the hierarchy of grievance are already eyeing one another uneasily.

The order now threatened by diversity is not pre- but post-civil rights. That minority became synonymous with oppressed, and "underrepresented" synonymous with denied, once only enhanced the power of the dominant minority, which extracted concessions from a still comfortable majority (that could still afford them and held an expectation of final conciliation). Smaller minority groups were content to follow the leader and accept a subordinate position. But what happens to that dynamic in a "post-racial" ("post-white") America where the majority of individuals have a birthright claim against the white plurality and no sense of obligation toward a black population that is culturally dominant, politically favored and stubbornly lagging in professional and scholastic achievement?
It was therefore Holder's purpose to preclude any challenges to black America's position atop the hierarchy of grievance. Black equality is more than simple equality. Holder is here to defend the primacy of his faction as the vanguard of a revolution now triumphant:

In addition, the other major social movements of the latter half of the 20th century -- feminism, the nation's treatment of other minority groups, even the antiwar effort -- were all tied in some way to the spirit that was set free by the quest for African American equality. Those other movements may have occurred in the absence of the civil rights struggle, but the fight for black equality came first and helped to shape the way in which other groups of people came to think of themselves and to raise their desire for equal treatment. Further, many of the tactics that were used by these other groups were developed in the civil rights movement.

By more false accommodation he allows that feminism, anti-war protests and other minority rights movements "may" have happened without the black civil rights movement--insinuating that they probably would have not. When Holder goes on to assert that black history is too little studied, and that "African American history is American history", he declares that black history is more than American history, and greater than any other group's American history.

The line is that we must continually revisit the sins of the past to understand our present. But in reality the better things get in the present, the more the self-interested must recourse to the dismal past, and the more the present has to be compared to an ideal of race relations that has never existed and may not be possible. There is no historical precedent for America, and nothing like her at present.

The regions from where America's "disadvantaged minorities" originate cannot compare in wealth, opportunity or liberty. Resentment of this humiliating reality feeds into that encouraged by the dishonest class of political opportunists represented by Holder. The language of civil rights has become an affront, no longer condemnatory of practice but of a people and a nation: the long history of Western civil liberties is only begun with the American civil rights movement and invalidated by the interlude of American slavery. "Simplistic", indeed.

We are in the late decadent phase of the civil rights movement. Declaring victory and demobilizing is not an option--this would involve the voluntary surrender of power, something that does not happen. Power is only surrendered under coercion or dissipated over time. The latter threat panics Holder and friends. Pretext must be found to justify power. Enemies, if they don't appear, must be found. First, they are said to be hiding among us. Then, the enemy hides latent within each of us. Our eternal vigilance against "hateful" thought is a population regulating itself on behalf of power.

Holder's acknowledgement of the problematic nature of diversity reveals an internal contradiction. By unmindful incrementalism we went from the noble ideals of equality and tolerance to their near-opposite: diversity as a goal in itself. Even now one cannot suggest publicly that a policy of ethnic diversifying is no more legitimate than one of ethnic cleansing, and no more fair. And while ethnic cleansing has a long, sordid history, ethnic diversifying has none at all.

A multiracial democratic republic worthy of the name will defend equality before the law against those who equate it with equality of results. It's too late in the game to deny that fairness in hiring and education produces racial inequality--inequality that, as we've seen, does not necessarily benefit the majority. Ethnic diversity and democracy are thus at odds. This was once a given; now it is heresy. But it is heresy only because we think it's awful that it should be so. Thus far we have chosen not to reconcile a diverse population to democracy, but to reconcile democracy to a diverse population. This may be inevitable. But, as the truth is always worth knowing and no subterfuge lasts forever, we would do well to call the Attorney General's bluff.

Heckling the Coronation

During his first year in office, President Obama can be expected to unquestioningly acquiesce to the consensus demanding he oversee an increase in public debt twice as large, as a percentage of GDP, as any year in the Roosevelt administration. He will do this because, as any successful politician, he is congenitally incapable of recognizing, much less offering resistance to, the elite's will to power (known to the benighted as bipartisan consensus). A fish cannot know it is wet, and a politician cannot be made aware of the recurring tendency of elite design to diverge too far from the common good, mostly because he cannot distinguish between the two.

The intent of this radical increase in public indebtedness is to somehow stave off the inevitable reckoning of the last two decades of imprudent public and (far more, of far less appreciated consequence) private borrowing, preserving the illusion that we can sustain a standard of living based on greed and the serial contrivances of speculative and, now, credit bubbles.

Even as the new president takes us to task for our irresponsibility and "cynicism," he assures the gilded class among us that he's quite prepared to defer onto your grandchildrens' grandchildren the cost of propping up a system founded on irresponsibility, illusion and instant gratification. As much as it takes, apparently. Never accuse the new president of lacking nerve.

While citing the "lessons of the Great Depression", the new administration will be taking out this mortgage on a nation no longer, as it was in the thirties, rich in the resource that was still only just becoming the key to global power and industrial might, oil; a nation poised to exploit vast stores of still unrealized industrial and human capital; a nation that would enter into a great war that would act as the ultimate stimulus program, bringing together all of these factors in one unified effort and leaving our global competition broke and broken. That nation was like a contained spring straining to expand. The spring has since sprung.

Now it is the elderly percentage of the population, the poor (whom we continue to import from abroad, lest we fall prey to "nativism" or "protectionism") along with their attendant entitlements and social programs; now it is the cost of energy and food, that are poised for growth. Ours is a nation already drained by two unnecessary and unsustainable wars, that are weakening us relative to an increasingly resentful and disdainful world. Now it is a nation that doesn't know how to deploy a massive stimulus, of corporations that employ as many or more abroad as they do at home and view any sense of allegiance to the nation that charters and protects them as a sacrilege; of governments and municipalities incapable of large projects due to a self-conflicted complex of regulations and patronage programs.

Since the imagined conservative rebirth of the "Reagan revolution," we have been steadily selling off our industrial base in what Paul Craig Roberts aptly identifies as a system of labor arbitrage. This process is unguided by anything but aggregated greed, and for that reason its champions are probably correct about its inevitability. If it had a deliberate end it would be that the parceling out of our capacity to build things must be complete long before any near-equilibrium in global wages and production costs manifests a floor beneath this stomach-churning descent and thus ends its profitability. Our industrial base will end up somewhere, just not here. Perhaps at that point we will lure it back with our desperate willingness to work for starvation wages (brilliant!), provided of course our foreign friends have developed the keen distaste for "nationalism" and "protectionism" with which we are so selflessly blessed.
In conjunction with this halving of manufacturing's share of GDP, we have doubled finance's share of same. Like the imagined endless bounty to be found in treating a perfectly fine industrial capacity as if it's the object of a salvage operation (akin to jumping out of a perfectly good airplane) to be parted out and liquidated, we've also bamboozled ourselves into believing in the infinite divisibility of money and confidence, in an inexhaustible fifth dimension of wealth to be mined moving money about--check that, the money need not move, nor even exist other than as digital 0s and 1s in our computer programs. Observing this remarkable displacement of the physical realm, one soon wonders why we don't simply declare ourselves wealthier. Of course we've pretty much done just that.

But that declaration was really a loan application. The goods received for that loan abound: the exurbs were overextended and their now derelict far reaches stand shuttered, monuments to a different sort of failure of imagination--too much, not too little; the electronics still entrance us and dictate our daily lives; the massive plasma televisions still emit their comforting, hypnotizing glow, even from the humblest abodes; cinematic wonders produced by massive allocations of money, logistics and manpower--productions akin to small mercenary wars of plunder--still entrance us in theatres. Even the President makes a fetish of the dull convenience of his Blackberry, confident to the end in the transcendent efficacy of instant communications and the cool factor. Time to pay for all this stuff or default; there is no third way. Contrary to what we're being told, deficits matter, more than ever.

The president was admirably sober in his inaugural address (prompting one acolyte to concede, "well, he's not perfect"), calling for shared responsibility for the calamity upon us. Normally I'm all for us taking ourselves to task as a people, but it must be noted that now the powerful hector the common for doing precisely as instructed: borrowing and consuming. There has long been a consensus favoring consumption over saving, probably because those who gain access to the privileges of power by adopting the consensus, whatever it is, in the same way one once adopted the dominant religion, knew that this was the only politically feasible course of action. To be on the wrong side of this may have been far-sighted, but it was not politically advantageous or financially lucrative. Curiously, this state of affairs remains. But then that's the problem with elite consensus, which I don't pretend to have a substitute for, it's a bit like a company's management--their failure is the company's failure. When they go, everything goes. Management does not resign en masse, and the elite doesn't acknowledge its errors (or its existence).

Our elite has failed us. Don't expect that to be featured in the official proclamations. Whose "dogma" (to use the phrase that President Obama, in one of his brilliant ironic turns, used to stigmatize his political opposition simultaneous with a call to unity) was it that declared profligacy a virtue and thrift a vice, after all? How sophisticated did the elite expect (or want) a forklift driver in Tennessee to be about finance or monetary policy? Has he, derided as fat and lazy and unfit for the global economy by people whose highest aspiration is to one day read from a teleprompter while presenting television audiences with an inoffensive visage, worked less for more? No; he's worked more and gone further into debt for less.

Still, the last sanctioned form of bigotry, that against him (provided he's white, and a he, of course) will be the redoubt sought by our desperate ruling caste. Someone will be blamed for the coming degradation in our prospects and standard of living. In another time it might have been minorities and immigrants. We always make the mistake of fighting the current war as the last, thus the endless evocations of the Great Depression now. Likewise, some will compel us to tilt at the windmill of a racial, fascist reaction. Some of them will be deluded; others will merely be resourceful.

And resourceful they have been. At some point it became something of a scandal to be too white; maybe it was when a photo of three firefighters at Ground Zero made a perfect image to be cast in bronze but for their inconvenient accuracy as a racial sampling of the fallen. The diverse racial makeup of the new first family is proclaimed the new standard, and we are cued to shudder at the thought of reverting to our dismal past.

This declaration of a new model of superiority would be more bearable if it wasn't just (in its least destructive aspect) one more impingement on merit; but the reality that it marks out for exclusion the majority of families in this country (for being insufficiently integrated, though I'm certain we're not about to begin calling groups to task for being uniformly non-white) seems not merely bigoted (which it very much is) but mad. I'm just retrograde enough to cling to that quaint notion of equality that has been so much bandied about during this week's festivities, just so lacking in sophistication to get the impression the references now to color of skin and content of character mean precisely the opposite of the words expressed.

But that noble ideal, having been too long useful to the corrupt, too often resorted to by the craven, has, in a remarkably similar fashion, been as devalued through overindulgent minting as our monetary currency. It's now as cheaply produced and disposable as those "collectible" Obama coins and plates we see advertised on television (and made in China).

But there is more than absurdity here. There is also the deliberate stoking of fear and anger; the purposeful manipulation of white neurosis and black grievance, all so a man, and his attendant factional allies, can gain power claiming an almost superstitious capacity to allay these things (to "heal"). An act (in the theatrical sense) of dubious legitimacy and responsibility. This is the sinister underside to the mass reverie (and there's always a sinister underside to mass reverie) about President Obama's "historic" ascension. This is the leer beneath his already iconic smile. But, if your conditioning against crimethink hasn't already caused you to reject me out of hand for somehow wandering into the political minefield of race, this brings us to the second contradiction in the president's inaugural address for which I will, next time we meet, offer one last lonely jeer lost amidst the adulatory crowd--his avowal to unencumber science in public policy.

Make Believe and Reality

Last summer, as Barack Obama directed the subtle intimidation of fawning European crowds (millions of charisma-intoxicated Germans can't be wrong!) at those Americans still retaining the quaint notion presidential elections are domestic affairs not subject to global opinion, at least one of his acolytes in the media here in the formal remnant of the United States gushed that Senator Obama had thereby assumed the leadership role vacated by President Bush--by acquiring the geopolitical equivalent of an impressive TVQ score. "Power begets more power, absolutely" Mr. Rich enthused, apparently without irony.

We'll leave aside for the moment the interlocutor's widely shared confusion--that President Bush does, or that President Obama can be expected to, maintain a leadership role that is more substantial than ceremonial. The inverse relationship between the freedom of action afforded a president and the power vested in the executive office continues to grow, along with the complexity of the job and Congress' by now institutional cowardice. Likewise the relationship between the caliber of man drawn from the electable and the reverential expectations we have of the office. For this we have only ourselves to blame. Remarkable leaders are possible only by astounding coincidence in this environment, and they will not be fashioned out of creative desperation (witness the fiction of President Bush's post-9/11, thrust-upon greatness).

Of course, before Barack Obama's world tour touched down amid the automatic adulation of the children and the childlike of Europe, he'd already performed a much smaller gig in front of a tougher crowd in Israel, where he dutifully asserted that any amount of force (or US munitions) Israel deems necessary to deter Hamas' crude rocket attacks is justified, because he has children of his own (the children of Gaza, and how their deaths might perpetuate the cycle of violence--something the president-elect has at least feigned awareness of in the past--would not be allowed to complicate this simple calculus). Yes, he doesn't really believe this, he was just saying--which is precisely the point. Even now, three weeks before the nation changes administrations in a state of bewildering economic and geopolitical crisis, the next president of the United States has little experience beyond just saying.

That rhetorical bet of last July is now being called, before the president-elect has even sat at the table in earnest, as sanction for a gruesomely disproportionate military response leveled upon an all but powerless adversary. The precocious senator, having grown used to posturing before people intoxicated by the imagined wisdom inherent in his mulatto moral superiority, and having his elegant vapidities received as profundities, has forgotten, or never properly learned, that words have meaning. Of course he's not alone; we've all forgotten this. Barack Obama wouldn't be possible otherwise.

More to the point, this man who's made a religion of power (with which he has, like the born-again Christian and his savior, a close personal relationship), has ascended with such absurd ease and rapidity to its pinnacle he hasn't had the opportunity to develop sufficient respect for its consequences. His make-believe of last summer, playing at global "leadership", is suddenly harsh reality. Israel's hard bargainers weren't just looking for him to genuflect properly (this much is to be expected), but were looking for something a little more concrete. Obliterate the Gazan ghetto with America's finest military hardware before an outraged world, burning through American soft power as rapidly as we expend her munitions? Yes we can!

So the presumption and airs of that heady summer last are nowhere to be found as the president-elect ducks questions on his way from gym to golf course, his sudden shyness papered over by embarrassing beefcake shots. "One president at a time" is how the dodge is put into words, even as Israel's actions and Ehud Barak's assertions, placing limitations upon the incoming administration with the complicity of the current one, reveal it for what it truly is, capitulation to a forced reality. The economic crisis warranted no such respectful inaction, but rather haste in supporting the status quo; Obama's duck-and-cover in this instance is really the same thing after all, reassurance to the players upon which the new president's cherished power is utterly dependent that he will not step out of line. As for that much-hyped esteem which the rest of the world so cheaply bestowed on our frail young prince, it will wear out as quickly and to the same disappointment of any cheap purchase if Mr. Obama doesn't redeem it with real, yeah, "change".

Deconstructing Barry

(And the Myth of White Racism)

She had seen May Day parades when people were still enthusiastic or did their best to feign enthusiasm...As a group approached the reviewing stand, even the most blasé faces would beam with dazzling smiles, as if trying to prove they were properly joyful, or, more precisely, in proper agreement.
(…)
Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.
--Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

You know he talk so hip he’s twistin’ my melon man…
Don't you know he can make you forget you're the man?
--Happy Mondays, Step On

The appeal of Barack Obama is best understood as kitsch.

The Obama campaign, as any, is more a work of art than of argument. It is (present tense, for it continues) a narrative blend of hagiography, historical fiction, mythology and propaganda. Like any work of art it may blend various genres and themes, but it is ultimately of one specific type. All political movements rely more or less on kitsch, but the Obama campaign, stripped to its essence, is kitsch.

This phenomenon-as-political movement is a masterwork of improvisational, interactive environmental theatre, with the electorate as its participatory audience. But a political campaign is no mere work of fancy or fabrication. When power is the end for which the narrative is the means, one cannot refuse his role in the play, even in opposition. We are all players now in Barry's melodrama.

What do I mean herein by “kitsch”? Not the common usage that has rendered the word little more than a synonym for "inferior." Nor any of the only slightly narrower meanings of unsophisticated, anachronistic, culturally irrelevant or crude. I do not mean merely that it is sentimental; though sentiment is its active ingredient. I refer specifically to that self-conscious and obliquely self-referential aspect of kitsch; of kitsch as the celebration of a given sentiment as its own end and justification, as an ennobling thing it its own right. The quote above captures it better than I can. In that part of Kundera's book devoted to the subject he notes how ubiquitous and permanent kitsch is, how inseparable it is from the whole of culture and human existence. The author was not only outlining kitsch's role in the totalitarian movement that looms grey and dour over his story, but also conceding the kitsch element in that story.

Content does not make kitsch; kitsch is in the nature of our relationship to content. Kitsch is the self-indulgent celebration of one’s capacity to feel and emote, through the deliberate suppression of doubt, nuance and skepticism. Kitsch is not the artist saying "behold this truth", but the audience prompted to declare, “behold our love of truth." Kitsch is the saccharine film soundtrack that drops in before anything has actually occurred, cuing us to emotion. For the acolytes of the Obama campaign the kitsch element can be summed up as, "behold the depth of our feeling."

This is kitsch's appeal, directly to our vanity. Even as we seem to be drowning in the language of its opposite and mortal enemy, irony, kitsch is everywhere. Even our gangsta rappers indulge in kitsch; they are among the worst offenders. The unfortunate rap theme written for Barack Obama was a prime example of kitsch, by a familiar practitioner thereof.

Kitsch's prevalence and permanence are so great that unravelling it from the totality of our experience is daunting, and most will (perhaps with more wisdom than this author) come to sigh that it is "everywhere" before moving on to more productive pursuits. This is unfortunate, because that very same prevalence is precisely why an understanding of kitsch is so important. There is no sensible "anti" kitsch position, as if we will eradicate the ineradicable. It would be unfortunate if one political faction or other were to successfully fashion it into an adjectival anchor to weigh down their adversaries, creating a new term of calumny to go with "fascist", "communist", "racist", et cetera ad nauseum. But we're well served in better understanding it, so as to better understand ourselves and that vast area of effective human behavior that is neither wholly rational nor studiously moral, but desperately and sometimes dangerously emotional.

What makes kitsch bad art, its unearned catharsis, makes it the most effective demagogy. It requires nothing of us other than acquiescence to the sentiment. Because kitsch is the willed absence of doubt, it acts as a neatly closed emotional system, impervious to skepticism and hostile to introspection--herein lies its political genius. Through propaganda, kitsch arouses revolutionary ardor and imposes totalitarian control. Kitsch fires up the rabble and cows the mass.

Those few of us left capable of viewing the Obama phenomenon with detachment will recognize its seductive offer of an easy, celebratory catharsis, its encouragement and indulgence of the individual's sense of moral superiority. The effectiveness of this appeal is manifest in the adoring crowds, in the deliberately incurious and uncritical appreciation of the candidate and now president-elect that continues. In the candidate's unspoken collusion with the media to equate his personal ambition with the civil rights movement itself and to subsequently equate any rejection of the candidate's race-based appeal with a rejection of his race, holding criticism of the campaign guilty of bigotry until deemed innocent.

In the wake of electoral victory, the rhetorical purges would begin within hours. One such story in the New York Times portrayed Southern white support for John McCain not as merely as evidence of the declining influence of these voters--but assigned a reverse cause-and-effect, ascribing their declining influence (as a sort of punishment) to their resistance to Barack Obama.
They were presented with candidate brandishing his race as a value--a moral superiority--in and of itself. They rejected the race-based candidate, voting more than usual for the nationalist Republican over the liberal Democrat. The charge then follows that they've rejected Obama entirely because he's black (not because he runs, almost entirely, as black; needless to say, any automatic support accruing to Obama for his race is, curiously, anti-racist); of course, this is then fed back into the system, as proof of the desperate need of the candidate, to rout once and for all this "racism".

In the case of Obama, kitsch appeal operates at a heightened advantage, cuing a long-conditioned response in whites inclined toward critical self-examination and conspicuous expressions of tolerance. This practice has always come with an expectation of change, of eventual improvement in relations among the races generally, between blacks and whites specifically. This subconscious expectation of a final conclusion is borne of our familiarity with the cinematic arc of film.

But after decades of unprecedented state action and an opening up of the culture none would have imagined possible, the foreseen idyll of perfect racial equality and its ensuing harmony (the kitsch promise), has faded into the harsh reality of a stubborn inequality. Inequality increasingly reveals itself as the predictable result of a society unprecedented in both its fairness and ethnic diversity.

But this cannot be said. Even as blacks gain cultural influence disproportionate to their numbers but not talents, they continue to lag in the professions and business pursuits. Meanwhile, other minority groups advance disproportionately as well up through the ranks of society. The rate of change, the opening up of opportunity in a society that not long was as segregated as the rest of the world remains to this day is nothing short of revolutionary. There is no historical precedent for America; yet, the more liberal, the more meritocratic our society, the deeper the resentment of inequality--and, contrary to our hoary egalitarian assumptions, we can expect increasing material inequality as the result of increasing equal opportunity. We have the unfortunate task of reconciling a diverse and restive population to this humiliating reality. Strategies are subconsciously developed.

The historical reality and present romance of black suffering in America assigns a moral premium to blackness; not unrelated, the general appetite for and fascination with black culture assigns it a cultural premium. Routinely, a thing is dismissed as inferior or, yes, derided as kitsch, if it is deemed too "white." All of this serves to heighten, in the projecting mind of the audience, the candidate's natural gifts, and assign others not in evidence, such as wisdom.
Whether he understands it or not, it was in pursuit of these structural advantages that Barack Obama abandoned his origins and embarked on his anthropological excursion into the heart of African America.

Instinctively the ambitious sense the path of power. The dirty little open secret of Obama's personal narrative is the "multicultural" candidate's lack of curiosity in things beyond the narrow and provincial Ghetto Gatsby identity he's crafted for himself. Quite contrary to the attempts of some to portray the man as foreign and Muslim because of his time in Indonesia, what's truly striking about that is his apparent--or deliberate--indifference to the experience.

It was there that he and his feminist mother were exposed to a stark counter-example to the West; it was there, not in the United States, that he was bullied for being different. It was from there that he was sent home to take advantage of the vastly superior opportunities and advantages of home and, eventually, to entrance earnest white liberals relating the emotional torment induced in him by the outrages inflicted on a Black Man in America: someone asked to touch his hair, his grandmother feared an intimidating black beggar (who "could have been my brother" he narrates, impervious to the irony that this man for whom he imagines a comfortably remote brotherhood is assaulting an actual relative, for whom the young Barack apparently felt not a moment's protectiveness). For Barack Obama, Indonesia and Hawaii look great on a resume, but their experience and contrasts aren't of much practical use.

In light of this, his attitude toward conservative whites, his charges of narrow bigotry and provincialism, would be found laughably oblivious if not outrageous placed in their proper context, but one gets the impression he doesn't truly understand the nature of his metamorphosis, of his ambition and rise. The language, for him as well as his acolytes, is too seductive; its effect too successful; its rewards, he has brilliantly demonstrated, only as limited as the ambition and energy that harness it.

Examining the phenomenon one is struck--and perhaps reassured--at how unexceptional, outside of ambition, is that which we know of Barack Obama. Having deliberately veiled himself in a cliche, welcoming the projection onto him of the neuroses and hopes of a restive nation, he is like the void in the eye of the storm.

In this environment the convention that structural disadvantages and white attitudes account for the lack of black success in business and the professions, for disproportionate rates of incarceration and poverty, for the whole host of ills for which each white individually is daily hectored to feel responsibility, as a feature of collective guilt, is not merely unsupportable, it's absurd.

The more evident this becomes the more fiercely defended the taboo against questioning collective guilt as a model for race relations. The absence of comprehensive societal equality requires ever more fanciful explanations; ever greater expressions of commitment to equality of results are required of public servants; ever greater denunciations of a nation that has taken historically unprecedented actions to achieve it. This is the pathological behavior of a neurotic society. The nation yearns for a climax, a final act of absolution. It stubbornly recedes the more we strive for it. Thus Barack.

To maintain the taboo, any resentment of this must be equated with bigotry; skeptics are ostracized and deprived of status. Propagandists distinguish themselves fashioning rationales and assigning blame for a distressing reality. In America the civil rights movement has made the familiar trek from revolution to totalitarianism. Kitsch has sustained it on that journey.

Of course in this cultural milieu, adopting the collective guilt model so regularly and inelegantly expressed in such arenas as Barack Obama's former long-time church, "whiteness" as an ineradicable sin in itself is a necessity. The candidate himself stated as much clearly when describing slavery as "America's original sin", as if the institution originated and continues here, rather than in Africa. He also means, more to the point, "cardinal sin". There is no final absolution for white America, just perpetual contrition. The fact that this immodest and wildly presumptuous phrase isn't controversial in the least, acquiesced to by silent consensus, is cultural sanction itself. The Caucasian holds second class moral status. Whiteness is the "human stain" of a stigmatized identity. This is too valuable a bludgeon for those who wield it (ironically they are mostly white elites, mobilizing minority resentment to bring their white opponents to heel) to be surrendered without a fight.

Ritual condescension of offended identity groups is a requirement of polite society and public stature. To escape a censure that grows harsher the more hollow the condescension becomes, whites individually and as a group place a premium on the achievements of prominent blacks, who must be found and promoted to assuage and take advantage of this. This is the environment Barack Obama burst upon with his 2004 speech to the Democratic national convention.

Barack Obama effortlessly assumes the mantle of grievance for the greatest sins of the nation--slavery, segregation, disenfranchisement. But, contrary to the habitual assumption, his unique personal history gives him not a greater understanding of this history, having neither the typical black American nor typical white American experience, but a lesser understanding. Barack Obama stood outside of this epic dynamic, looking on with envy. His choice of a fabricated identity on one side of it should disabuse us of the assumed inherent misery and unfairness imposed upon black America--no one is so fortunate to be born an American than an African American. There is no cachet in being white.

For Barack, American race relations is a cherished romance that became one with his considerable ambition. This romance will not be sacrificed now. Observers silently take solace in the assumed falsity of his black struggle. About the time of the election a prominent political reporter could be found on a television interview program, with perhaps unintentional frankness, trumpeting Obama as an African American without the African American experience and, more to the point, anger; touting, to put it crudely, his inauthentic blackness.

For a candidate to arrive on the scene as a sort of prefabricated historical figure, for his ascension to be defined as an act of justice and absolution; in light of the grand myth of the civil rights movement in America and the sheer power of this narrative--the wonder of Barack Obama is not that he is here, but that it has taken this long for him to arrive.

The news reports following the candidate's triumph proclaimed the fall of a "barrier." But the barrier had faded long ago--in fact it was over ten years ago the nation was so transfixed by an African American public figure, Colin Powell, for the very same reasons it's now enamored of Barack Obama, that at one point it seemed he could have chosen between the presidential candidacy of either political party--this before his political affiliation was confirmed. In fact, the automatic goodwill bestowed on that man has still not dissipated, despite the fact his personal career of mediocrity in powerful positions has only been interrupted by his implication in the misinformation campaign preceding the Iraq war.
Barack Obama did not "smash a barrier", as the headlines trumpeted. Barack Obama was carried along by a powerful force to where he is. Barack Obama was inevitable.

We're probably fortunate it is this man, and not some other--probably because he seems decent enough, and relatively free of corruption for an ambitious politician; this of course we've taken on faith, as part of the deal. He may even prove capable.

It is not entirely an earnest if misguided aspiration to justice from which arises this absurdity; it is also a form of chauvinism. It comes from the cloistered sense that history begins with and is confined to America. This truncated historical context is accompanied by a shrinking of the present's context, ignoring the example of every other nation in the world that must grapple with the challenges of diverse populations and tattered histories. The libel compares the nation to an idyll that has never existed, not to the world that is and has been; it's a further outrage that the imagined idyll is born of a distinctly Western and Judeo-Christian concept of equality before God, regardless of race. The charge that "America is a racist country" is meaningless placed outside of its proper context: as compared with what other country? Likewise the hoary fashion and shallow conceit condemning Western culture as a whole. In America we alternate between ignorance and disdain not only for the past but for the world beyond our borders--even, or especially, those who routinely condemn America for its racism.

Contrary to the mass conceit of the Obama campaign, it is more this chauvinism and not a post-racial, global consciousness upon which Barack Obama depends. Escaping us is the irony of this moral bludgeon being wielded by a man far more likely to be descended from Kenyan (as well as European) slave traders than black American slaves. Again, there is no environmental history of blackness for Barack to call upon, only the birthright bestowed by his transitory father; only, in the end, the color of his skin and the features of his face. Barack Obama is a white liberal living out the exquisite dream of actually being black. More relevantly, he is an ambitious politician taking advantage of it.

To be successful a campaign must identify itself with and within a single, all-encompassing myth. The McCain campaign attempted to make itself one with the myth of national greatness, through the personal narrative of heroism of its candidate. The Obama campaign, more successfully, made itself one with the myth of civil rights. Ultimately the point is to present the candidate as the living human embodiment of Providence. In a post-religious age, politics and celebrity fill the evangelistic void. Personality captures power and familiar interests and factions advance behind this wedge.

By myth I do not mean illusion. Fundamental truths are revealed to us through the myths we hold dear. The fundamental truths our candidates sought to co-opt this year were the necessity of love of country in one instance, the justice of equality before the law in the other. But through the vulgarizing exploitation of the ambitious, a nation's founding mythology becomes flattery and demagogy, mere caricature. The fundamental parent truths underlying our mythology are difficult, humbling and, perhaps most relevant to this, limiting. Through political expedience our founding myths are becoming overladen with contradiction, no longer recognizable to us.

The disappointments in store will reveal to us that a nation is not sustained by wealth, or power, or even democratic process, but the binding power of a fundamental truth that, unlike the flattery of kitsch, demands something of us and guarantees nothing. What we may be witnessing now is our degenerate end as a people that brandishes as a weapon a mythology it no longer believes.

John McCain's Base Base

Perhaps you‘ve seen it, the near-precise moment when John McCain lost control of his campaign. The scene is a now familiar one, the bogus “town-hall meeting.” He’s passing the microphone around like a decrepit Donahue, standing before a woman who starts by saying she “can't trust" Obama; McCain is nodding along, intimately engaged for the moment in manipulating the neurotic angst that is the dwindling lifeblood of his campaign. About the time she says her fear is due to what she’s been reading, a look of worry creases his trademark frown of condescending concern; he’s contemplating preemptively snatching the microphone back from her, when she lays it on him: Obama is “an Arab”. She's managed to confuse her slander (assuming there isn‘t an “Obama is an Arab” email careening about the internet), but it matters not.

Hope and Hype

(minor clarification: "the Mortician" is David Axelrod, for his dour visage, not Ms. Obama)

Ah, it had nothing to do with Kennedy. Still, all that vigor disappeared once he found out he couldn't get anything done.
--Mad Men

Events, dear boy, events.
--Harold MacMillan

To emerge sane from the recent party conventions and the endurance test of a campaign ahead of us, one must block out most television coverage, now a carnival sideshow more useful for the revelatory subtext of elite disconnect and desperation rather than as reportage or commentary. MSNBC, once their coverage degenerated into the equivalent of a high school clique war, had me tuning in just to see if Matthews and Olbermann would finally consummate their disdain in flailing, flinching combat. Alas, our powdered and pancaked schoolyard brawlers have been separated. I will have to recourse to imagining how it might have played: the sound of their coats rustling against their microphones, their heavy breathing and curses as they grapple, in the background the chant from the convention floor, U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! Jarring cut to a patriotism-themed Chevrolet commercial.

Still the antics of our television journalists were dignified in comparison to the degenerate discourse that passed for political speech-making at the Republican convention. The great democratic experiment is destroying its laboratory. Such concentrated absurdity I can take only in very small doses. So I'm left deliberately ignorant of the polls or consensus regarding the political raffle, relying on my faulty impressions, which usually fail.

Nonetheless I'm increasingly convinced that Barack Obama is doomed to disappoint despite, if not partly because of, John McCain's crass and corrupt attempt to trump the Democrats' race card with his own gender card. I'm not sure it matters any more. I feel like Henry Kissinger watching the Iranians and Iraqis go at it, lamenting they can't both lose, hoping for maximum carnage. Forget about lesser evils. The path of lesser evil has led us to the hell of mediocrity and corruption. I'm taking the advice of a bumper sticker I saw long ago, when things were nowhere near as bad: don't vote, it only encourages them. But I reserve my constitutional right to indulge in America's true pastime, complaint.

As for Senator Obama he projects, other than mediocrity made conspicuous by the media's studiously averted gaze, uncertainty--if one only dare look. His selection of the buffoonish but "safe" Joe Biden (holding all the cards, he checks nervously) betrays his lack of confidence. He's gotten way out in front of his plotted career trajectory, propelled there by a force he set in motion but now under its own creepy mass-delusional momentum. The man suggests something more than the usual politician's insincerity. It's there beneath the condescension of phony bipartisan comity and kitschy "eloquence"; his unsuitability to the task of taking the helm of a rudderless ship of state held in the aggregated current created by multiple corrupt factions. Does he hear the falls ahead?

Not only is the miraculous feat of racial unity his acolytes expect (bless their delusional hearts) impossible, but his actual goals, to the extent he has any beyond his cobbled together, platitudinous wish-list of a platform, are beyond the means of a government holding a ballooning debt obligation in an imploding economy (not to mention ever-expanding military commitments, guided by something bearing no resemblance to national interest, in a world hardening against us). Our politicians are promising change and change is coming, just not on their, or our, terms.

It's the fear of change that motivates us, as always, despite the quadrennial phony demands for it. The public pretends it wants change and politicians pretend they can deliver it. Despite the mantra we, naturally, fear change, no matter how necessary.
Likewise, Barack Obama's campaign is more nostalgic than forward-looking or reformist. The Democrats have the problem of complicity in the same criminal travesty that promises to return them to power. The time has come for a fundamental reorientation of foreign policy and public indebtedness, but the Democrats are as incapable of or unwilling to address these dangerously related issues as the Republicans. Aside from their disingenuous call to reform, their partly diversionary answer to our predicament is to revisit the now corrupt and anachronistic civil rights movement. It's their strong suit after all. They've produced a sequel of their biggest hit. Much of the public and the political center is lining up to see it. It's a heck of a lot less trying than a fundamental reconsideration of our role in the world.

Barack Obama is successful not because we despair for the state of race relations--quite the opposite. He's successful because we wish to insulate ourselves with the comforting myth of the civil rights movement--because, contrary to the Democrats' never-ending, opportunistic appeals to racial resentment and hysteria, legal equality and civil rights we do better than anyone else in the world. We do it so well we don't know when to stop. We've decided it works for all ills and injuries, here applying it like a balm on a broken back, when the patient needs to be in traction. Combine it with our other obsessive compulsions, self-congratulation and promotion, and Barack Obama is inevitable.

9-11 broke our confidence and Iraq hasn't, as hoped, repaired it. We want to subsume the criminal horrors of the war within a narrative of "victory"; we want the easy credit bacchanal to resume; we want cheap gas and cheap thrills; we want the world to recede back into the murk beyond the electronic ether of "reality" television (what an ironic concept); we want to continue to insulate and inoculate; above all, we want to feel good about ourselves. It's a form of kitsch.

Politicians, with their monomaniacal ambition and endless rationalizations for the corruption, rapine and bloodshed they sometimes engage in and sometimes ignore, are alien creatures to the common man, but they're the common man's creations. They reflect back on us; they are the living embodiment of our decadence. And this year we are enraptured by two egos in possession of corpses channelling competing narratives of personal suffering and turmoil. It's the first election of the Oprah era.
The Economist, achieving exquisite oblivion as only the combination of sophistication and convention can, recently ran a cover of our two presidential candidates under the banner,"America at its Best". Let's hope not.

The Democratic Party presents its candidate as the long awaited antidote to the timeless disease of racial strife. The party has so long told the lie, and acquired so many store front preachers of the false but profitable faith that arises from it--the lie being that racial discrimination and inequality are the distinct products of white imperfection (without irony), to be corrected by the stern hand of government intervention--that it has fallen for its own con, and is no longer in a position to manage it. There is no turning back now, and the aging party members hope that somehow, some way, it will all resolve peacefully and profitably. But an inherent contradiciton ultimately has to be resolved, and if your contradiction is that your demographic is inherently evil but you are not because you recognize it and wish to atone by force of law (you are one of the good ones), you may find yourself without a chair when this music stops (see Clinton, 2008). Perhaps this explains the appeal of the "Hope" mantra, all but chanted with closed eyes and palms turned heavenward.

The very resentments and passions Obama conjures threaten to consume him, whether in electoral defeat or in executive failure. Cold comfort can be taken in the fact that there really is only so much any president can do, despite the expansive powers of the office. We should turn the Klieg lights of celebrity away from candidates and spotlight those around them.

But the man is unsuited, despite all the cloying, conspicuous gushing of a press that retains its liberal bias only where it will do the most harm, so eager to praise the intelligence and character of a black figure, any black figure who doesn't threaten to upset things too much and take his rhetoric too seriously. If it isn’t already a Chris Rock joke it should be, this impulse.
Of course Barack Obama does take his worst rhetoric seriously (what he modestly describes as the "big heart" forever in conflict with his political "hard head"--foist such megalomaniacal characters on yourself at your peril, America), but no one, not even his political opposition, wants to be caught noticing. The man's reliance on forty-year old political assumptions indicates not just a disturbing radicalism but an adolescent intellect. But even in counting on his lack of sincerity--as witnessed by the Wright controversy--his admirers build on his myth.

The Obama phenomenon resembles an all-night group cocaine bender, with everyone blathering away, betraying and ignoring the same desperation evident behind the dilated pupils and in the cheaply conjured, shallow fraternity; loss in the election or failure in office will be the hard comedown of the following morning, with the sickly morning light coming through the blinds, when everyone realizes it’s over, that they’re not really going to go vacationing together next summer, all the talk now a bit embarrassing…

It seems it will all resolve in recrimination for the “racism” that just wouldn’t let America finally reconcile her history of slavery and segregation. The tantrums will be entertaining at least. I’m sure some have already dim outlines of their “America’s Shame Continues” pieces.

And it is a shame, what with the neocons on the other side (or, rather, more heavily represented on the other side); why not make the Great Gesture and get it over with, one is tempted to say, the inevitable disappointment when Obama and the Mortician move into their new digs and realize the place is haunted to the rafters and the closets all filled with skeletons. Let the people and all the earnest twenty-something keyboard hotshots get their first lesson that human nature, resentment, bigotry, etc will not be vanquished by token. Used to be we realized human imperfection wasn’t the province of governance but its confounding influence.

And who knows, Barack might prove capable of wise selection from the cacophony of competing voices and jockeying hangers-on, and might manage to restore some constitutional integrity, arrest or turn back some corrupting trends, despite the fact that in Chicago’s target-rich environment he always opted on the side of the Machine. And it is depressing how consistently he did.

Governer Palin (who, by the way, I like--for governor of Alaska) may be McCain's gamble but it's a gamble that promises (or threatens) to pay off big; every time Obama calls attention to her lack of heft he calls attention to his own, and an apparent inversion of his ticket's arrangement in this regard. But my favorite line comes from Politico, touting Obama/Biden's "forty years" of foreign policy experience--36 for Joe and four (rounding upwards) for Barack. Four years spent preparing this presidential run, as Obama himself noted would be necessary when asked about a possible presidential bid about the time he took the oath as a senator. He's rightly called on his presumption, but the real problem is with the opportunists about him. There's a charming, callow honesty to be found in the Senator's written and spoken record, which constitutes an epic ode to power (his first book is almost entirely a paean to power, and how it is achieved) in stark contrast to his contortionist campaign; more evidence his success has overtaken his wildest dreams.

But I suspect the Wonder Brother will lose, because he has no business being president and it's obvious (understanding the far more qualified candidate seems the far greater evil--and all that implies for the health of our system), leaving race relations rawer than ever, with Joe Lieberman as Secretary of State and Rudy Guiliani as Attorney General, God knows who else in the cabinet; meanwhile the party goes on at AEI, AIPAC, etc. As for us, we've run out of blow, and it's getting light outside.

And the Uncle Tim Goes to...

I used to be disgusted
now I try to be amused
--Elvis Costello, The Angels Want to Wear My Red Shoes

In Slate's unfortunately named "Big Idea" column, Jacob Weisberg, waving about the latest NY Times/CBS poll (PDF) like Joe McCarthy brandishing his list of names, campaigns for title of this season's most conspicuously contrite white (a la Steve Sailer's "Uncle Tim" sweepstakes) by pointing out that Racist White America is not singing along enthusiastically or harmoniously enough with the Obama fantasia (unlike the lockstep support and vicious turn against the Clintons of Black America, which is either an allowable double-standard or a post-racial phenomenon noticed only by, presumably, Racist Whites) and the unfortunate outcome of a McCain administration will not be the result of an unqualified candidate but of an unqualified people:

What with the Bush legacy of reckless war and economic mismanagement, 2008 is a year that favors the generic Democratic candidate over the generic Republican one. Yet Barack Obama, with every natural and structural advantage in the presidential race, is running only neck-and-neck against John McCain, a sub-par Republican nominee with a list of liabilities longer than a Joe Biden monologue. Obama has built a crack political operation, raised record sums, and inspired millions with his eloquence and vision. McCain has struggled with a fractious campaign team, lacks clarity and discipline, and remains a stranger to charisma. Yet at the moment, the two of them appear to be tied. What gives?

The "natural and structural" advantages are Obama's "charisma", celebrity, a tight campaign organization and a busload of money. We remain unconscionably non-responsive to the superficialities, and it must be you-know-what. John McCain may very well be the greater evil in this race, but to conclude that there's no contest here, between a junior senator of no achievement beyond leveraging a well-received, high-profile speech into a presidential nomination (assuming we're still capable of distinguishing between political maneuvering and actual governing) and a veteran senator and former congressman who nearly captured his party's nomination eight years ago is like being the only pothead in the room and berating everyone else for not finding your new lava lamp mesmerizing.

If Barack Obama was willing to risk power to contrast himself with our current catastrophic drift in foreign policy this "all else being equal" argument might carry some weight. A more principled campaign, if one were still possible, would. The unfortunate fact is that the American public is only too willing to forget about Iraq as long as the "surge is working" narrative can be made plausible through the two-minute drill of their brief daily encounters with the news cycle--and Obama is playing directly to that. So Weisberg's ilk is astounded that Interventionist Lite, offered by the Racial Candidate Lite, doesn't automatically trump the wrinkly old white guy, and the wrinkly old white folks feel more comfortable with one of their own. The harder our priestly media class has to work to uncover "racism" the shriller they get.

The real tragedy is this is all leading, somehow, to a McCain presidency. We have bigger fish to fry than the red herring of Obama's false promise of a "post-racial" future that is precisely the opposite of what he, and his class, desire, even if they thought it possible. His is a backward-looking appeal to racial guilt and the solidification of our current racial spoils system disguised as a march forward to reconciliation. It all increasingly seems destined to leave race relations rawer than ever, as evidenced by such as Weisberg's childlike hope resolving in a tantrum of melodramatic despair (see below).

What Obama's campaign is managing to do is convince people, with good reason, that racial resentment will be a feature of American life for a very long time. Of course, that was precisely the gist of Obama's grand speech on race, in the appalling presumption of an obscenely privileged man berating the nation that privileges him for its "original sin" of slavery--only in America is Barack Obama's campaign possible, and no need to worry Black America, it will never be enough. No one will ever ask you to forgive whites for their collective, historical guilt or relinquish your cherished romance of collective suffering, much less take note of the fact that no African population has ever had the power, freedom or opportunity that has been afforded African Americans. And why would Black America give up this advantage? I ask without irony or condemnation. It is mere human nature and no people in similar circumstances can be expected to behave differently. But I would be so very proud of a nation that at least made an effort to preserve its democratic republic and traditions, by, if ever so gently, acknowledging this reality.

Only in America is Barack Obama possible, indeed; no other nation is decadent enough to indulge in such absurdities. The pessimism and resentment infusing the Obama campaign is remarkable in light of the rhetoric. But the real tragedy is that the current crisis in America is no time for it. Obama seems destined to fail, largely because he has no business being president. It simply won't be enough to point out that the current executive has no business being president either, so therefore we must be bigots for rejecting this one.

It's unfortunate that so many Democrats decided they needn't take their bright, shiny new candidate for a test-drive before nominating him, but if he is capable of repairing the damage of the Bush administration it will only be by some astounding, fortuitous coincidence. No argument is offered that he is capable, just reprobation for any who dare ask.

Barack Obama wants to be president because he wants to be president. John McCain, God help us, has some more specific ideas about what he will do with the office. It's unfortunate that the Democrats' answer to arguably the most disastrous administration in American history is a precocious political wonder they Hope will require little Change in the way things are done. But I'll let Weisberg sum up the fatuity of it all:

Many have discoursed on what an Obama victory could mean for America. We would finally be able to see our legacy of slavery, segregation, and racism in the rearview mirror. Our kids would grow up thinking of prejudice as a nonfactor in their lives. The rest of the world would embrace a less fearful and more open post-post-9/11 America. But does it not follow that an Obama defeat would signify the opposite? If Obama loses, our children will grow up thinking of equal opportunity as a myth. His defeat would say that when handed a perfect opportunity to put the worst part of our history behind us, we chose not to. In this event, the world's judgment will be severe and inescapable: The United States had its day but, in the end, couldn't put its own self-interest ahead of its crazy irrationality over race.

"Crazy irrationality over race" indeed.
The first half of that remarkable paragraph is just the sort of appalling magical thinking that brings well deserved scorn upon the Obama campaign, which can be summed up thus: "here is a black candidate; reject him and you're a bigot." We are further chastised that the "the whole world is watching" expectantly. This bludgeon of an argument, so clumsily and creepily brandished in the unfortunate locale of Berlin, is rightly rejected. It's a cheap trick and a disappointing response from the Democrats to the Bush catastrophe. But then that's the point really; this is a bipartisan tragedy, and before the neocons broke out into the open field after 9/11 they patiently ground out the short yardage through administrations Democratic and Republican alike, and they have never been without blockers from the liberal interventionist line.
Another problem with the Great Gesture thinking regarding Obama is that it is contradicted repeatedly by the candidate, again, openly stated in his much lauded and little studied speech on race. There is a thinly veiled threat beneath it all, as evidenced by Weisberg's near panic about "the world's judgement" and "the United States had its day". It may very well be we've had our day, but I submit that the bizarre phenomenon of Barack Obama is evidence of that decline, not our only hope of escape. Of course this is what makes it so depressingly just another aspect of our masturbatory national pastime of self-flattery. Barack is here to make us feel better about ourselves without really trying to better ourselves. No wonder Oprah loves him.

Weisberg marvels at white "America's curious sense of racial grievance", citing the fact that twenty-six percent of white Americans answered that they have at one time or other "felt discriminated against"; presumably he will only be satisfied when the one hundred percent of them that are overtly discriminated against via a complex of federal and state law and regulation (that Barack Obama enthusiastically supports) are cowed into answering in the negative, or accepting the increasingly fanciful arguments that discrimination is not discrimination when it is codified into law and directed against the majority (how this will all work when whites constitute a plurality is anyone's guess, but judging by the subject herein, I wouldn't place any bets on that demographic shift bringing us into the sunlit open of a "post-racial" future where all claims are put to rest). I used to be disgusted...