A Letter to BoB
This may shock some of you, but I write for my blog and cross-post here. This post - which is not a resignation post, (in any context of the word “resignation”), is BoB’s and BoB’s alone.
First, again thanks to Jerry Bowles, who got me started in blogging when he invited me to join BoB back before the 2004 election. I remember one of my first posts was about driving up to canvas for Kerry in Harrisburg. Jerry also gave me a shot to blog about music over at his terrific SEQUENZA21 which I bombed unspectacularly; it quickly became apparent to me the crucial question was, what am I going to tell professional musicians, especially professional musicians who were composers trained classically in theory, about music? But Jerry didn’t ask me to stop, I stopped myself. Again, thank you Jerry.
The genesis of this post, of course, is Lefty’s last post, especially his first sentence:
Still feeling groovy about Obama?
I write for me and mine at BLCKDGRD, so I’m very aware that my BDRisms are gleefully insider and shamelessly ironic, which is probably the primary reason only a few of you follow the links to BDR from here. Cool. Thanks to the many four of you who do. I am willfully allusive, delight in my own code, and infuriate as many as I bore here. Probably bore more, truthfully. Cool.
So, let me try this without the BDRisms:
I’ve never felt “groovy” about Obama. I have no personal investment in Obama the individual.
Obama is a tool. I still harbor the belief that he’s a lesser tool than Clinton would have been and a lesser tool than McCain would be. I deeply doubt any one person, any one party, can reverse America’s decline; I’m still naive enough to think the decline will be slightly less shitty to slightly more people if the lesser-Republicans are steering.
Then there’s Obama’s effectiveness as a tool - which is what Lefty’s post is about, I think - and if Obama runs to the center as fast as he can from people like me, that’s to his credit as a tool in the game he’s playing. If a majority of people in this country felt as strongly about civil liberties in general and privacy issues in particular as I did, Obama would be running not away from us but towards us. It never fails to amuse me that what’s condemned as pandering is one of the few aspects of real democracy our definitively non-democratic country has.
(It’s also important to remember that what Obama - or any politician - says and means and what’s reported to us by the media are ALWAYS two different things: witness the fury over Obama’s re-statement of his Iraq policy that Lefty references: Obama didn’t say anything different than what he’d said before, which was reported as a flip-flop. We live not only in an echo-chamber, we live in a house of mirrors. This is why I both investigate and instigate performativity as political discourse.)
Obama is not going to get us out of Iraq because America is an empire and the elite who run the empire want a military presence atop the seas of oil. The elite in this country would rather profit from the decline of a oil-based empire than invest in the highly speculative and probably impossible and certainly less-profitable chore of re-tooling the world’s economy on what? wind? nuclear? hydrogen? that they are not guaranteed to control much less maintain their margins of power and profit.
Which leads back to my complicity - and your complicity - which is what I’m really writing about. I love getting outraged, I love playing the game, I love pretending our outraged game-playing makes one single, vital, iota of difference, but I love poking the realization that it doesn’t, and I love poking the outrage that it doesn’t. The desperation of that love is my main subject.
So when I write a snide comment to Lefty’s post:
Obamapostasy’s a pita. Someone should write about it.
It’s not Lefty I’m poking, it’s me.
Well, Lefty too. Who I urge to keep writing, who I continue to look forward - and all my colleagues here - to reading.
Posted: July 5th, 2008 under Aargh, Aarghlessness, Best of the Blogs.
Comments: 8
Comments
Comment from Josh Hammond
Time: July 5, 2008, 12:38 pm
Well now. BDR was/is quirky and many times hard to decipher. I enjoyed the funky words and the surprise links. Always a change of pace. BDR, naked now, is a little bit of a surprise, sorta.
Nevertheless, I am on the other side of the fence of the unveiled BDR. I am feeling “groovy” about Obama, although that word has not passed my lips or mind in a 1000 moons. I have a lot invested in him as a person, not the least of which is money and my “standing” with family and friends, where I peddle his case. I don’t see him as a tool and I would like to see Chicago as the new Crawford Ranch. There are a lot of interesting things going on in the Second City, and New York is too predictable and I hate the Yankees.
I am prepared and willing to give Obama the benefit of all the doubts. I don’t see him as a tool, except he is maybe his own tool. He is not a fool tool like McBush. He is from nowhere with a sense of the world that all the presidents in the past 40 years have not had. He is a thinking man’s Marlboro, and just because he is smart and he can think for himself, doesn’t make him an elite any more that Thomas Jefferson or FDR were elites.
I believe elite is the tag of last resort. Nixon’s favorite tag. A Pug favorite. I want to hear Obama’s inauguration speech, and I want to watch him govern. This is unlike anything that has happened in our lifetime, and I for one plan to enjoy every single exhilarating moment and every wrenching moment.
And I expect to hear a lot more Obatonics from BDR.
Comment from Pat
Time: July 5, 2008, 3:22 pm
Josh, Everytime I hear the GOP refer to Obama as an “elitist”, I can’t help but wonder if that is code for “uppity”.
When I listen to Obama give a speech, it feels me with hope, but then when I see the way he votes in the Senate, it feels me with disappointment. Of course, I didn’t like the way Hillary voted either. They’re both flawed, as I’ve said before, but the country is so sick and tired of the way things have been going the last seven and a half years, that Obama has a really good chance of winning in November. As timr says, he needs to get off the defense and on the offense. He doesn’t need to run a “swiftboat” type of campaign, all he has to do is tell the simple truth about McCain.
The following is a link that shows the real McCain.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20201.htm
Comment from bdr
Time: July 5, 2008, 3:31 pm
Thanks for the kind words, Josh, but I didn’t say anything in this post that I haven’t been saying all along. Such strength had my cipher
Folks, when I say “elite,” I’m talking about the 1% of 1% of 1% that rule the world politico/economically, the ones who consider the American president an employee.
I’m not saying Obama is an “elitist” who holds out a pinky while sipping tea from bone china. (And while “elitist” may have an “uppity” element vis a vis Obama, Republicans running against elitist Liberals is as old (and older) as Milton railing against the Roundheads.)
I am saying Obama will do nothing to consciously weaken the power of the 1% of the 1% of the 1%’s power.
The difference between McCain and Obama (or Republicans and Democrats) is micro, not macro: each represents contending philosophies on how best to expand the power of the very most powerful.
Comment from Josh Hammond
Time: July 5, 2008, 4:02 pm
Who is speaking here? bdr or bdr?
The differences between McCain and Obama is micro, not micro?
Pat, hang in there. He is voting in a manner that the Pugs can’t nail him to the wall on the Dukakis thing, the Kerry thing. Let’s just get through the first week of November.
Comment from Sasha
Time: July 5, 2008, 5:29 pm
Pat I think elitist means two thing. In the case of Obama it clearly means “talking white.” But elitist is an epithet that has been tossed at Democrats for a long time.
I was going to wax extended, but now that I think about it maybe I’ll turn that into a post.
Comment from bdr
Time: July 5, 2008, 5:50 pm
A third voice: here’s how I talk to friends via email:
I’ve always had a problem with patience, and there are realities of our world in general and our country in particular that seem to me so obvious as should make everyone post-cynical, in that Obama can be viewed both as a tool of a rigged system and a fascinating game piece in the rigged system, and that my not only being entertained by him but rooting for him within the system implicates me as much of a tool within that system as Obama is. If I can’t figure out a way to detach the system’s feeding tubes from me, it must be because I want the feed (plus the feed for those kids in head start, etc….).
That’s the same thing I’ve been saying.
Comment from timr
Time: July 6, 2008, 9:48 am
bdr, you speak truth to power, but unfortunately power does not listen, nor care what you or the masses think. They rule now, and think that they will rule forever. That is just the way this current world works. They will continue to dismantle every law in the land that was made to protect the worker. What those in power want is a return to the time before unions, before SS, before lawyers, before food and product purity and safety laws came into being. They want unrestricted access to all the natural resources, and they want the pollution laws gone. After all, the 1% of the 1% don’t have to live with the bad air, they can live where the air is good and the scenery is pristine. NIMBY works better for them than anyone else. When gwb was the gov of Texas he would not let any law be passed that limited what big business could do, antipollution laws were not “laws” they were just “suggestions” to big business, so pollution ran-and still runs-rampant.
Comment from timr
Time: July 6, 2008, 9:51 am
bdr, just as a BTW, but I do visit your blog, not often because the black background and neon colored letters gives me a massive headache. But I do visit every once in a while, your blog remains in my favorities file. PAR-TAY on dude!(I know that dates me, but so what)
Write a comment