There can be little question that Obama's presidency will be much preferable to that of McCain. But to believe that Obama's election as the President of the United States represents an end to the global nightmare, one needs to hope against hope.
VINAY LAL
Barack Obama has achieved what would have seemed improbable to even the most ardent admirers of America two years ago: he has been elected the 44th President of the United States of America. Many, not least of them Obama himself, see in the ascendancy of a black man to the highest office of the world’s hegemon, a supremely historic moment in American, if not world, affairs. Ever since Obama declared his candidacy for the American presidency, he has never doubted that this would be an ‘historic’ election, whatever its outcome. Obama’s victory speech at Chicago’s Grant Park a few hours ago underscores his own sense of history being made with his affirmation that ‘a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.’ It is only in the mid-1960s that the US passed the Voting Rights Act, enabling most African Americans to cast a vote that in principle was always their birthright, and it remains an indubitable fact of American life that tens of thousands of African Americans, as well as other poor people, continue to remain disenfranchised. Even if the word ‘historic’ is maddeningly ubiquitous, the enormity of Obama’s personal achievement can scarcely be overstated.
During the course of the election campaign, Obama became a phenomenon. That other ubiquitous word of politics, ‘charisma’, appears to have been invented for him. Obama writes reasonably well, and has even been lauded for his skills as an orator; he is suave, good-looking, mentally alert, and a keen observer of world affairs. The ‘unflappable’ senator, as he has come to be described in the American press, exudes a sense of masculine strength and confidence that seems comforting to an ailing nation. Obama attracted crowds larger than any customarily seen in the US, except at football -- American football, not what the rest of the world understands by football -- games and nearly the whole world was rooting for him. Kenya, which claims Obama as its native son, has now declared a national holiday in honor of Obama’s triumph. Such is the incalculable hold of the US, in times better or worse, on the imagination of people worldwide that many are more heavily invested in the politics and future of the US than they are in the politics of their own nation.
There are, of course, perfectly good reasons, other than those summoned by the notion of America as the heaven on earth, why much of the rest of the world should find the American elections of interest. Iraqis, Afghanis, Iranians, Sudanese, and Pakistanis, among many others, known and unknown, the target at some point of the military wrath and moral unctuousness of America, may want to reason if their chances of being bombed back into the stone age increase or decrease with the election of one or the other candidate. The French, perhaps best known for the haughty pride in their own culture, were so moved by the events of September 11, 2001, which the Americans have attempted to install as a new era in world history, rendering 9/11 as something akin to BC or AD, that Le Monde famously declared, ‘Nous sommes tous Americains’ (‘We are all Americans’). One doubts that, had it been Beijing, Delhi, or Dakar that had been so bombed, the French would have declared, We are All Chinese, Indians, or Senegalese. That old imperialist habit of presuming the royal We, thinking that the French or American we is the universal We, has evidently not disappeared.
There can be little question that Obama's presidency will be much preferable to that of McCain.If nothing else, his presidency is not calculated to be an insult to human intelligence or a complete affront to simple norms of human decency. After eight years of George W. Bush, it seemed all but improbable that America could throw up another candidate who is, if not in absolutely identical ways, at least as much of an embarrassment to the US as the incumbent of the White House. But one should never underestimate the genius of America in throwing up crooks, clowns and charlatans into the cauldron of politics.
It is likely that McCain has a slightly less convoluted -- or should I say 'jejune'? -- view of world history and geography than Bush, nor is his vocabulary wholly impoverished, but he would not have struck anyone with a discerning mind as possessed of a robust intelligence. Though McCain insistently faulted the ‘junior senator’ from Illinois, as President-Elect Obama was known in official lingo, for his lack of experience, his pick of Sarah Palin, a small town mayor who had recently risen to the office of the Governor of Alaska, for the position of Vice President betrayed an enormous lack of judgment.
McCain committed numerous gaffes, accusing (to take one example) Iran of training al-Qaeda extremists, though of course if one thinks of George W. Bush it is manifestly clear that such displays of ignorance have seldom if ever in American politics cost a man the White House. In America, it is enough to have a candidate who understands that Iraq and Iran are not only spelled differently but constitute two separate nations. Obama seems so far ahead of the decorated Vietnam War veteran in these respects that it seems pointless to waste any more words on McCain.
Far too many American elections have offered scenarios where a candidate has been voted into office not on the strength of his intelligence, sound policies, or moral judgment, but because the candidate has appeared to be ‘the lesser of two evils’. The iconoclast Paul Goodman, writing in the 1960s, gave it as his considered opinion that American elections were an exercise in helping Americans distinguish between undistinguishable Democrats and Republicans, and there are, notwithstanding Obama’s appeal to liberals and apparently intelligent people, genuine questions to be asked about whether this election has been anything more than a choice between Tweedledee or Tweedledum.
Candidates with wholly distinct views have always been described as ‘spoilers’ in the American system, and anyone who do not subscribe to the rigidly corporatist outlook of the two major parties can only expect ridicule, opprobrium, and at best colossal neglect. One has only to recall the virulence with which supposedly liberal Americans spoke of the consumer advocate Ralph Nader, who justly described George Bush as ‘the giant corporation in the White House masquerading as a human being’, for having gifted Bush the White House by drawing votes away from Al Gore in the tightly contested election of 2000.
To this extent, whatever America’s pretensions at being a model democracy for the rest of the world, one can marvel at the ease and brilliance with which dissenters are marginalized in the US. The singularity of American democracy resides in the fact that it is, insofar as democracies are in question, at once both perversely primitive and advanced. In its totalitarian sweep over the political landscape, the one-party system, which through the fiction of two parties has swept all dissent -- indeed, I should say all thought -- under the rug, has shown itself utterly incapable of accommodating political views outside its fold; and precisely for this reason American democracy displays nearly all the visible signs of stability, accountability, and public engagement, retaining in its rudiments the same features it has had over the last two centuries.
Obama’s most ardent defenders adopted the predictably disingenuous view that Candidate Obama has had to repress most of his most liberal sentiments to appeal to a wide electorate, and that President Obama will be much less ‘centrist’ in his execution of domestic and foreign policies. (The US is one country where most hawks, particularly if they are distinguished senior statesmen, can easily pass themselves off as ‘centrists’, the word ‘hawk’ being reserved for certifiable lunatics such as Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, or blatantly aggressive policy-makers such as Paul Wolfowitz. No one would describe Colin Powell, who shares as much responsibility as anyone else for waging a criminal war on Iraq, as a hawk.) Of course much the same view was advanced apropos Bill Clinton, who then went on to wreck the labor movement, cut food stamps, initiate welfare ‘reform’ that further eroded the entitlements of the poor, and launch aggressive military strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Kosovo, and a host of other places.
Moreover, unless one is to take the view that Obama thought of his candidacy overnight, it is equally reasonable to argue that, knowing how much he would have to appeal to the rank-and-file of not only Democrats but the large number of ‘undecided’ voters as a candidate who would be markedly different from both the incumbent and the Republicans running for the presidency, Obama has been projecting himself as far more liberal than either his political record or views would give warrant to believe. Indeed, as a close perusal of his writings, speeches, and voting record suggests, Obama is as consummate a politician as any in the US, and he has been priming himself as a presidential candidate for many years.
Obama’s 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope (New York, Crown Publishers), furnishes as good an entry point into his worldview as any. Its subtitle, ‘Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream’, provides the link to Obama’s memoir of 1995, Dreams of My Father (1995). People everywhere have dreams, no doubt, but there is nothing quite as magisterial as ‘the American dream’: the precise substance of the American dream -- a home with a backyard, mom’s apple pie, kids riding their bikes without a care in the world, a cute dog running around in circles after the kids, ice tea, a Chevrolet or SUV; or, if you wish, something loftier, freedom, prosperity, and equal opportunity for all -- matters less than the fact that ‘the American dream’ signifies something grand and unique in the affairs of humankind. ‘Oh Yeah The American Dream, / American Dream / the American Dream’, sang the reggae star Jimmy Cliff,
‘so You Want To Get American Visa
go To Where They Say The Living Is Easier
since You Were Young You Been Told
you Can Get Anything There
but The Soul.’
A politician who does not profess belief in the American dream is doomed, but there is no insincerity on Obama’s part in this respect. Leaving aside momentarily the question of how the American dream has been a nightmare to many of the most thoughtful Americans themselves, from Henry David Thoreau to James Baldwin, not to mention tens of millions of people elsewhere, Obama’s fondness for what Americans call ‘feel-good’ language is palpably evident. Just what does the audacity of hope mean? Need one be audacious to hope? Obama’s pronouncements are littered with the language of hope, change, values, dreams-- all only a slight improvement on chicken soup for dummies or chocolate for the soul.
The chapter entitled ‘The World Beyond Our Borders’, some will object, is illustrative of Obama’s engagement with substantive issues, and in this case suggestive of his grasp over foreign affairs. One of the stories that circulated widely about Bush upon his election to the presidency in 2000 was that he carried an expired passport; a variant of the story says that Bush did at that time own a US passport. It is immaterial whether the story is apocryphal: so colossal was Bush’s ignorance of the world that it is entirely plausible that he had never traveled beyond Canada and Mexico, though I am tempted to say that illegal aliens and men born to power, transgressors of borders alike, share more than we commonly imagine. Obama, by contrast, came to know of the wider world in his childhood: his white American mother was married to a Kenyan before her second marriage to an Indonesian. Obama is an uncommon African American in this respect, since the vast majority of African Americans have no living connection with Africa; moreover, though the precise importance of this cannot be unraveled at this juncture, his whiteness does not stem, as it does with most mixed African Americans, from his father. To what extent Obama can share the pain of a history, where hybridity was forged from the acts of white slave-owning men raping their black women slaves at will, is an open question.
Obama lived in Jakarta as a young boy, and the chapter offers a discussion of the purges under Suharto that led to the extermination of close to a million communists and their sympathizers. Obama is brave enough to acknowledge that many of the Indonesian military leaders had been trained in the US, and that the CIA provided ‘covert support’ to the insurrectionists who sought to remove the nationalist Sukarno and place Indonesia squarely in the American camp (pp. 272-73). He charts Indonesia’s spectacular economic progress, but also concedes that ‘Suharto’s rule was harshly repressive.’ The press was stifled, elections were a ‘mere formality’, prisons were filled up with political dissidents, and in areas wracked by secessionist movements rebels and civilians alike faced swift and merciless retribution -- ‘and all this was done with the knowledge, if not outright approval, of U.S. administrations’ (p. 276).
It is doubtful that most American politicians would have made even as mild an admission of American complicity in atrocities as has Obama. But a supremely realist framework allows for evasion as much as confession: thus Obama merely arrives at the reading that the American record overseas is a ‘mixed’ one ‘across the globe’, often characterized by farsightedness and altruism even if American policies have at times been ‘misguided, based on false assumptions’ that have undermined American credibility and the genuine aspirations of others (p. 280).
There is, in plain language, both good and bad in this world; and Obama avers that the US, with all its limitations, has largely been a force for good. And since America remains the standard by which phenomena are to be evaluated, Obama betrays his own parochialism. The war in Vietnam, writes Obama, bequeathed ‘disastrous consequences’: American credibility and prestige took a dive, the armed forces experienced a loss of morale, the American soldier needlessly suffered, and above all ‘the bond of trust between the American people and their government’ was broken. Though two million or more Vietnamese were killed, and fertile land was rendered toxic for generations, no mention is made of this genocide: always the focus is on what the war did to America (p. 287). The war in Vietnam chastened Americans, who ‘began to realize that the best and the brightest in Washington didn’t always know what they were doing -- and didn’t always tell the truth’ (p. 287).
One wonders why, then, an overwhelming majority of Americans supported the Gulf war of 1991 and the attack on Afghanistan, and why even the invasion of Iraq in 2002 had far more popular support in the US than it did in Europe or elsewhere around the world. The suggestion that the American people were once led astray but are fundamentally sound in their judgment ignores the consideration that elected officials are only as good as the people to whom they respond, besides hastening to exculpate ordinary Americans from their share of the responsibility for the egregious crimes that the US has committed overseas and against some of its own people.
Obama has on more than one occasion said, ‘I’m not against all wars, I’m just against dumb wars.’ More elegant thinkers than Obama, living in perhaps more thoughtful times, have used different language to justify war: there is the Christian doctrine of a just war, and similarly 20th century politicians and theorists, watching Germany under Hitler rearm itself and set the stage for the extermination of the Jewish people, reasoned that one could make a legitimate distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ wars. Obama has something like the latter in mind: he was an early critic of the invasion of Iraq, though here again almost entirely on pragmatic grounds rather than from any sense of moral anguish, but like most liberals he gave his whole-hearted support to the bombing of Afghanistan in the hope, to use Bush’s language, that Osama bin Laden could be smoked out and the Taliban reduced to smithereens.
Does a ‘dumb war’ become ‘dumb’ only when Americans have been unable to clinch victory? Was the Iraq war not really a dumb war at the moment, less than a month into it, when Bush unfurled a large sign reading ‘Mission Accomplished’ on the deck of an aircraft carrier? Would Vietnam have been less of a dumb war if the Vietcong had been vanquished and Vietnam had become another outpost of American capitalism? How dumb does one have to be to understand that whether wars are ‘dumb’ or otherwise, the entire world has become captive to the ideology of the free market -- not least of all Vietnam, which in its eagerness to attract foreign capital and turn the country into yet another Dubai-like zone has zealously been beckoning American investors?
Obama is so far committed to the idea of Afghanistan as a ‘good’ war that he has pledged that, if elected President, he would escalate the conflict there and also bomb Pakistan if it would help him prosecute the ‘war on terror’. He has recently attacked McCain, who no one would mistake for a pacifist, with the observation that his opponent ‘won’t even follow [bin Laden] to his cave in Afghanistan’, even as the US Defence Secretary has all but conceded that a political accommodation with the Taliban, whose support of bin Laden was the very justification for the bombing of Afghanistan, can no longer be avoided. The casually held assumption that by birthright an American president can bomb other countries into abject submission, or that the US can never be stripped of its prerogative to chastise nations that fail to do its bidding, takes one’s breath away.
No one should suppose that Obama, blinded by the sharp rhetoric of the ‘war on terror’, has positions on Iraq and Afghanistan that are not characteristic of his view of the world as a whole. ‘We need to maintain a strategic force posture’, he writes, ‘that allows us to manage threats posed by rogue nations like North Korea and Iran and to meet the challenges presented by potential rivals like China’ (p. 307). This could have been the voice of Reagan, the Clintons, Bush, McCain, and countless others: there is such overwhelming unanimity about ‘rogue states’ that almost no politician in the US can be expected to display even an iota of independent thinking.
On the question of Palestine, Obama has similarly displayed belligerence and moral turpitude -- even if the bellicose Israelis have expressed some reservations about Obama’s capacity and inclination to safeguard Israel’s interests before anything else. At the annual meeting in June 2008 of the American Israel Political Action Committee, a self-avowedly Zionist organization that commands unstinting support from across the entire American political spectrum, Obama was unambiguous in declaring that ‘Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel and it must remain undivided.’ It would only be belaboring the obvious to state that, on nearly every foreign policy issue that one can think of, with the exception of a timetable for withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, Obama’s position can scarcely be distinguished from all the other advocates of the national security state.
There can be no gainsaying the fact that Obama’s election as President of the US will appreciably alter American debates on race. African Americans make up 12% of the population but constitute nearly half of the US prison population; one of three black males will, in his lifetime, have gone through the criminal justice system. African Americans are, alongside Puerto Ricans, two ethnic groups among whom poverty is endemic, and repeated studies have shown that in every critical sector of life, such as access to jobs, housing, and health care, blacks face persistent racism and discrimination.
Obama is fully cognizant of these problems and is likely to address them to a greater extent than any other candidate. But one can also argue, with equal plausibility, that his ascendancy will strengthen the hands of those who want to think of American democracy as a post-race society, and whose instant inclination is to jettison affirmative action and reduce the already narrow space for discussions of race in civil society. It is immaterial, even if fascinating to some, whether numerous white people voted for Obama to prove their credentials as non-racists, while others gave him their vote because he’s not all that black -- just as some black people surely cast their ballot for Obama precisely because he is black.
By far the most critical consideration is that the US requires a radical redistribution of economic and political power: Martin Luther King had come to an awareness of this in the last years of his life, but there is little to suggest that Obama, a professional politician to the core, has similarly seen the light. One hopes that in the euphoria of Obama’s election, people will do neither King nor Obama the injustice of comparing them to each other. King struck upon a from of ethical resistance in the face of seething hatred, racism, and injustice, and was among those black leaders who came to the realization that America’s vicious war in Vietnam was inextricably linked to endemic forms of injustice at home. He had the courage to declare, before his assassination, that ‘America is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today’. Whether Obama will display such courage remains to be seen, though the signs, to put it mildly, have not been encouraging.
In these deeply troubled times, when there is much casual talk of the American ship sinking, the white ruling class is preparing to turn over the keys of the kingdom to a black man. Imperial powers had a knack for doing this, but let us leave that history aside. Here, at least, Obama appears to have displayed audacity, taking on a challenge that many others might have forsworn. However, nothing is as it seems to be: with the passage of time, Obama has increasingly justified the confidence reposed in him as an establishment candidate.
A man with some degree of moral conscience would not have shrugged off the endorsements of Colin Powell and Scott McClellan, until recently among Bush’s grandstanding cheerleaders and apparatchiks, but would have insisted that Powell and others of his ilk be brought to justice for crimes against the Iraqi people. But Obama will do no such thing, for after all Powell and the master he served, like Kissinger and Nixon before them, only made ‘tactical’ errors. Obama prides himself, moreover, on being a healer not divider: he will even rejoice in the support for him among previously hardcore Republicans .
As Obama begins to put together his transition team for his first term into office, the presence of former Bill Clinton advisers, such as Rahm Emanuel and Clinton’s Chief of Staff, John D. Podesta, in his personal entourage suggests how far the ‘change’ on which Obama has wrested everyone’s hopes will most likely be more of the same.
When Obama is not speaking about values, hope, and change, he presents himself as a manager, representing brutal American adventurism in Iraq and Afghanistan as illustrations of policies that went wrong. He comes forward as a technician who is best equipped to fix broken policies, repair the system, and get America working once again. Throughout, he has remained as ardent an advocate of American exceptionalism as any, exploiting to the hilt the idea that America remains a singular phenomenon in world history.
‘If there is anyone out there’, Obama said in his victory speech in Chicago, ‘who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.’ If the descendants of slaves can have come this far, Obama will say, the dream of (white) American forefathers, all slave-owners to boot, is alive and well -- though what sleights of hand are necessary to arrive at this reading are all to obvious. As Jimmy Cliff continues in ‘American Dream’:
Words Without Deeds
is Like A Gold Wind Full Of Breeze
so You Better Take Heed
so You Better Beware
and You Better Take Care
cause You Just Might Be There For A Nightmare
One can only hope that an America that is once again working does not mean for a good portion of the rest of the world what it has meant for a long time, namely an America that is more efficient in its exercise of military domination and even more successful in projecting its own vision of human affairs as the only road to the good life. To believe that Obama’s election as the President of the United States represents an end to the global nightmare of the American dream, one needs to hope against hope.
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Vinay Lal, by an accident of history, teaches history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and is presently Director of the University of California Education Abroad Program in India. Like Obama, he was born in 1961, has a 10-year old daughter, lived in Jakarta as a young boy, and has been associated with Columbia University and the University of Chicago. There ends the similarity between the two.
The recent violence involving the church and locals in Orissa and elsewhere has, it is said, sullied India's image abroad, put the Sangh parivar in a spot and evoked global sympathy for the "hapless Christians", the victims of those fascist Bajrang Dal goons.
