Barack Obama: Build Up This Wall

Barack Obama doesn't speak for the worker.

He doesn't speak for labor, for the woman who is right now scarfing down meat and corn by-toxins entombed in preservatives which were just minutes ago wrapped in a film of processed fossilized krill; while she maps out how best to coordinate dinner for her kids sometime between her day job and her after-hours employment, Barack Obama has just finished a meal prepared for him by domestic house servants who are also at the same time employees of the largest military directorate in the history of the human race.

Barack Obama doesn't speak for workers. He is not a spokesperson of labor, despite TeaParty™ claims to the contrary. He also doesn't speak his words for labor. Workers are not his audience. They aren't his demographic.

When Barack Obama speaks, he has a target market.

They call themselves progressives; sometimes they'll let you call them liberals, but not around soldiers, or the boss, or the angry white dude who thinks women are out to get him because no women will be caught dead fucking him.

That is, they are conservatives, ones who can live next door to a married homosexual couple as long as the gay pair knows how to tend a lawn; rumor has it that they will even accept a well-spoken black person at the next parent-teacher function, provided she doesn't bob her head up and down like those urban people do.

And as conservatives, they are vested people. We could call them compromised, or bought and paid for, if we wanted. Conservative, liberal, vested. It's all the same thing.

Vested people own a stake in the project of growth and extraction. That's their claim on the time and energy of the ruling class. It's why our politics is geared towards keeping them in. Ownership is more than a membership in the club. It's an active border war. Investment in a merit certificate, a company position, a political party, a progressive church - these are acts of definition. Those who belong are as marked by whom they exclude as they are by their inclusion. And they do exclude; conduct which requires a strong defense. An inside defines its outside, and comes to depend upon the struggle to keep what's out from getting in. Sometimes that means a little extra tolerance, or concessions to an image of reform. Sometimes it means hunting down wetbacks and hajjis.

It can never end. A moment without the struggle to succeed, to excel, to obtain what others cannot have is a moment the inside becomes indistinguishable from what it's not, and what it is without.

So what are vested people really good at, if we understand them as persons engaged in an enterprise of exclusion which cannot end?

They're skilled in the arts of belonging - attempts at obtaining a deathlessness, one which has none of the charm of a reach exceeding its grasp, and all of the bitter anguish and self-satisfied vainglory of a tombstone carved in a script without translation. They want a special security. It's called success. And it keeps the wrong people out. Because the wrong people have already lost their contest with frailty, imperfection and mortality.

Liberals, being conservatives, being vested and invested people, are wall builders and wall keepers.

And Barack Obama really does speak for them:

"President Barack Obama said he considers himself the underdog in the 2012 presidential election. And he has no problem with that.

In a Monday interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos, Obama said he is 'absolutely' the underdog in his upcoming race, due in large part to the dismal economy playing out on his watch. His comment came in response to Stephanopoulos indicating that a new ABC poll coming out later Monday found that 55 percent of Americans think Obama will be a one-term president."

Note how Barack fucking Pendragon Obama has used his tête-à-tête with that toothy macaque, Stephanopolous. He's positioned himself as Man with his back up against a wall. A wall he promises to defend, a wall the very existence of which serves to preserve the world in which vested people live. He's proud and happy to be there. It might even be his mission. Because there are dangerous people on the other side of this wall, and they want to tear it down.*

Barack needs his liberals. Really, he does. Admittedly, he's the most powerful politician in the world. And sure, he can issue kill orders, send sky death robots to deliver parents to their children's funerals, get for paid for the task, and get away with it. Yes, he assisted in the largest act of naked theft in American history. But, really - he's a guy up against the wall. A wounded pet. A man under threat. Shall we say it (because, well, Harris-Perry already has)? He's in danger of an electoral lynching. He's the underdog, this chief executive of an empire spanning the surface of the earth, with three hundred million immediate subjects, and a billion more under arms:

" 'I don't mind,' Obama said of the poll's results. 'I'm used to being an underdog.'

Ultimately, however, he predicted that voters will pick their next president based on who presents a vision for the future that can help ordinary families recapture the American Dream. And that, he said, is something he knows just how to do."

That's the Barack fucking Obama liberals (who are conservatives) know and love. He's their man, and maybe even their man-friday. And he knows it. He knows not just what to do, but what and how to say it. He's lying, but to liberals he's a man armed with the truth:

" 'When I ran in 2008, the basic idea was that ordinary folks who are working hard, doing everything right, just weren't getting ahead,' Obama said, citing people's frustrations with the rising costs of health care and college education. 'The whole approach of everything I've tried to do over the last three years is to say, 'What are those big changes that we have to make so that our kids are getting the best education? [So that] we've got the best infrastructure in the world? [So that] we've got the tools that allow us to succeed again?'"

Education. Success. Infrastructure. The man is talking institutions; social structures defined by their walls, by who they serve, and by whom they exclude. The "best education" cannot be "best" if it's available to everyone. Success delimits. A merit baby with the best education might succeed, but his elevation is inseparable from the failure, disqualification and proscription of the losers. His "ordinary folks' is a limited entry demographic. It's for vested people. 

And while the rest of us wrestle with the petty struggles of hoi polloi, the feeding of self and children, keeping the heat on and a roof over our heads, not dying of preventable tooth infections, the boredom and dullness of a persistent alienation, the endless resistance to the monetization of our lives and love - the vested people are securing their camp and the walls which keep us out.

Barack Obama speaks for them.

He speaks to them.

And they are listening.


* - who, for nine hours of the day, are letting themselves be re-affirmed in the conviction that the voice on the radio is broadcast to them from an equally vital defense of the same wall, one which, should it collapse, will result in a red tide of socialists, immigrants and disorder. Here's our long distance image: Barack Obama and Rachel Maddow, hands against the wall, encouraging good liberals to come to their aid. Pressed against its other face, and in earshot, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity stand with caricature chins a'lifted, exhorting their troops to lean harder into the fight. Sitting atop the wall, the lords of wall street, Detroit, the oil cartels and the defense industry sip their champagne, or decades old single malt.