"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Oct 4, 2011

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.

11 comments:

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

the Apparatchik-in-Chief

Mine, until someone else claims they typed it first.
~

Jack Crow said...

Yours.

Tao Dao Man said...

I am expecting a very big Oct. 2012 [or sooner] surprise.

Beware of false flags.

Slim Charles said...

Dead on, Jack. Absolutely right.

And I'd add: Barack Obama does knowingly what the conservative "progressives" do unknowingly. I mean: Obama is cynical where the "progressives" are merely indoctrinated.

Contrary to the propaganda peddled in Suskind's recent book, Obama is not a dithery meritocrat who foolishly thought that the "best and the brighest" would "solve the problem" and is now shocked to discover that Larry Summers didn't deliver. Barack Obama went into the presidency _intending_ to make unemployment higher. He wanted to deliver a higher unemployment to the investor class, and he succeeded in doing so. Of course he hides his knowing, aggressive pro-Wall-Street agenda under the guise of the meritocratic wonk who trusted too much in Summers, Geithner, and Bernanke, but this is all crap. As long as people think that "Obama is not enough of a fighter" or a man who trusts too much in technocracy, they can hold out hope that his errors are merely tactical. When they realize that Obama is very _much_ the fighter (on behalf of Wall Street), and that he trusts in the "experts" but only because knows that Larry Summers' expertise is precisely in shedding jobs and not creating them -- only then will they realize that it's not a matter of Barack fuck Obama having "no balls"; it's a matter of the guy not being on our side.

This is what, I think, distinguishes him from the careerist "Marxist professor" who has utter disdain for the working class and yet somehow calls herself a "progressive." That Marxist professor is actually an indoctrinated idiot: for all her cynicism, she still doesn't consciously _know_ that she is a conservative. But Obama is no idiot: he knows whose side he's on, and why his lies work.

In other words, the "progressives" do not know themselves, but Obama does.

Anatole David said...

Obama exploits the dark heart of statist collaboration.

They want their Health INSURANCE. They want their kids safe from Middle Eastern hellholes. They're fine with the poor curbstomped or filling up prisons as long as their exurban reposes aren't disturbed.

Obama knows most Americans pledge allegiance to the predatory class, and its Institutions, out of fear of becoming prey(Note the slavish idolatry towards our murderous and parasitic Military Institutions).

Sweet talking statist predators hypnotize prey with hope, change, and institutional reform. This tightens the coils of coercion and crushes more lives for the sake of "order".

He's an underdog as much as Uriah Heep was 'umble.

Randal Graves said...

FC Barcelona's the underdog, too.

Jack Crow said...

Fucking Randal. Thanks for the laugh.

Anatole, Slim,

This is what I keep mulling over: what's the backlash going to look like?

But, an aside first. My wife and I watched the finale to the first Spartacus season last night. I'd seen it before. She, not. She's not really into blood and gore, and especially not what she calls "gratuitous sex[uality]".

She didn't see the sex. She saw the season's climax (which I'll not spoil, if you haven't seen it).

And she had a wicked grin.

Wicked.

A new thing under the sun.

She is no radical, my wife. A competent, sound, self-possessed woman - not given to her husband's, er, enthusiasms. I would change everything, now. She would overwhelm the world with persistence.

It was no small surprise, then, to hear her speak, through that wicked smile, "Kill them all."

We talked, after.

She nurses a hatred for the rich that was not in her heart or head, before.

A beautiful thing, this. Precious.

If my wife has come to this place, there are more of us that I would have allowed myself to imagine.

*

So, what's the reaction, the backlash?

I fear that it will look like tolerance. This isn't Uganda. They won't criminalize Occupy, will they?

They're going to hug it to death.

Rage, and even hatred, are the needful responses, no?

RZ,

I don't know. Continuity is very important right now. Disruption helps the Republicans. Barack needs to look competent, suave, calm. The only thing I can imagine working in his favor is a joint Israeli/American/British adventure in Iran. And that is fraught with intangibles and unseen ramifications.

Tao Dao Man said...

An attack on Iran would be the beginning of the end.
And they know it.
It is/will stay on the back burner.
The Ziocons are insane, but they are not suicidal.

Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, one of the smaller Stans etc. are more likely.

It does not matter which puppet temporarily sits at the throne.
America has grown accustom to war.
It is all a self imploding empire has to look forward to.

Anatole David said...

Obama's 2012 Campaign will stress themes of Unity and Strength. Slogans about "The Future We Deserve". "Winning the Future" is no longer viable. He'll stump with shared sacrifice(Unity) and coming together to overcome(Strength)and fighting enemies of the freedoms we hold dear(Again, unity and strength). He will stress the outdated and divisive politics of his opponent. Of course this is all bullshit, but he will win in a landslide. Why? He will raise tons more money than any Republican candidate. He will not need a late surprise to win. He has Wall Street, despite the grumbling of people like Jamie Dimon. No Republican opponent can provide the largesse Obama has to the predatory class. He's increased military spending, expanded war(nary a protest), and doubled down on Bush abuses(very little outrage). Mitt Romney couldn't pull that off. (The above is merely an opinion and not an endorsement.) The big money's riding with Obama. Big money always wins.


Van Jones and Moveon.org are already busy trying to co-opt OWS. All due respect to Mr. Greenwald, but I believe the OWS will morph into a movement that will support Obama, i.e. it will stress opposition of Republicans(tactics!) and ask Obama to push harder(dig in and find his former self). It's already positioned itself as antithetical to the Tea Party(a Republican AstroTurf group). So the AstroTurf is already growing under the OWS protesters feet. Even if many are not conscious of it.

Call me cynical. The Crows keep stern vigil above my hearth.

Jack Crow said...

Aye, Anatole. Hugin and Mugin deserve their due.

This segue's nicely into my next failed attempt.

Anatole David said...

Failure is fertilizer for future victory.(Laughter)

BTW Think Progress is comparing OWS folks to the original Tea Party. The cumbrous embrace of CAP and other "centrist" DNC fronts near. Autumn's cold fingers will pinch wholesome fires.