Periodically from among my 1200 or so occasional correspondents on the Facebook there will appear paean to the Wonders of Obama along with the implicit complaint that "we" oughta just stop picking on the guy (St. Barry himself has taken this tone on occasion of late). Such was the case Friday morning:Why Obama? President Obama did not sell America to the corporate oligarchy that ...has destroyed our democracy -- the Republicans did, the lobbyists did and above all the Supreme Court did. President Obama didn't bust the unions -- Reagan did. President Obama didn't declare war on women and minorities and immigration rights, gay rights and working men and women -- the Republicans and religious right did. That's why!See More
Not I, said the Little, Red Hen. Dr. Woody warn'ta buyin' it!:
Why NOT Obama? He's nominally "in charge." We're in THREE international slaughterhouses, mainly it seems to keep up demand for armaments from America's only working industries, "defense" plants.
But just to take your first point, about selling out to the oligarchy: He cannot not have known that Chris Dodd's bill to 'reregulate' the banksters was a transparent fraud designed to earn Dodd a life-time of comfort, and a multi-million dollar reward in a sweet K-Street gig for his troubles. Dodd, just to refresh the collective memory, was/is a powerful Senatorial "Democrat," and chair of the Senate Finance Committee when he got his corpoRAt parachute. Like Dodd, Obama's an aspiring oligarch, a talented member of the coordinator class...
As for Unions: Where's EFCA? Obama and his corpoRat asshole pal Arne Duncan are dead-SET on busting the teachers' unions and opening the schools to further privatization. He didn't declare war on women, but his defense of them has been anything but stalwart or robust. He's not a committed "pro-choice" ally.
There's a terrible, poignant irony in the fact that because Obama's not a "White" president, he cannot act on behalf of the interests of oppressed peoples with whom his own morphological characteristics associate him BECAUSE by doing so--by bestowing any favor at all upon the racial underclass--he would be immediately accused by his detractors of abandoning "All the people" for "his people." Terrible, indeed, is the irony that insists only the Oppressors can aid the Oppressed, innit?
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Product Placement:
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Whilst perusing Krugman's column this morning, as the well-read pundit should, Dr. Woody was again taken with the elegant simplicity of hegemony. The way hegemony works, there's room for one or some few of any persuasion within the amply porous but still sufficiently elastic structure of the dominant ideology. There is so MUCH information that the daily/hourly flood effectively washes out the distinctive qualities. Yet each creates--indeed, claims--their own space: Kucenich, Paul (pere et fils); Krugman, Beck, even Alan Grayson got an amused, cynical spin on the wheel. Krugman's in his own chamber. We are all "lone actors."
But anyway, while I was reading "The Shrill One," on the difference it makes in the world of for-pay health care if you're a consumer or a patient (pig, or pork? the same question, nest paw?), I wished I could discover when the first Senator or Congressperson rose on the floor of the US Congress to address his colleagues and at that crucial juncture when he named the constituency for whom he spoke, instead of the words "American citizen," used the word "American consumer." (One of the most transformative books I read in grad school was "Metaphors we live by" by Lakoff and Johnson (1980). Yeah, THAT Lakoff. You link that concept up with the Sapir-Whorf Theory, and that's a passel of explanatory power, in my always humble estimation, anyway.)
That day was the beginning of the end. It probably happened about 1950, but I'm not sure. Words DO matter. It changes thkngs if you think of yourself, or are thought of by your bosses/representatives as a "citizen" versus a "consumer." Once the dominant metaphor changes, changes in 'reality' also occur. What you call some one or something in many important ways shapes and informs your behavior. This, of course, is not a new idea, but one that perhaps needs to be refreshed periodically.
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