Danger signs
Wayne Brown is a well-known Trinidadian writer and columnist who now lives in Jamaica. This is the24th in his new serieson the Obama era.
Almost as soon as it hit the newsstands, last week’s edition of The Washingtonian sold out. Reason: the magazine featured a cover photo of President Obama bare-chested in swimming trunks, over the title, ‘Our New Neighbor Is Hot.’
Some stuff-shirt bloggers thought the cover offensive, even racist. One columnist who disagreed was the NYT’s Judith Warner.
Warner, whose charm is a willfully naïve honesty, was rapturous. “Washington [these days] feels as if it could be exciting. It feels as if you might go to a kids’ soccer game and see…Malia! You might go to SilverSneakers and see…the first grandma!”
People, Warner tells us (and this columnist has heard the same thing here in Jamaica), are still dreaming — literally — about the Obamas.
“Every time the Obamas head uptown for parent-teacher conferences,” Warner reports, “the city comes to a halt. Teenagers jump up and down; cops smile; moms, leaning on the doors of their S.U.V.’s, momentarily relax. I was once stuck with the girls at a Wisconsin Avenue stoplight on such an occasion. Afterward, before parking the car to run errands, we stopped and gazed upon the hallowed patch of asphalt that we’d just shared with the Obama tires. It was a solemn moment.”
The comments mainly echoed Warner’s mood.
“WOW! Talk about a good roll model for healthy Americans! He not only talks the talk, but he struts it too!”
“…for the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my president.”
“We in the Great White North [Canada] are at least as dazzled by the first family as Americans are [at] having an intelligent and gorgeous President and First Lady.” And so on.
There were just two dissenting comments. One reader presciently warned: “Perhaps what we ought to be considering is not just how describing our president as ‘hot’ affects us, but how it affects the president…The last thing we need is for politicians to think of themselves as rock stars.”
She put her finger on a real danger. If there’s a serious risk for Barack Obama, it’s that he’s not just streets more intelligent (and attractive?!) than his political opponents — it’s that he knows it. And once he absorbs that knowledge into his personality, can hubris and the contempt it secretes be far behind?
The answer is, of course, no. Obama may bestride the globe like a colossus, but at the end of the day he’s just a man; and, as Frank Rich pointed out (NYT, May 3), we’ve already seen flashes of delusions of grandeur from him (that faux presidential seal during the campaign, those faux Greek columns), and at least one flash of contempt: “You’re likeable enough, Hillary.”
After the canny stampedings of the Bush-Cheney years, Obama’s legendary coolness has many upsides, but the downside is its potential for a radical objectification of those around him. It would be too easy, one suspects, for Obama to cross the line between cool appraisement and — that word again — contempt.
It was therefore a relief to hear him poke fun at just such God delusions at the annual White House Correspondents’ dinner last week. “My next 100 days will be so successful,” Obama deadpanned to a delighted audience, “that they’ll be completed in 72 days. And on the seventy-third day I shall rest.”
Nonetheless, given the historic level of adulation, the danger remains, particularly while the Republican Party goes right on imploding, in a seemingly irreversible paradigm in which it continues to move to the right, shedding popular support as it goes. And the fact is that, in his short time in office, Obama’s pragmatism has already led him to cross a line dictated by an irreducible core of moral absolutes, a line beyond which lies the stuff of classical tragedy.
Needing to keep the CIA on his side, Obama continues to oppose the investigation of the Bush regime’s torture programme. Needing to avoid at all costs, for his presidency’s sake, another 9/11, he has invoked the Bush ‘state secrets’ policy; retained its warrantless wiretapping; announced last week that Guantanamo’s military trials (ie, kangaroo courts) of “suspected terrorists” will resume; and reneged on his pledge to release hundreds more photos of Iraqis’ abuse at the hands of sadistic US jailors. His increasingly alarmed supporters must be cringing in fear of what would be the coup de grace – an announcement that Guantanamo will remain in business indefinitely, after all.
On the Iraq photos, a letter writer to the NYT was to the point:
“When Allied forces liberated the Nazi death camps in World War II, Gen Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Allied commander, ordered German citizens to walk through the concentration camps to see the victims’ bodies. He wanted them to witness what their government had done as proof against denials the Holocaust had occurred. President Obama should follow Eisenhower’s example and let Americans confront the visual evidence of the horrors committed in our name. Verbal accounts are not enough to silence those who will deny or minimize this abuse.”
Obama is much too intelligent and decent a man not to know these things, and yet he has shown himself capable of ignoring them. Then, at what point does the parenthetical caveat — ‘Or at least he was’ — become irresistible?
Or consider Afghanistan.
Within days of his inauguration, President Obama authorized the continuation of the drone strikes on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, and the conventional war as well. He has also dispatched 20,000 more troops to Afghanistan. This means that, unlike Iraq, Afghanistan is now Obama’s war.
But so therefore is the civilian death toll which airstrikes invariably involve. On Friday the NYT ran a graphic piece on the devastation caused by US bombers which, the previous week, had mistakenly bombed an Afghan village from which the Taliban had already departed. The account, which quoted sources as saying that 117 civilians had been killed — including 26 women and 61 children — featured interviews with children writhing from third degree burns, and a photo reminiscent of the famous shot of a little girl running naked down a Vietnam street with the flesh dripping off her from a US napalm strike. Those children, too, are now Obama’s responsibility.
Granted that the outlaw Bush regime left the new president with horrendous moral, economic and political problems, the fact remains that Obama has already crossed over into a moral No Man’s Land. One would like to think the private man wept real tears for those children and their dead siblings. The fear is that the pragmatist did not.
