In the end, Barack Obama became President of the United States by telling us what we wanted to hear. It was a nice and noble vision that he presented to us, but there is a problem: We are not the nation that we were 28 years ago. We have grown too attached to people telling us we can have something for nothing, that the cheap goods from Wal-Mart have no price other than a few pictures of dead Presidents, we have consumed and consumed and consumed and in the meantime our manufacturing sector has been gutted, the average wage of a wage-earner has gone down for every year since 1973 and the only reason average household income has not gone down is because more people in the household are working and for longer hours, our health system has collapsed, we have become a nation of nervous nellies too frightened to take the reins of our own fate in our hands...
Obama takes over with a nation that is in denial, a nation that is no longer the great nation that it was 28 years ago, that produces nothing, that invents little, that has outsourced everything to people overseas and left nothing for its own people but selling real estate to one another when not selling cars to one another and being sandwich artists for those who are selling real estate to one another and selling cars to one another and now that both the real estate and automobile industry are in the dumps... now what? All we have left are high-tech military toys, but eight years of Bush regime overseas adventurism have destroyed most of our inventory of ground weapons and we no longer have the ability to make new ones. We can no longer make a tank here in the United States of America. We have no ability to make the turbine engines that drive tanks. We have no ability to rebuild our ability to make those turbine engines. We have destroyed our nation, all of us, with our short-sighted notion that we could ignore the common good, that we could ignore the health and welfare of the nation, that we could get tax cut after tax cut until 40% of American households aren't even paying taxes anymore, and yet still have all the benefits of good government. We bought the belief that we could have a free lunch, that we could have good government without paying for it, and now we are fucked.
And we're still in denial. Obama could not have won if he had not lied and told us that we could get even more tax cuts. If he had told us the truth -- that we have driven away the expertise needed to operate critical government functions like the Centers for Disease Control, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, FEMA, etc. with short-sighted wage and benefits cuts for government workers, that the nation is bankrupt because we no longer collect enough taxes to pay for even the basic security functions of our government -- he would have had no more chance of getting elected than Dead Gus Hall.
The question that will tell us whether Obama will be a great President, or merely another triangulating waffler like Bill Clinton, will be whether Obama is able to break the truth to us, and break it to us in such a way that we do not immediately storm the White House and tar and feather him and throw his burned body into the Potomac. I think he has the tools to be a great President. But unless he has the courage to tell us the truth, and the skill to use that truth to get us to help rebuild our nation rather than continue our addiction to cheap Chinese crap and free lunches, all that Obama is going to be is a place holder. And whether the nation can survive a place holder when all the buzzards are circling overhead over the carcass of this once great nation... well. We shall see, I suppose.
-- Badtux the Realist Penguin
I don't know what Obama is capable of fixing. We are a spoilt child of a nation, and heavily into disavowing our responsibilities. But I know I feel the small seed of hope for the first time in years; with McCain ascendant there would have been no hope, only the expectation of fresh hell incoming. Crossing fingers here.
ReplyDeleteAll those problems you list will go away if we just cut the capital gains tax.
ReplyDeleteAnd don't forget waving our hands around and praying for a magical invisible hand to help us out either, Anon! It's worked so great these past 8 years after alll... ;-).
ReplyDeleteI am 28 years old and am therefore a product of this excess to which you refer. Admittedly, it is convenient to be able to drive to the market and buy your basic amenities on the cheap. I am comforted by the fact that I don't have to rely on a single onion and pinch of salt for daily sustenance (as does much of India ). However, I am also not blind to social realities/consequences enabling this availability: jobs shipped overseas, child labor, death of mom and pop establishments... not to mention fat ass ppl. blocking the sidewalk/raising health care costs.
ReplyDeleteSadly, were have become a selfish nation. Republicans/democrats alike fear that Mr. Prez will take away their money, but similarly complain about the potholes on their street (ineffectiveness of big gov't, I'm sure).
Doubt we will change our habits anytime soon. I recall someone once suggesting that we put on a sweater instead of unnecessarily burning fossil fuels... dude was laughed out of office.