Tag: Ruth Marcus

Where’s Obama?

Ruth Marcus has recently posted an essay on Truthdig.com with the strangely evocative title “A Where’s Waldo? Presidency.”

For a man who won office talking about change we can believe in, Barack Obama can be a strangely passive president. There are a startling number of occasions in which the president has been missing in action-unwilling, reluctant or late to weigh in on the issue of the moment.

On health care, for instance, he took on a big fight without being able to articulate a clear message or being willing to set out any but the broadest policy prescriptions.

That was not an isolated case. Where, for example, is the president on the verge of a potential government shutdown-if not this week, then a few weeks from now?

Obama has said he agrees with some of his fiscal commission’s recommendations and disagrees with others. Which ones does he disagree with?

Where’s Obama? No matter how hard you look, sometimes he’s impossible to find.

Where’s Obama? One place you don’t have to look is Wisconsin, even though some people interpret Obama’s inspiring “walk the line” 2008 campaign speech as if it was a promise that Wisconsin right now is exactly where he would be.

“If American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain, when I’m in the White House I’ll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself – I’ll walk on that picket line with you as President of the United States of America.”

This feels like a crazy time. Almost nothing political in this country seems to make sense. I feel a little crazy too. Maybe this whole diary is nuts but it comes from my heart.

I think there are reasons for this crazy time here are a few of them:  

1. There is little correlation between what is reported in the mainstream media and anything we might agree to call “reality”. This fact is true because there has been a deliberate attempt to mislead the public through mind-control techniques which are partly engineered and has partly emerged from the logic of public relations and advertising.
2. We have,right now, a population that is, for the most part, addicted to “entertainment” and amusements almost as if they were the essence of life. This creates a need for meaning as a matter of fantasy. If it feels cool then it is true or desirable. We take positions on public policy, for example, based on messages from our lower brain. While this is normal for human beings the fact that the stakes are so high right now makes this a catastrophe. We are headed for a world described by the movie Idiocracy
3. Those people who ought to know better and who have had a liberal education and are reasonably cultured have lost, as Yeats said, “lost all conviction.” In other words the educated are dealing with the influence of modernism and the scientific view of the world where you cannot, by definition, be convinced of anything. You must hold all judgement until you have all the facts and it is hard to know when that point arrives. So the point gets pushed somewhere far away and that becomes a habit. Ultimately this form of modernism is value-neutral. It is hard for a modernist or post-modernist to say “here I stand” even when the question is to abolish the modernist project. This can be seen by the astonishing quiet on the part of the American intelligentsia (other than derision and wry asides, with some notable exceptions) in the face of several decades of active and unrelenting work on the part of the right to institute a return to religious fundamentalism, American Exceptionalism and feudalism with all its comforting certainties.