Lancing the Boil, the Administrations of Barrack Hussein Obama

Lancing a boil releases unpleasant, malodorous effluvium, frequently initiating a healing process. It can be messy and painful and not always successful. That pretty much illustrates life in the United States of America and the world during the administrations of Barrack Hussein Obama. The results will not be in for a long time but I sense that the adjective dysfunctional, not non-functional but functioning inefficiently in great pain, will be prominent.

That is of course largely (but not totally) because throughout his terms as president he was opposed on most matters by a tenacious foe whose only goal was to assure his failure regardless of social or economic consequences and because his purported values seem not to have been deeply rooted. He was not a fighter, rather, he sought unsuccessfully to develop consensus and the price he paid betrayed those who’d most trusted him. Something that either did not trouble him overmuch or which he was unable or unwilling to perceive.

The Republican opposition turned most of his efforts into lead for progressives but gold for the tip of the financial class that owns it. Admirable loyalty: once bought they stayed bought, and they were joined in that endeavor all too frequently by the leprous Clinton wing of the Democratic Party. Taxes were lowered on the wealthy (when not eliminated). Not that that had much of an effect because they were already being overwhelmingly evaded. The rest of the country was forced to bear the burden and ironically (irony seems a hallmark of the Obama presidency) many of the victims not only relished it but fought tooth and nail to increase it. Health care for all was converted into a golden goose for the insurance and pharmaceutical industries which unstiltedly shared their good fortune with their benefactors. Of course, that created confusion. Republicans were forced to oppose the abomination they’d successfully shepherded into being, with winks galore to their very pleased allies; hypocrisy, being no impediment, proved the most useful of tools. The President was forced to support his stillborn creation from which most life had been bled (i.e., the public option). And the Democrats, purportedly the president’s party, … well, their incoherence was deafening, led by the cheers of the afore referenced Clinton wing. It ought to be noted at this point that one winged avian species do not generally fly all that well which pretty much paints a portrait of the Obama presidency.

It started in hope but that was very rapidly and successfully converted to disillusion and despair, not just in the United States but everywhere. His epithet may be, “he tried, but not all that hard or all that well”, and like those before him, got caught up in playing with his shiny military toys, fueled by the lives of the best among us, their limbs and our treasure, a seemingly renewable resource, at least from the perspective of those who least contribute.

One benefit involved the focus on racism. On the one hand, an African American finally attained the highest office and ironically and in the long term perhaps more importantly, forcefully exposed the continued existence of profound racism. The president was an African American (not an African), that racial amalgam so ironically emblematic of the United States, applying to anyone with a traceable African component in his heritage. The obvious resurgence of rampant racism is not all bad as it may require people of good will interested in minimizing that disease to grasp that there is still so much more to do than the sixties led us to believe.

Racism’s cousin, xenophobia, was much more than just evident. It was as strong as it has ever been, making clear that it continuous as a central element of life in the United States. It always has been notwithstanding the sonnet “The New Colossus” by American poet Emma Lazarus which purportedly emblemizes the vision of America reflected in its Statute of Liberty. The United States has been oft referred to as a cultural melting pot but it seems more like some type of furnace in which those culturally different can be cast and disposed of, although not all that efficiently. That xenophobia is perhaps strangest as applied to the control exerted by Zionists over United States foreign policy where anti-Semites fanatically support the Israeli state in the hope that their messiah will come again amidst the horrors of Armageddon and where the Jewish Anti-defamation League has morphed into a worldwide campaign to defame Muslims; damned successfully too, “damned” being the operative concept.

So, in a slightly premature conclusion, hypocrisy rides high, as usual; the public is in a probable you can “fool most of the people some of the time” mood (or at least Mrs. Clinton hopes so); and, the spiral keeps heading downward, something that Cassandric prophetess, the Wicked Witch of the West (what an appropriate geopolitical connotation) noted towards the very end of her life when she commented: “What a world, … what a world” and slowly melted away.

Still, I guess we should stay tuned.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2016; all rights reserved