Last night I saw President Obama. I was rushing south on Park Avenue to make a 10:05 train at Grand Central Terminal when I had to stop at barricades on 68th Street manned by police officers. Soon the president’s procession went by. A whole bunch of cop cars, followed by motorcycles, then a number of VIPs’ cars including a long black car with flags on the hood that I’m guessing the president was in, then more black cars for VIPS, then motorcycles and cop cars and a couple of ambulances. The motorcade lasted over a minute before the last of the centurions passed blipping their sirens. I asked an officer if I could now go through, I had to get a train. “You have to wait five minutes.” I remembered being stopped by officers at the side of the road in Thailand and Tonga as their respective kings’ processions went by and thought, this is much worse.
I missed my train and had to wait an hour and cursed the proceedings for having detained me.
But when I got home at 1 in the morning, my feelings turned. I had cut my hand breaking kindling the other night and then got blood on my shirt sleeve last night, and I put cold water on the shirt and hung it and thought, I bet Obama can’t do this. Someone is standing there to take his shirt, and attending his every scratch, and breaking his kindling. The man has no personal autonomy. He can’t rush down Park Avenue counting off the blocks and the time, he can’t take a ride in Manhattan without shutting everyone else down and being surrounded by officious police officers and god knows how many suckups. Whereas I can walk anywhere I please, mostly.
Waste empathy on someone who must have known that whatever anonymity he still had as a U.S. senator would vanish once he was elected president? Best save your humanitarian “instincts” for those who suffer as a consequence of his selling out to Wall Street, war-makers and Israel firsters.
You can have sympathy/empathy for all people, including those at the top of the greasy pole. They are humans, too (and their lives are severely distorted by a system that pretty much turns them into out-of-touch automatons if they don’t have the personal strength and conviction necessary to be an actual leader — and I can’t think of a single politician who does these days). But that doesn’t preclude us from fighting policies and actions we perceive to be unjust and/or criminal.
thanks Pamela
pam, obama is a human, but he is devoid of humanity. this is certainly not weiss’s best writing, in no small measure for precisely what you laud as its strength: sympathy for people at the top of the greasy pole. anger, a much maligned emotion, is more appropriate. the slippery pole needs to be tipped over since most in this meritocracy never get within a mile of its base.
i have sympathy for the former slave population, their humanity, the only people who had a legitimate reason to celebrate obama’s election, and who, along with [most of] the rest of us were promptly f*cked over by the savior. he could choke on a sandwich for all i care. or has one of his attendants been tasked to avoid this risk, chewing the troublesome parts before obama takes a mouthful?
New documentary out on Obama…”The Rage of Obama”
Saying his background formed his desire/plan to destroy “Colonial America” and it’s people.
Wonder who put this out.
News reports says it’s second largest selling documentary on him.
P.S.
Odd, ‘The Rage of Obama’ was published in 2010……why would MSNBC give it a mention and bring it up today? Someone obviously wanted it brought to the public’s attention here in 2012 is all I can think.
Really nasty piece of work also:
“”In The Roots of Obama’s Rage you’ll learn: Why Obama’s economic policies are actually designed to make America poorer compared to the rest of the world Why Obama will welcome a nuclear Iran Why Obama sees America as a rogue nation—worse than North Korea The real reason Obama banished a bust of Winston Churchill from the White House and ordered NASA to praise the scientific contributions of Muslims Why Obama would like to make America’s superpower status a thing of the past.”
They’re saying Obama is carrying out his socialist/communist/ degenerate/ alcoholic African father’s war against ‘colonial’ America to impoverish us and destroy our power..
Gee, you mean his mother, and, even more, her relations who actually took care of him on daily basis more often than not, don’t count with him? Wonder why.
American says: “New documentary out on Obama…”The Rage of Obama”
Saying his background formed his desire/plan to destroy “Colonial America” and it’s people.
Wonder who put this out.
News reports says it’s second largest selling documentary on him…”
This sort of thing always literally cracks me up.
It’s ‘Obama is antichrist,’ more or less. For Chrissakes! I disagree with most of what he would want to do myself — but that’s secondary. His big problem (and hence our big problem) is that he is utterly ineffectual.
If only he were the antichrist. Then we might get somewhere.
PHIL- You have opened my eyes, partner. Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Lloyd Blankfein, John Galt, what do they all have in common? Atlases, all of them. Sacrificial lambs who toil selflessly on our behalf, unappreciated by the vulgar masses who selfishly exploit these titans, yet show no gratitude. Like Ayn Rand, you see things clearly. Why must the 99% be such a burden on the 1%? Perhaps Obama will read your words and take some comfort as he goes over the kill list, or when he holds Bradley Manning and Julian Assange to account. What strange power do the 99% hold over the 1% to be able to force them to give up the simple pleasures for the cold comfort of limousines, yachts and mansions? Hard to figure out, but I’ll tell you this: without them where would we be? Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I have to vomit.
Keith, this really is a rather mean-spirited rant. Just because Phil is showing the intellectual flexibility necessary to adapt to the age of neo-feudalism there is no call to pillory him with this sarcasm.
That said, clearly Phil’s adaptation to this new reality is not yet instinctual. Note his anger at the time he was held up. Clearly he did not doff his cap to the passing motorcade, much less tug his forelock.
Worse yet, whilst Phil’s intellect is willing I suspect his vanity will not go down without a fight. For the unspoken message of this anecdote is not that Phil missed his train because he cut things too fine but rather because the President passed him in the street.
Listen, as furious as I get with Obama I remember exactly how the ‘old boys’ tried to embarrass him time and again over any petty little faux pas and thing they could when he was new to all the protocols of the office.
And I think they did it because he was 1) black and 2) not a member of the club.
I really do think the wind was let out of his sails by his insecurity in how to behave in position of US President.
I don’t know if he is fact just another lying sham or lacking the balls to bust out or, if it’s that he has no faith in the US public supporting a ‘agressive’ black president who loses his temper and gives the zio or neo or whoever what for. We know damn well if acted like some past presidents and blew his cool ‘they’ would blame it on his being ‘Muslim or’ black or ‘African.
He should have his sea legs by now after 4 years and know what’s what, so if he is re elected maybe we will find out what makes him really tick.
I feel sorry for Obama in that his career is a failure. He’ll be remembered as the President who could have done things but didn’t. When climate change really gets going we’ll look back on his administration and wonder what someone like Carter would have done. Obama is all hat and no cowboy.