Phil Weiss: This is a picture of Mohammad of Vancouver. The picture was taken last week at an art intervention: A group of artists did pieces of political art about Gaza at some art galleries, unsolicited. One of the pieces was putting the word Holocaust on papers and tossing it around inside a gallery. A way of interrogating the use and sanctification of the Holocaust, when a type of holocaust was occurring in Gaza (and remember F. Scott Fitzgerald's use of "holocaust" in The Great Gatsby at the end of the book, to describe murder/suicide, yes before the Nazis.)
Anyway, that's Mohammad (who knows that Saddam was far worst than the IDF, who served in the Iran-Iraq war as an Iranian soldier, who is post-Muslim, who loves the west, who has dedicated himself to making Palestine the issue). And here is Mohammad on Obama:
I always considered the President of America
to be a film character whose movie is 4-8 years long instead of it
being 2 hours. The president is not a person.
He is a kind of 24 hour reality movie actor in role whose life would be
televised, watched and analyzed for the period of presidency. With
Obama, there is a Quantum leap
in that he truly is one thing. We no longer have an actor and then the
character that he would be putting on display. America has found itself
a true real Character. That IS what he is. No longer there are two
entities, on one side the actor and the other the character. There
is no real Obama counterpart, as there used to be a real Bush. There is only one.
That's why I call him the perfect hologram. His reality is a
powerful hologram that magnetically attracts attention.
Obama does not really exist separate from an iconic image, a three
dimensional moving, eating, walking, talking, version of a classic
icon, like Christ in Michelangelo's Christ in the Sistine Chapel
paintings.
The other
fascinating aspect of Obama is his ups and downs with Hilary. Their
tale more and more resembles a mother and son relationship, and I'm
afraid to say that the first thing that pops in my mind about this
topic is Michelangelo's Pieta. Mother and son dynamics are both very
Christian and very Freudian. Except in this case so far the son is
still alive and in charge, and the mother has been reined in. This is
quite different from the usual Christian or Freudian narrative.
But be
careful: things can always go crazy between a mother and a son.
I
am also interested in how everyone assumes what Obama says is not what
he means. Like when he speaks the national security language of Bush,
or when he articulates the neocon's objectives in Afghanistan.
Obama has directly talked about a wider war there but we really don't
think of it as a serious problem, because we believe that he doesn't
really mean what he says. Obama has spoken about his unshakable(?)
loyalty to Israel. He has said that he wanted Jerusalem to be undivided. We also don't think Obama's appointments mean what they are. For instance he has surrounded himself with Zionists. Joe Biden is an example. He is a self described one. Rahm Emanuel,
his chief of staff is another high profile Zionist in his
administration.
But again, who are we to assume he really means his
words or even his appointments? Maybe he had to say "'stuff like this"
to get elected. Maybe he had to appoint "people like this" to key posts
to be able to govern?
There are also times when we can all agree
that what Obama says is just fluff, like when he gets into sentimental
optimistic talk about the American dream or the triumph of the civil rights movement.
We all know the tragic limitations of these fantasies, but we don't
object to Obama's speech, because we 'know' what he means and why he has to say things like this.
When Obama gets "serious", he speaks very
metaphoric and referential, and therefore his words are open to
multiple interpretations. Remember his reference to the "walls" in Berlin last year?All of us thought for sure he was referencing the
Israel's apartheid wall. But was he really?
My real concern is,
what if he, in all these cases, really means what he says? What if he
really thinks Israel has a right to unleash war crimes for the third or
fourth time in the name of its security? What if he really believes
America can overcome the Bush years and lead the world again?
And what if
he really thinks that he can fix the economy, heal all the racial
wounds and bring about global social justice?
