This post is part of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page.
There’s that picture again, this time from the front, President Obama, Susan Rice and Samantha Power, their arms around each other, walking back to the White House after the announcement of their appointments in the Rose Garden. I can’t get that picture out of my mind. With the virtual world exploding, it will be somewhere forever.
Why does the photo bother me so much? On the surface, it’s a lovely photo. Our first African American President with his new female African American National Security Advisor and an Irish-born female scholar, soon to be Ambassador to the United Nations, who believes that American power should be used to intervene to prevent genocide wherever it rears its ugly head in the world. All for the good.
But, then, I experience a sinking feeling in my stomach. What it represents beyond the surface is profoundly unsettling. Is this where progress has led us?
Looking at the records of all three, I can’t help but feel profoundly disappointed. Such is life. We all disappoint others. Sometimes we disappoint ourselves. Still, the sinking feeling is more than disappointment. It’s about cultivating those who would deny our promotions to power. It’s about sleeping to the top with or without sex being a component. It’s about being bought. It’s about selling out.
On the Israel – and Palestine, Obama, Rice and Power have been bought and sold. It’s so obvious. They’re having their records cleansed even at this late hour. By straightening up on Israel, they think they’ll be free to do the right thing on other, more important, issues. They’re wrong.
Anyone who thinks that cleansing one part of your politics has no effect on the other parts is living an illusion. When you get right on one issue, you censor yourself on others. Call it the political fear factor. Once your opponent knows you’re afraid – and you know it too – you’re dead in the political waters. Whatever good you could have done with your power is over.
It’s the political cycle we’re in. How we’re going to break out of the cycle when people who should know better back down for personal ambition is difficult to imagine. Each political figure you hope will be the exception isn’t.
You can’t give up. It’s irresponsible. You can’t move ahead either. Everyone’s selling out.
The other viral story of the week – the National Administration Agency snooping and the company that Edward Snowden worked for, Booz Allen Hamilton, the multi-billion dollar security firm – is equally depressing on a variety of levels. Though seemingly quite different, there’s a connection to the photo I can’t get out of my mind.
One level which hasn’t had much play in the NSA story is about being bought and sold. The New York Times ran an interesting article on the company’s economic size, links to government and the benefits companies like Booz Allen Hamilton bring to the extended Washington, D. C. area. The article reads like a celebration of government largesse. It treats the post-September 11th world as a giant pork barrel where everyone and their brother compete for national security dollars. There isn’t a critical question raised in the entire article about the company or the intelligence industry itself except for how the leak scandal might affect the company’s future.
What struck me was the amount of money the company brings in from the Federal government for surveillance – 1.3 billion dollars last year alone – and the number of people the company employs – almost 25,000 employees. But other than Edward Snowden, few ask why the untold thousands of people employed in the intelligence industry throw their lot in with these kinds enterprise so willingly. Don’t they think about what their work means to individual liberties and our society at large? Aren’t they – like Obama, Rice and Power – selling their souls?
If you want to break the political cycle of injustice and war, you can’t focus only on the politically ambitious. They’re just a mirror of our own condition. If we’re willing to be bought and sold, why shouldn’t they enjoy their brief time at the top?
This is the most astute article Mr. Ellis has penned in a long time in his series. He does get to the core of the politically ambitious, yet well-intended human’s problem in the current USA. Should I just add the obvious, that all American politics are pork-barrel politics? That Congress is most essentially Barterland? What do the described trio of individuals do with the most singularly focused and wealthiest lobby in the USA? There’s a caustic reason why, e.g., Allison Weir is not running for, or trying to keep a high slot in the US government. It is what it is. Donated Dollars.
“But other than Edward Snowden, few ask why the untold thousands of people employed in the intelligence industry throw their lot in with these kinds enterprise so willingly. ”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27919.htm
“When Dante enters the “city of woes” in the Inferno he hears the cries of “those whose lives earned neither honor nor bad fame,” those rejected by Heaven and Hell, those who dedicated their lives solely to the pursuit of happiness. These are all the “good” people, the ones who never made a fuss, who filled their lives with vain and empty pursuits, harmless perhaps, to amuse themselves, who never took a stand for anything, never risked anything, who went along.”
” Irish-born female scholar, soon to be Ambassador to the United Nations, who believes that American power should be used to intervene to prevent genocide wherever it rears its ugly head in the world. ”
Except when we actively support the perpetrators. Power doesn’t say anything about mass murder and genocide in Central America in the 80’s, which we supported. She’s got about two or three sentences in her book, misleading ones at that, about East Timor. Nothing about Indonesia’s mass slaughter of alleged communists in the 60’s that totaled something like half a million people. Also supported by the US. I suppose she’d argue that wasn’t genocide, but wouldn’t an honest writer concerned with the subject of US foreign policymakers and how they ignore genocide want to look at the very closely related subject of policymakers supporting mass murder?
I know Ellis knows this, but I wish he and others would stop repeating the conventional storyline about Samantha Power, that she’s this truth-telling idealist who fights against the realists and wants the US to do good in the world and is now folding under pressure. She folded a long time ago.
How do you know that the people selling their abilities to the intelligence industry are doing so willingly? Most of us lack access to the means of life, which are monopolized by the wealthy minority. Therefore we HAVE to sell our abilities in order to get what we need for ourselves and our children. If we are lucky we may be able to choose to whom we sell them and avoid selling them to immoral employers like intelligence, prisons, manufacturers of weapons, harmful drugs etc. But many people are unlucky and have no real choice for all sorts of reasons (what skills they have, where they live, how old they are, etc.). True, they can say no and end up hungry and homeless, together with their children, but is it fair to expect this of them? Is it fair to tell them off if they put the welfare of their families first? What would you do if you were in such a situation, Professor Ellis? I know that my willingness to reject immoral ways of earning a living has directly depended on my ability to earn a living by moral means.
RE: “The other viral story of the week – the National Administration Agency snooping and the company that Edward Snowden worked for, Booz Allen Hamilton, the multi-billion dollar security firm – is equally depressing on a variety of levels.” ~ Marc Ellis
A GREAT COMMENTARY: “America at the Precipice; Can Fascism be Far Behind?” ~ by Norman Pollack, Counterpunch, 6/13/13
ENTIRE COMMENTARY – http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/06/13/america-at-the-precipice/