- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
We all still know that Obama is inheriting an unholy mess. Fox News is already calling it "Obama's recession." The MSM is just exploiting the sentiment that can be wrung from this moment of fresh-start solidarity while sharpening its claws under the table. They will produce what gets ratings, and what gets ratings is transient and manipulable emotion. The left- progressive-whatever-contingent to which I belong is accustomed to marginalization and impotent outcry, and outrage and suspicion may be all we remember how to do.
But we unwittingly join hands with the ever-fulminating and floridly stupid far right when we feel it our bounden duty to simply rip and tear around our less universally held convictions. One of these is that our elected leaders are all crooks and liars and if it seems momentarily otherwise, well, just wait. Because they have been crooks and liars for some time and always will be. Right? Maybe.
But this is a nation steeped in the habit of blind nationalism on the one hand and knee-jerk outrage at government on the other. And crippling division in the better places. Where I live politically, nobody has said "stand behind your president" except in parody of the right for a very long time. I think it's pretty much forbidden. Like that collective pride we felt when Obama was elected... could that be... gasp... "patriotism"? Get that thing out of my house, my patriotism has just been about hating the ongoing vileness into which my country has been hurled, and feeling a deep need to loathe and expose it as the rotten thing that it has become. That's patriotism, right? Not pride in a collective task well done, by a whole bunch of people from all over the political spectrum... not pride and even loyalty pledged to the actually good president who has managed to accomplish that impossible thing. We are perhaps disoriented.
There is every possibility that whatever real good this very good man can do will be torn to ribbons in the political bear-baiting ring.. There is a certainty that a media designed to entertain people at their fifth-grade capacity will remember that we seem to have no attention span and is dying to see if we won't just blame Obama for what probably cannot be fixed for years to come. This cycle is going to hurt. The knee-jerk response will be blame of the new administration, starting with a deep, righteous sigh of disappointment re cabinet appointments, and ending in a stupidly reactionary vote next time around.
I say, let's not do it. Let's not go along with that crap. Let's stick together on the big stuff, unintimidated by the fickle winds of what passes for political "hardball", and stay the damned course with this guy. Looks like a pretty sound line-up to me. How quickly we forget.
