Published: Sunday, January 25, 2009
From The Washington Square News
By Aaron Leonard
Like hundreds of thousands of other people I went to Washington, D.C., to see Barack Obama sworn in as president. This was the third inauguration I’ve been to since 2000. The first one was pretty raucous; demonstrators lined the route, some even throwing eggs as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney drove by. There was a feeling that the country had been hijacked, that something approaching a coup had been pulled off. The second Bush inauguration was just sad. There were demonstrations, but there was also something like stunned disbelief that Bush could have been re-elected.
I went to President Obama’s inauguration knowing this was different. Going in, there was a sense that people were reclaiming something. You could not help but be struck by the enormous significance of a black man rising to the highest political office in the United States. I was especially affected by the overwhelming number of black people traveling to Washington; it spoke to people’s hopes and the shared legacy of a most horrific oppression.
Throughout the day’s events, two lines from pop-culture canon kept flashing across my consciousness: “Wouldn’t it be nice,” that testimonial to youthful optimism by the Beach Boys and a line from George Carlin, “I stuck a dollar bill in a change machine … nothing changed.” What people think will happen and what, in fact, is likely to happen are two different things.
As I stood in the crowd while Chief Justice John Roberts swore Barack Obama in, my mind zoomed around the world. Somewhere in Gaza City a tank — paid for in part by the mega billions in U.S. aid — turned down a street on its way back to Israel after contributing to a cascade of human suffering. In Afghanistan, a U.S. soldier popped his daily antidepressant to try and combat symptoms of boredom and horror at the prospect of inadvertently killing civilians. In Iraq, a young man still reeling from his torture and humiliation in Abu Ghraib prison wakes up from another sleep full of endless nightmares. I thought of Mississippi or Montana, where the main support for a young woman wanting to terminate her pregnancy is counseling offered by anti-abortion supporters to keep young women from controlling their own bodies. I thought about all these things, realizing that Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and all the Democrats gave former President Bush license to commit war crimes. While there will be changes, like more engaged diplomacy and less bluster, Obama is not going to change things in any meaningful sense. Just look at his official positions on Afghanistan, abortion, Iraq or prosecuting Bush to see what I mean.
It’s not wrong for people to have dreams and hope. The world is a horror for too many people. But we need to confront honestly what Obama does and does not represent. Too many people I talked to in Washington had too superficial an understanding about where Obama actually stood and where they thought he stood. They liked the package but weren’t really taking the trouble to unwrap it. In a certain respect Obama is an agent of meta-damage control, a course correction for a U.S. empire that is overextended abroad and wracked by a huge financial crisis. The empire is in need of serious medicine.
It’s not bad to have hope, but if it’s illusory or misguided, then nothing good is going to come of it. Facing things squarely is a much better starting point.