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Rage Against the Machine
(3)The only difference between the two parties is marketing, said Adam Jung, a youth organizer who was interviewed during the Rage concert in Denver. Electing Democrats to end the war is like drinking light beer to lose weight.
This quote comes from the NYTimes, which this morning has a lively article describing the antics of Rage Against the Machine, which “formed an ad-hoc convention in opposition to both major parties,” one in Denver and one in Minneapolis. The article is worth reading. I found it very refreshing after two weeks of canned heat.
While I can’t condone violent protest and vandalism (e.g. bricks through windows. slashing tires), I am glad to see a populist spirit of opposition alive in the land.
And while I will give Democrats credit for appearing to be less threatened by this kind of protest than are the Republicans (copious arrests being made in Minneapolis), I am no more convinced than Adam Jung that the Democrats will end this war. Joe Biden is a right smart argument against the notion that they’ll even try.
First things first, Barack Obama has broken a very big racial barrier and we should all be very proud of him and of our country for that.
But he is not the re-incarnation of Martin Luther King, Jr. He’s a politician. A Chicago-machine politician. To state this is not necessarily to slander Obama. Any African-American man or woman who would be elected President of the United States of America would be a politician.
And it is true that this war is a Neocon, Republican war, but with a few brave exceptions, the Democrats have acted as enablers throughout.
Still I believe in politics. We need politicians. Maybe almost as much as we need poets.
I would expect an Obama administration to put a more human, diplomatic face on our foreign policy, and that is an important difference with the Republicans. It is my hope that he’ll be able to de-escalate things a bit. To stop with the posturing and the toothless threats. But I don’t imagine that he will be able to restore the Empire and the Pax Americana. Bush has already shown the world that the Wizard is just a little man suspended by a lot of hot air.
We ain’t the only big guy in the room any more.
Anyway, to deflate my own argument a bit, I think our economy may well be what stops the war. Like I said, we ain’t the only big guy in the room.
I would think Obama would close Guantanamo, but the horse has left that barn.
I would also expect Obama to stop tying U.N. funds for women’s health to abortion politics. And that is a very big foreign policy difference for me.
Obama may draw down troops in Iraq, a process that already seems to be underway, but he has never said that he’d leave altogether. What will he do about Afghanistan? Pakistan? Iran?
Politicians don’t stop war. The history of the 20th Century proves that. Forward-looking leaders don’t come from the field of politics. They come from the people.
We must make our politicians accountable. We’ve never succeeded in stopping war before but we must not stop trying. Just as we must continue to resist totalitarianism and terrorism. I continue convinced that the best weapon against all these things is a “war on terror,” not of guns and bombs, but within the individual heart. We must not succumb to the politics of fear but speak out against atrocity, whether it comes from our side or the other.
And remember that marching in lockstep, even with the good guys, is a dangerous thing.
That is why I’m delighted by Rage Against the Machine (though I probably won’t listen to their music).
I share with you a quotation for Hannah Arendt that I found in Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting:
The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story. …the lesson of such stories is simple and within everybody’s grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror, most people will comply but some people will not …Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.
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Barack Obama, Rage Against the Machine
3 Responses to “Rage Against the Machine”
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koshembos September 7th, 2008 at 6:30 am
Charles de Gaulle was a politician who stopped the French war in Algeria.
Obama is a white politician with an African father. He Grow up in a white family and his mom was white. I am not particularly impressed by his nomination because it was done by cheating and lying.
The war in Iraq will be over by June 2009; the US and Iraq agreed on that already. The remaining troops will be placed in camps away from action.
I doubt we will see president Obama; he turns up to be an inept campaigner without a hysterical media opposing his opponent and wothout caucuses that can be manipulated.
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Hey Koshembos. I thought you’d probably given up on me because I haven’t been talking politics much lately. As for de Gaulle, well, nobody, including me, should make sweeping generalizations. Still, Nixon stopped the Viet Nam war, too. I had the idea that the French in Algeria was sort of like the Americans in Viet Nam.
Anyway, I stick to my overarching point, which is that politicians are owned (at least at this time in this country), even Obama for all his claims of getting most of his money from small donors, and they do what makes money for their owners. And even when they’re honorable, politicians are about the art of the deal.
As for the voters, well, I think Abraham Lincoln said it — you can fool some of the people all of the time and you can fool all of the people some of the time but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.
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Some added thoughts about MLKJr. I don’t think he had any desire to be nor should he have been President of the U.S.A. His value was as, essentially, a rabble rouser. A rare sort of rabble rouser who sought, not power, but to empower. His power was that he could rally people to put their vulnerable bodies on the line. In part, this may have been because he put his body down there on the line with them. As did Ghandi. He had the courage to die for his cause and the moral fiber not to kill for it.
I think Obama is riffing off MLKJr without ever having developed the spiritual depth.
Which is not to say that I think John McCain and/or Sarah Palin have any spiritual depth.
I also think poor whites have never had the courage to rise up with their black brothers against wealth and power because they’ve bought the bill of goods that somehow being white makes them free and superior. They also have never developed spiritual depth.
Me? I mouth off a lot but I don’t know what courage I’d have if I was put to it. Though to some extent I established this blog because I wanted to speak out in a public forum against the atrocities of the Bush administration. So perhaps that was a small act of courage. But I do it hiding in a corner behind my computer screen.
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