2009: Hope or Illusion?

I resisted emitting a sonorous year-end review or set of predictions for fear of bloviating, but now that we’re a few days into January and almost ready to (shudder) go back to work, I feel the need to take stock in a summary, if whimsical, way. Where are we, where are we going, what does it all mean for my chances and yours at health and happiness, a bit of enjoyment, a flash of satisfaction, protection in sickness, safety in old age?

Both the person of Barack Obama and the event of his election obviously mark the transition from 2008 to 2009, and it remains to be seen if it will mark a larger historical transformation as well. Let’s hope so. Biped mean-spiritedness and egotism have reached heretofore unknown heights in these last decades, and as always the seeds of destruction of the Reagan-Bush-Falwell-Rove regime grew from within itself.

It must come as quite a shock to the hordes of church-going faithful—especially the women—that their loyalty to an ideology of Christian altruism and self-abnegation helped feed a giant maw of incompetence, corruption, conquest and disdain for the weak. They must be a little uneasy at the results of George Bush’s steady reliance on mystical communication with God as a guide for public policy upon viewing the ruins of New Orleans and Baghdad, not to mention the Arctic ice sheet. Obama’s courtship of Rick Warren looks like an attempt to give them new wine to put into those old skins, and if Obama manages to peel a few believers away from their exclusive fascination with the genital doings of us bipeds toward concern for the rest of the body as well, the possibilities for change will be enormous. Like it or not, a whole lot of people view the world through the prism of religious belief.

The other burning issue is, as usual, war and war-making, which marks us as a nation and pretty much always has. We are always refighting the last war or getting ready for the next one; our generals speak for us and lead us; veterans dictate the shape and tenor of patriotism and loyalty. Defeat in Vietnam weakened the militarists, but they were assiduous and patient and restored their monopoly on public discourse culminating in the destruction of John Kerry’s candidacy in 2004 as an aging hippie flag-burner.

I think Obama will represent a huge shift away from the adolescent male posturing of the neocons to a more female style of decision-making whose impact may be too subtle to notice at first. Obama is the product of a matriarchal system, was raised by women and goes home to a female household. He has a woman’s toughness, a non-confrontational style that is less concerned with ‘winning’ than with drawing strict boundaries and enforcing them. The geopolitical game is about scoring points, but Bush has shown us the limits of bullying as a strategy as did John McCain. Obama’s campaign generally avoided it, and he still won.

The other development related to warfare that I anticipate is largely out of Obama’s hands, which is the slow but inexorable confrontation with our national decision to commit torture and abuse of prisoners that occurred under Republican orders with Democratic complicity in a line running from Dick Cheney and John Yoo through Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Jay Rockefeller all the way to John and Jane Q. Public. We felt threatened; we wanted revenge; we got it. Now come the consequences both for our consciences and ourselves.

Torture is a funny thing: it doesn’t go away after the fact. ‘Once tortured, always tortured,’ said a victim from the French resistance in World War II, and that goes for countries, too. No matter what deals are cut to brush the happenings at Guantánamo and Bagram under the rug, no matter how many whitewash commissions sign off on the secret prisons and the rendition to Egyptian and Syrian dungeons, the torture issue will come back to haunt all its perpetrators and abettors even if the bodies have long since been dumped at sea.

Obama will have a lot to say about whether we get our civil liberties back, and his record so far is not encouraging given his buckling on telecom immunity. (He caught hell for it, too, and seemed surprised at how many of us noticed.) But even he can’t stop the putrifaction that arises from the body politic when it commits these crimes, and the foul ooze will bubble forth willy-nilly.

Gazing into the crystal ball on the economic and domestic policy front is much trickier, but I anxiously hope that the proposals are as Rooseveltian and audacious as some suggest, not just the infrastructure spending plans but also radical surgery on our moribund health systems at long last. While most everything else can advance through the usual process, health care reform needs swift action based on Obama’s electoral mandate. Otherwise, the reactive interest groups like doctors, insurance companies and pharmaceuticals will certainly mobilize to keep us enslaved to their profits.

In short, I have high hopes in Obama while not shedding my illusions about the essential contrariness and self-sabotaging instincts of the biped race as a whole. But for some strange reason the country has produced this remarkable guy and decided to take a chance on him. He reflects the times just as Clinton and Bush did, which tells us a lot about those egocentric and self-indulgent years. I want to trust Obama because he is not only smarter than I am but because he may actually have embarked on this crazy mission primarily to get something decent done.