Keep the Change

For the record, I spent Election Day 2008 driving people to the polls. I didn’t ask any of them what their political preferences were, although many volunteered that information, and I wouldn’t have denied a ride to anyone based upon such a consideration, but since most of the people were elderly, female and of African descent, I can pretty much surmise what they did in the voting booth, and, more importantly, why they did it. I also contributed money I couldn’t afford to the Obama campaign for President and spend a chilly few months in the old household while my wife supported Hillary in the primaries. Now, just slightly less than one year into the Obama presidency, I’m starting to get that sinking feeling that you get when you begin to suspect the Van Gogh etching you greedily bought without proper caution is a fake. Of course, like any case of desperation related denial, I will keep the etching proudly displayed upon the wall and pray that I am wrong.

I do realize that President Obama took office under a set of circumstances which were as unfavorable as any since at least Franklin Roosevelt and I know it is hard to remodel the kitchen when the house is on fire, but the continued failure of the America economy is not what troubles me. I am of the opinion that our current economic struggles are the result of decades of short-sighted consumer behavior, regulatory failures and the policies of both Democratic and Republican administrations which favored the accumulation of shareholder value over fundamental economic development. These things will not be corrected by President Obama nor all the king’s horses and all the king’s men any time soon. The things that bother me are far simpler, and as a result, far more disturbing.

I’m going to give the President a pass on Iraq, although I’m not fully convinced that he deserves it, but it is clearly a complex situation and it appears that things are slowly sorting themselves out, although we are still pouring an incredible amount of money and intermittently the lives of our soldiers into fixing a mess that should be the responsibility of the Iraqi people themselves. The trouble with Iraq is that it is the poster child for the Bush Doctrine, which basically says we can, and perhaps should, impose our “superior” values on the rest of the world by force, although one of our values is that values should never be imposed on others by force. President Obama probably rightly fears the instability that would result from a too hasty U.S. exit, but there comes a time when the chicks must leave the nest on principle alone. We don’t want Iraq living in our basement and bringing its unemployed friends over for the next hundred years.

So forget Iraq, but the last time I checked, President Obama was still the Commander in Chief of the United States Armed Forces. So why do we still have this stupid “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy? I know there are a lot of people in this country who feel homosexuality is a sin or a perversion or something equally unpleasant, but unless I completely misunderstood, their candidates lost the election. We bed-wetting Liberals put Obama in office and we want gays to be able to openly bleed and die for their country just like every other poor son-of-a-bitch of whatever persuasion in the military. To deny someone the right to serve their country because Sarah Palin doesn’t like their sex habits is the height of foolishness, not to mention being down right unpatriotic. And why is Guantanamo Bay still an operating prison? Why has the policy of rendition not been clearly and specifically denounced and terminated? What stuns me is that President Obama won’t do these simple things to demonstrate that he understands why he is the President, which he apparently doesn’t. I could go on and on about the triumph of form over substance in health-care legislation, the escalating American presence in Afghanistan and the consistent kissing of Wall Street’s ass, but those are also complex issues which merit substantially more effort than I am willing to make between Christmas and New Years; nonetheless, I am sadly coming to the conclusion that President Obama is similar to virtually all of his predecessors in the fact that executive policy is driven by perceived political necessity rather than commitment to principle. What is even sadder is that as he compromises on everything important to me, the Right in America intensifies its hysterical efforts to discredit him. Perhaps the sharks of pessimism already smell the blood of a seriously wounded dream.

The Sixth-Century B.C. Greek philosopher Heraclitus is quoted as observing that one “cannot step twice into the same river”, illustrating his defining principle of the inevitability and inexorability of change. He felt that there was an underlying universal force governing change, but he never fully defined the supposed nature of that force. Heraclitus was something of a buzz kill, eventually parting ways with his fellow Ephesians over their alleged self-indulgence and he spent the last years of his life wandering the mountains, eating grass and talking trash about Homer and Pythagoras. He was later much admired by the Stoics, whose motto was basically “get used to it”, but I have to wonder if Heraclitus, like an increasing number of us, became disillusioned by the contradiction of the clear and absolute certainty of change and the preponderant likelihood that said change would not be the same change we had chosen to believe in.