Jan
25
“Specifically, my hope had been that elevating a progressive African-American Democrat to the nation’s highest office would do two things: help to bring about an effective engagement with America’s unresolved problems of racial inequality, and begin to reverse our headlong march toward a Hundred Years’ War with radical Islam. I did not expect these things to happen overnight, but I did expect to see movement in this direction. This administration has shown scant inclination to do either, which is disappointment enough. But worse—far worse—is the likelihood that Obama’s failure even to attempt such changes will discredit the very idea that these are worthy objectives for any Democrat. Obama has said little of substance about racial inequality since moving into the Oval Office, and what he has said leaves much to be desired. His speech to the NAACP convention was a rehash of his by now familiar “family values” homily. His comments on the arrest last summer of a black Harvard professor were shockingly inept. Our black president seems eager to address the American public with passion about the race issue when his “friend” has been mistreated by the police, but not if it means stressing policy reforms that might keep tens of thousands of troubled black men out of prison. As for the new American militarism, Obama has not really changed the direction in which we are headed. Indeed, and ironically, his speech in Oslo accepting the Nobel Peace Prize attempted to justify American military hegemony as the necessary precondition of global security and prosperity in the second half of the twentieth century. His conduct of the “war on terror” and, most distressing, his escalation of our involvement in Afghanistan’s civil war is eerily reminiscent of the approach of his immediate predecessor.”
(Notes on) Politics, Theory & Photography
