What Do You Expect?

I read the article below in OpEdNews. It so closely paralleled my feelings at the moment that I decided to reproduce it here for you. I can't say I'm quite as optimistic as Obenzinger says he is, but you've got to hope that Obama really does represent the light at the end of the tunnel. I hope you enjoy this article as much as I did. If nothing else it is a good piece of writing.

Bob
***********************************************************************************

Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/articles/November-5th-2008-What-D-by-Hilton-Obenzinger-080911-402.html

September 13, 2008

November 5th, 2008: What Do You Expect?

By Hilton Obenzinger

Meditations in a Time of Delusions and Lies – 28

It's November 5th, 2008.

White people have been given the cue to reject a black man with code words like "hockey mom" and "pit bull with lipstick." Gender has been pitted against race to allow white people to talk about "working class" to mean white people got to keep what's theirs against the onslaught of effete wine-drinking law professor black men. Huh? Cavalcade of distractions, Swift Boats in all ports, blatant mendacious fabrications, and over-ripe baloney piled to even higher levels than the first 8 years of Rove.

New terms have been added to the twisted cynical fascist lexicon, "lipstick" joining "honor" and "service" and "homeland." Two colonial frontiers go head to head: Alaska of desperate last-chance white folks versus Hawaii of mellow mix-mix. America no mo' bettah mix-mix. Alaska crude wins.

What do you expect?

Bush has locked American logic into endless occupation of Iraq, which the Happy Fighter Pilot embraces with joy. The attack on Iran is now cleared for take-off. Pakistan is on the "to pulp" list. The solution to war is more war, wider war. The solution to occupation is more occupation, wider occupation. Israeli leaders can barely contain themselves; they decide to extend The Wall to Jupiter. America looks the other way.

Crazed victims of America get even crazier, and even more Americans still can't figure out why they hate us. Good people all over the world set up "Committees in Solidarity with the People of the United States" (CISPUS). In El Salvador and Germany and Vietnam they argue and agonize over what the true meaning of solidarity is all about – Sending money to besieged truth-tellers in New Jersey? Singing songs of the Spanish Civil War? Should they campaign for Boycott and Divestment? CISPUS reaches out to underground Americans waiting for the decades-long Alaska winter night to end, but they know that only the oppressed Americans are the ones who can defeat the Four Budweiser Delivery Trucks of the Apocalypse.

What do you expect?

Oh, I forgot. Russia now bad, them big bad Russians. Surround them with missiles, goad them with NATO, provoke them – and we can have a Cold War again. Good for arms business, happiness for missile guidance systems. The first Cold War turns out to have had little to do with ideology – something a lot of people suspected all along – so we can go back to square one – ah, containment and confrontation – all wrapped in the warm blanket of familiar fear, along with lust for oil. And then there's China . . .

What do you expect?

A thousand miles off the coast of San Francisco a mass of plastic bags two times the size of Texas floats in the Pacific – this is fact, check it out. Soon the continent of crap drifts toward the coast, and Americans strangle in their own garbage. Dead zones at the mouth of the Mississippi expand in all directions. Bees die off, fruit trees wither, frogs disappear – and perky Sarah hunts down polar bears from helicopters as they swim in Arctic Jacuzzis. Do you miss honey? Do you miss apples? Do you miss the North Pole?

What do you expect?

Americans are told they don't want a "Washington Bureaucrat" to make their health-care decisions. They are happy to have a bureaucrat in Connecticut or Wall Street to decide instead. Actually, once again Americans are left waiting in the Emergency Room – which is about to be shut down.

This is freedom of choice. Women have no choice, even if they die, to carry babies to the maws of death in Kabul or Baghdad or Texas Death Row, which is "pro life." Sex is bad, abstain from touching yourself in those goofy places, abstain from joy, avoid all candor, avoid all knowledge, keep your secret places to yourself – and, above all, do not touch anyone's private parts that look like your own.

Capitalism continues to eat its own. No regulation means constant regurgitation. Banks kill themselves off like bees. Putrid carcass free market burgers kill off entire cities like bees, no need for hurricanes. No one checks the meat, no one checks the drugs, no one checks the ads on TV to buy the drugs, no one checks the drug companies who are put in charge of saving the planet in sacred trust with oil companies. More poor, more pain, more jails, more crank, less school, no science, more God, less compassion, less jobs, more shopping days before Christmas, less reality, more reality TV, more stupidity, less art, more dead brain.

And what do I expect?

Actually, on November 5th, 2008, I expect joy. Joy for a government that, while no means perfect, hears people, that the people have not been fooled one more time, and that the ballot boxes have not been stuffed, and a black man leads the descendants of masters and slaves, immigrants and natives, the meager and the mighty, judged by his character and not by the color of his skin. For a government that acts without corporate veto, that harkens to an America of many-ness and ferment. That allows the community organizer to reach across the continent to gather the energies of multitudes to take up the task ourselves. That you are cared for when you are sick, that you are cared for in order not to get sick.

The People's Herald watches Great Greed, regulating, not allowing the thoughtless collapse of dreams and the careless injection of poison. That war is not the business of America, that problems are solved before countries and peoples are destroyed, that children will learn in schools that can teach, that people can work at jobs that pay and grow the spirit, that religion belongs to people and not politicians, that the people take the lead to save the planet, that that we grow prosperous through the exercise of new ideas, that bees will live, and songs and all the other expressions take us to the world, and the world brings us thanks, and that courage means living in that world, sharing problems and promises and power.

On November 5th, 2008, I expect it will be possible to imagine all of these things, and more.

Which America do you expect on November 5th, 2008? What will you do to make it happen?




Authors Website: www.obenzinger.com

Authors Bio: Hilton Obenzinger is the author of "American Palestine: Melville, Twain and the Holy Land Mania," among many other books of criticism, poetry and fiction, and the recipient of the American Book Award. He is a long-time Jewish American advocate of Israeli-Palestinian peace. Hilton Obenzinger teaches writing and American literature at Stanford University.

Back