Green Like Me
Questioning the masquerade of Barack Obama
Do you remember chloro- phyll? Then you’re showing your age. For chlorophyll was all the rage back at the dawn of the ’50s when Lever Brothers, in its finite wisdom, put on the market a bright green, mint-flavored dentifrice that promised not only to improve the condition of your teeth, but cure bad breath as well. How did the emerald goop work such wonders? Hard to say, as chlorophyll is nothing more than the green pigment found in most plants. Sure, it looked like it had something special to offer. But at the end of the day, chlorophyll toothpaste succeeded in making teeth green (if brushing was carelessly executed) and nothing more. Its market history was intense but brief. And so may well be the marketing history of Barack Obama – if American voters get wise to him.
I say marketing history rather than political campaign because that’s precisely how the first-term senator is being sold to the American people – not as a person but as a product. And as “product placement” goes, you can’t argue with the success of this one. Why, it seems like only yesterday former First Lady and the current senator from New York, Hillary Clinton, had the Democratic presidential nomination all wrapped up and tied with a neat litle bow. But over the past few months, that’s no longer the case, with Obama winning primary after primary. And the Illinois senator’s success is clearly the result of an element every bit as powerful today as chlorophyll was in the ’50s – Melanin. What’s that, you ask? Simply the primary determinant of human skin color that also exists in the plant and animal kingdoms where it serves as a pigmentation.
Like chlorophyll.
No, I’m not being flip. America has been an incipiently racist enterprise ever since it was “discovered” by white foreigners, who quickly robbed the melanin-enhanced natives of their land and lives, then compounding the offense by importing slaves from Africa. When the slaves were freed in the wake of a war that split the country in two, trouble continued via “Jim Crow” – the laws that until very recently were in place to make sure black and white lived separate and decidedly unequal lives. And that’s not to mention the lynchings and other less gaudy forms of violence visited by one race upon the other. Yet after centuries of turmoil that have never truly ended, America has suddenly, collectively, elected to, in a manner of speaking, “changed its mind.” And Barack Obama is its chosen vehicle for doing so.
What’s going on has been described countless times in the media by people like Bryant Jones, a Georgetown University student who, according to an article in last month’s New York Times, “has always leaned Republican,” but says of the black Democrat, “It was his all-encompassing message that got to me … I left uplifted by him.”
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Jones is not alone in experiencing such “uplift,” as the senator has for nearly a year enchanted turnaway crowds all over the country, dazzled by his rhetorical skill in delivering upbeat speeches redolent of his “message” of “change.” What he wishes us all to “change” from or to is rather vague. But that matters little to Jones and his ilk who find Obama’s greatest strength lies in “the fact he symbolizes for me that we are at a point where we do not have to think about skin color.” In other words, because of Barack Obama’s color, Jones doesn’t “have to think” about Barack Obama’s color. Such cognitive dissonance is as American as … pecan pie. And you’ll find this same attitude reflected in a more effusively eloquent form in Senator Ted Kennedy’s declaration of support of an Obama presidency. “With Barack Obama, we will turn the page on the old politics of misrepresentation and distortion … we will close the book on the old politics of race against race, gender against gender, ethnic group against ethnic group, and straight against gay.”
Needless to say, nothing of the sort is in the offing. Racism in America will not magically come to an end with a Barack Obama presidency any more than it abated once the late Thurgood Marshall was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Yet in news item after news item that’s the clear implication. That, plus the fact that he’s “new” and Hillary Clinton is “old,” this playing into culture’s ceaseless demand for novelty and up-to-the-minute hipness – even from a figure as temperamentally “square” as Obama. Like all successful products, he has a “pitch” related directly to his biographical novelty. The offspring of a Kenyan father and white mother, he’s too young to have been part of the civil rights movement that produced almost all the African-American politicians currently in and out of office (as in Jesse Jackson). And in sales terms that’s all to the good. His style, like his story, is “new.” And Hillary’s, tied inextricably to the fortunes of her husband, former President Bill Clinton, is “old.” No wonder, then, a novelty-minded “mainstream” media is at Obama’s feet, with the perpetually dyspeptic Chris Matthews declaring, “I felt this thrill going up my leg” at the sound of Obama’s voice. Each day, less emotionally overwrought scribes dutifully detail the ebb and flow of support Clinton and Obama receive from women and African-Americans – seen as their respective core constituencies. Additional note has been taken of the fact that Obama has attracted “better educated” (read white) voters while Clinton draws her strength from the “working class” (black), this making race and class a point of divide.
“How do we take the country in a new direction?” Obama asked at a recent televised “debate” (read: joint press conference) with Hillary Clinton. “How do we get past the divisions that have prevented us from solving these problems year after year after year?” His answer cocktails up an image of Republicans and Democrats sitting down to sing “Kumbaya” together for the greater good – a true “fairy tale” far more pernicious than the one Bill Clinton referred to in regard to Obama’s stand on the Iraq war. Is he simply a melanin-enhanced Joe Lieberman? Surely not as ham-fisted, especially in the way he handled a “debate” query about health care.
“My view,” Obama declared, “is that the reason people don’t have health care, and I meet them all the time – in South Carolina, a mother whose child has cerebral palsy and she could not get insurance for her, and started crying during a town hall meeting, and Hillary, I’m sure, has had the same experiences.” So clever in “personalizing the issue,” isn’t he? But then – “What they’re struggling with is they can’t afford the health care. And so I emphasize reducing costs. My belief is that if we make it affordable, if we provide subsidies to those who can’t afford it, they will buy it.” In other words, nothing at all like the universal health care available in other Western countries, lovingly and accurately detailed by Michael Moore in his film Sicko. For a single-payer system is, according to Hillary, what “a lot of people favor, but for many reasons, is difficult to achieve.” And she’s no more willing to go into those “many reasons” than Obama is of explaining how a “more affordable” insurance can be made available to Americans barely able to keep their heads above water in a struggling economy beleaguered by a war without end. He’s just capable of spinning a line of bull in a more convivial manner, giving comfort to many. But not one in which any should trust.
“Truth will not be comforted,” says the merchant in Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. “Led by dear charity, lured by sweet hope, fond fancy essays this feat; but in vain; mere dreams and ideals, they explode in your hand, leaving naught but the scorching behind!”
As for Obama’s “uplifting” power, we can say again, to quote Melville: “Something more may come of this masquerade.”
Published: 02/20/2008
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I think that DAVID EHRENSTEIN has an excellent point about how Obama's color is so much a part of his allure. But I wonder about "Better Educated" as code for white, I think it goes to the heart of the chnaging face of class in our society. To me it could mean "East Ivy School educated or wanna be", "white-color professional" is another one that it could be....It tells me that I am to believe that the "haves" are for Obama, because he advocates for the "have-nots" who for the most part are not voting for him, yet. But why are the "haves" voting for him? Is it because they know he will be controllable, while he is singing the "Songs of Solomon" to those dummies on the lower half of the economic ladder, they "our betters", a club that is color blind if not gender blind, will be solving the worlds problems, with minimal discomfort to themselves. Obama's legislative record shows how cautious and timid he is, a perfect mouthpiece for the new "secular evangilicals", long on faith, short on specifics while some grey cloud of advisors, made up of Washington regulars really run things. What really bothers me is that is being marketed like bottled water, or a can of Pepsi Plus, which is icky and embarresing in a Presidential campaign.
But would it be possible to research what "better educated" is actually code for?