by Damozel | Can Obama fix the world to make it safe for Americans? Not likely, though it's increasingly clear that people are expecting him to try. And he did ask to be given the job, even though some of us wished he would save himself for a later time -- the unimaginable time following the current Death of Complacency -- when the worst would be over and he could help us get back on the road to the next big thing in our history as a people. Instead, he opted to preside over what for some young people and people like Maureen Dowd who have short memories and a massive sense of entitlement appears to be, like, um, the Worst Times Ever.
The job really should have gone to a Republican, since they made the mess, but a Republican can't fix this or any mess, because the current crop don't know jack about reality. Is the problem that we've become a nation of self-involved self-gratification seekers, who think that things will always go in our favor and never, ever change? And this is because...why? History certainly doesn't back up that view.
Luckily for my peace of mind, I am a 50-something. My 80-something mom -- who survived the Depression and the Second World War with her optimism not only intact but strengthened-- often says with a sigh, "Well, I will tell you this: I had some GOOD TIMES anyway." And I can remember periods in my own life -- NOT limited to 9-11-- when even middle-class people were afraid. And I am aware enough to know that for some Americans -- e.g., those growing up in poverty in the Inner Cities -- the situation has always been insecure, dark, dire. The main change now is that the class of Americans who felt entitled to their prosperity and security are no longer assured it will continue unchanged.
So at least I've got history to fall back on, not to mention my upbringing. As a teenager, my dad repeatedly and loudly played Accen-tu-ate the Positive," a 1945 Johnny Mercer song on his hi-fi (look it up on the google, kids) to drown out Jethro Tull. Some of it got through to me anyway. His version was sung by the Andrews Sisters (or some group of sisters who sang in close harmony) and the lyrics enjoined the listener:
Eliminate the negative
And latch on to the affirmative
Don't mess with Mister In-Between
You've got to spread joy up to the maximum
Bring gloom down to the minimum
Have faith or pandemonium's
Liable to walk upon the scene
To illustrate my last remark
Jonah in the whale, Noah in the ark
What did they do just when everything looked so dark?
I have no idea how Jonah and Noah coped in case they existed at all and I don't think Johnny Mercer did either. I suspect they just said to themselves, "Hang on tight and grit your teeth till this ride's over."
Which is what Obama is saying to us. And...yes, we can, largely because there aren't a lot of other options except curling up in a ball and whining.
This seems to be Dowd's intention. She's been in a dark, dire mood as she witnesses the ever-decreasing demand for snotty columnists whose sole function is to peck enthusiastically at people with actual ideas or influence -- thinks not. She shakes an enfeebled fist at Bill Clinton for suggesting that perhaps this was and is part of the President's job, while intoning venomously, like one of the crones from Macbeth, "Dark, dark, dark."
Barack Obama’s grandmother told him to smile more. Bill Clinton tells the new president to strut more.
As the country takes a bullet train to bankruptcy, the last Democratic president urged the current one to “embody” that old American spunk. That spirit of — as they sing in “Oklahoma” — “We know we belong to the land and the land we belong to is grand! A-YIP-I-O-EE-AY!”
It’s rich. The Man from Hope whose Missus castigated Candidate Obama for raising “false hopes” is now criticizing President Obama for not peddling more gauzy hope.
Instead, he implies, the president’s warnings of calamity, designed to gin up support for borrowing and printing trillions to shore up the sagging economy, might actually be dragging down our already sagging self-esteem.
Says the ever-helpful Bill: “I just want the American people to know that he’s confident that we are going to get out of this and he feels good about the long run.”
It’s hard to muster moxie with stocks shriveling, Chris Dodd talking nationalization, and Paul Volcker making Chicken Little sound cheery — “I don’t remember any time, maybe even in the Great Depression,” he said, “when things went down quite so fast, quite so uniformly around the world.”
With this economy, as William Goldman famously said of Hollywood, “Nobody knows anything.” The only thing to fear is ... everything. ...(emphasis added)I cannot possibly overstate the contempt I feel for Maureen Dowd, who is a sort of poster child of spoiled brats everywhere: the ones who think they're hard done by if they don't know where their next infusion of dividends is coming from.
As always, I have no notion what she is trying to say Obama should be doing and saying in addition to, or instead of, what he is doing and saying now. As usual, she winds in and out between and around several contradictory positions which as usual have in common only one thing: they are different from Bill Clinton's.
Clinton isn't wrong. But contra Clinton, I don't agree that there's one single right approach for the president of a people who feel their illusion of controlling their individual fates sliding right out from under them as the nation bounces down what promises to be a sustained (and bumpy) downward ride to who knows what different place and damaged state. Churchill, for example, didn't sugarcoat the future for the benefit of the courageous Britons.
He told them straight up that they'd need to cultivate qualities we profess to admire ---such as courage, frugality, stoicism, and real hopefulness (i.e., the sort that shines through the darkness that so terrorizes MoDo) --- but haven't had much chance to practice will become necessary. It's not the end of the world, though it may be an end to our belief in the sort of American exceptionalism that holds we are entitled as a people to be exempt from the troubles that afflict other nations and that in earlier times have afflicted our own.
On the other hand, we're Americans. Putting on a happy face has seen us through a lot worse times than the present. Maybe there's some good in doing that now, instead of curling up in a fetal position and dying inside our little cocoons.
So screw you, Dowd, and screw all the pissing and moaning Republicans who got us into this mess, have no ideas how to get us out, but nevertheless point fingers and screech that Obama's ideas aren't good enough.
I realize that we may undergo a sea change. I admit that the process may be painful. But I dare to hope that the outcome will be rich as well as strange.
Meanwhile let's see some courage in the face of adversity -- and even perhaps a little interest in, and enthusiasm for, the possibility that at the end of it we might emerge better and stronger and wiser as a people.
The government can't guarantee your safety and prosperity; it never could. Whether we like it or not, those blessings (which is what they are) depend on factors increasingly outside the control of a single nation.
All Obama can do is the best we can. Perhaps we can try to come together now as a nation and....no? Really?
Then MoDo is probably right: The only thing you have to fear is everything.
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wonderful!!I got kicked off a blog full of republican ranting today, she said I was namecalling and not contributing to the conversation, all the while they were calling me stupid and uninformed! Oh well, to each his own, I should stay with my own smart people anyway. President Obama wanted this job because he wanted to make a change, a desparatly needed change from the old lame ideas coming from the right. They are so jealous and full of hate that they have nothing but fearmongering to spew forth on their hateful blogs! Can they at least give this good man a chance to work? No, they are too bitter. too hateful, too resentful because they have no power, they are a lost breed...
Posted by: sue | February 22, 2009 at 06:28 PM