Seven years ago the MSM, in an extended display of pageantry reminiscent of a Louis XIV crowning, proclaimed to the world that America had entered a post-racial era in its election of Obama. The euphoria was short-lived. Evidence oozed out of the White House that it’s residents were not as evolved on the “racism” front as the media had pretended.
Other than those who were “in” the inner circle of the small group which led his political campaign, most of the new President’s supporters didn’t fully appreciate the extent of his resentment for America and for most Americans. Few had read the two biographies published under his name. None knew anything about him, his background, or his record, and even his educational documentation had been very effectively hidden by his handlers.
Today, seven years after his election, although the denial and willful ignorance of his feelings continue apace, Obama cannot help himself. His ego regularly drags his mouth into the ditch of indignation and bitterness.
The analysis of his rancor is made effortless as we read his responses just three days ago in a vacuous NPR interview, “blue-collar men have had a lot of trouble in this new economy, where they are no longer getting the same bargain that they got when they were going to a factory and able to support their families on a single paycheck.”
How many unreserved insults can middle America absorb from its own President? Bargain? BARGAIN? People who work, or have worked in blue collar jobs, whether in factories, or putting up bridges, or driving tractors, or shovelling in coal mines, or risking life and limb on oil rigs, . . . got BARGAINS? The people who bust their backs, or have busted their backs building America just got BARGAINS? What effrontery? What absolute denigration of a middle America.
So all of YOU aging angry white men, whom he also accuses of being racist if YOU don’t bow down to him like his sycophants, YOU who now need two pay checks to make ends meet, YOU who, evidence shows, have ZERO in your savings accounts, YOU who financed Obama’s ability to take another multi-million dollar golfing vacation to Hawaii, YOU who voted him into office, YOU are the problem with America.
YOU, not your racist President, YOU are the problem because YOUR racism is in your DNA.
And just keep in mind that you’re dying off, YOU aging angry white men, while YOU go have yourselves a Merry Christmas if you can afford one, you ungrateful radicals — Obama will remember you from the 18th green, but don’t YOU expect the guy who’s never done a day’s work in his life as you have, to be grateful for you, or grateful for living in the Nation you helped build and continue to build. Don’t ask him to wish you well. Ever. Just remember you got a “Bargain”.
A constituent of the vast baby boomer generation with a career which has been fortunate to know the ponderous corporate worlds, as well as the intimately pressurized, and invigorating entrepreneurial domains of high tech and venture capital, I have harvested my share of mistakes meandering through corridors of enterprise from Silicon Valley, to London and endless, colourful, sometimes praetorian points in between. The voyage has provided an abundance of fodder for a pen yielding to an inquisitive keyboard, a foraging mind, and a passionate spirit.
Whether political or business or social or economic or personal, is it not all political? It is a privilege to write, and an even greater privilege to be read by anyone, and sometimes with the wind at my back the writing may occasionally be legible. I do not write to invite scorn, nor to invite respect, but if I get really lucky the writing can stimulate thinking. I also write for the very selfish purpose of animating my own processes, and engaging the best of what life offers. Above all, whether biting fire or swatting shadows, I am grateful to be gifted the freedom to write and publish whatever flows down to the keyboard. To all those who enabled this freedom, and to all those standing guard to preserve it, I am indebted.