Left alone to get gigantic/Hard, huge, and haunted

I always thought those lines were a good description of the slow development of the US state from a backwater boy's club to a global empire. If anything says "hard, huge, and haunted," it's the US military.


It has been four months since Barack Obama assumed the US presidency, with his famous “yes we can” mandate. (We can do what? And who is we?) So far he has been just as managerial as his predecessors, showing no sign of mobilizing or even exhorting the American people towards a particular goal.

When he was elected, I predicted that he would have to make a choice between being a caretaker president like Clinton—to repair and strengthen the US state for its next mass expropriation—or making small fundamental changes and being a one-term president. It is clear now that he has chosen the former. Despite a financial catastrophe, he increased the Pentagon budget by 4% over last year. His “withdrawal” from Iraq closely parallels the multiyear withdrawal from Vietnam. His reforms to science funding, health care, energy efficiency, and credit card regulations have been similarly tepid. He moved to close Guantanamo Bay but not Bagram, Abu Graib, etc., and he has not repealed any pernicious Bush-era legislation or dissolved the organizations that administer them. His only ground-breaking action to date has been the $1100 billion (and counting) cash giveaway to Wall Street. At this rate, the “battleship of state” will be in full working order when Mitt Romney takes over in 2017.

Some defenders of Obama argue that I expect too much, that even the most well-intentioned US president must tread lightly in the 21st-century USA. They point to his modest reforms as victories. Presumably this need for accommodation explains Obama's uniformly pro-corporate and imperialist Cabinet. But in that case, who in their right mind would want to be president? To campaign for months, to ask for the trust of the American people, and then to stand in the corner while the real decisions are taken? Surely someone of Obama's intelligence would not commit to such a task if he knew he was powerless from the outset.

If nothing else, Obama could take the JFK route, and eloquently call for reform even though his own government won't allow it (I’m thinking of the 1960's death squads in Southeast Asia and South America). Maybe I missed that speech, but it seems to me he's been pretty bland since he got elected.

I don't think Obama is a bad person; I just think that he sees his job differently than the general public. In this day and age, a president is like a CEO for the US state, and that state is geared towards keeping American dominance worldwide much more so than helping the weak or unlucky. Historically, a president was like a king: the nation's chief diplomat, general, and judge, and a splendid and majestic father figure for the ignorant masses. As we saw at Obama's lavish inauguration, there are still elements of that today.

Incidentally, Noam Chomsky came out of retirement last week to pen an essay. Therein he patiently explains, yet again, that torture, repression, and imperialism (directly or by proxy) are not a post-9/11 phenomenon or even a post-1980 or post-1945 one—they have been part of the US government toolbox since its creation. The West didn’t win itself, after all…


PS For those who don’t recognize it, the title of this entry comes from a Tragically Hip song. It begins: “Me, debunk an American myth?/And take my life in my hands?”

Update: Perhaps I spoke too soon. Nothing substantive yet, but you never know.