The Problem with Being Barack Obama President Barack Obama has inspired hope in millions of people. He has taken the mantle from America’s least popular president. He is the first African American to ascend to the nation’s highest office. He has won the Nobel Peace Prize. All of these things are very big problems.
In inspiring in his populace such hope, Obama has run the greatest risk of all: blind faith. Those who follow him simply because he is him, a messianic, meteoric figure who went in four years from a virtually unknown senator to the most high-profile man in the world, fail him in the worst way; they lose their ability to be critical. If Obama is allowed to do as he does, unchecked by the jurisdiction that ushered him into office, what we find is a pseudo-fascistic state in which a leader is imbued with the blind goodwill of his people and permitted to do as he pleases.
And yet. And yet, a large portion of Obama’s supporters, those who do not step in blind faith, are Americans who came of age under the Bush administration, are therefore more inherently skeptical of government than is healthy. This contingency will hold the president to higher standards than are humanly possible in a system of checks and balances, will accept no compromise, and will, via their facebooks & twitters, copy and paste articles from The Huffington Post, Salon.com, and The Nation, offer jejune, bromidic, sardonic commentary, and be unwilling to back their president no matter what he does. They seem to expect, unrealistically, that Obama will, overnight, transform the United States into a European Socialist Democracy.
To paraphrase Dave Chappelle: Never be the first black person to do anything. Because Barack Obama represents the penultimate realization of the American dream, because his people were enslaved by the very country he now leads, he is under the utmost scrutiny. He must, while attending to the monumental task of taking office amidst the largest financial fallout in nearly a century, be very mindful of the past; it is upon him to look both forward and backward critically, all while carrying the Atlasian weight of the present crisis on his back.
Akin to the constant scrutiny of being the first African American president – scrutiny that comes, unlike the facebookese criticism of the previous paragraph, from intellectual and public forces of nature such as Cornell West and the Reverend Jesse Jackson, not to mention organizations such as NAACP – is the furor of criticism now arisen from the Nobel Peace Prize. Granted, the prize was decided upon when Obama had less than two months in office, yet the American people seem incapable of understanding that the president has been burdened with yet another behemothic responsibility – to live up to a prize previously given to Nelson Mandela, Amnesty International, The Dalai Lama, and, the largest elephant in the room, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Even more than the challenges of the present, President Obama faces the skepticism and blind faith of his own people. His hands are tied ideologically by those who would allow him unchecked to carpet bomb Beijing, could he present a forceful enough argument for doing so, and, at the opposite end of the spectrum, by those who, as he does his best to carry the US forward, make their glib, self-indulgent remarks behind closed doors, withdrawing ever further their support for his future candidacy. An ultimate, possible, troubling outcome of all of this? The man with the highest probability right now to change the world for the better may lose the support of his own constituency because he inspires such lofty aspirations and hopes in those whom he leads.
1 comment:
I was discussing the Nobel prize with my dad during my xmas break in France. It is probably one of th worst thing that could happen to a sensible man - receiving a prize for something you haven't achieved yet. It is probably hard to even fathom how much pressure he must be under. Kinda like the singer of Bulletproof Mirror you know, recognized as the biggest fucking rock star to have ever lived by his peers, and yet still trying to land a contract with a Major.
Good to read you Will, still waiting for a copy of your novel!
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