WHEN BARACK WAS COOL

Wasn’t he a cute teen?

We on the left – even the psychedelic left – have long had a tendency to turn on the leaders we elect because we feel they’ve failed us. We swiftly fall to denigrating them because they have not kept what we imagined were the promises they made to us. We did it with Jimmy Carter, we did it in spades with Bill Clinton, and now we’re doing it with Barack Obama. This is not to say that that Obama hasn’t disappointed a whole bunch of us on multiple fronts. On the day of his election, I published a 3000 word, cover-story valentine to the President-Elect greeting him as a new FDR come out of Chicago to sweep in a 21st Century New Deal – with massive public works projects – in which a measure of neo-socialism would be no vice, and choirs of massed rock stars would sing “This Land Is Your Land.” Seems I had the right song but the wrong guy. Healthcare, as passed into law, is laughable. Banking regulation lacks teeth. Afghanistan has become Vietnam 2 with the US floundering around in an ancient – and, this time, tribal – civil war. Economic stimulus has been meager where it counts. He fails to fall on BP like the Terminating Wrath of God, and seemingly cannot silence the gauleiters of the Fox Right in a war of words, or flog the Senate into submission. But let’s face it. None of us is going to flee Obama and vote for – or support – Sarah fucking Palin (or whomever.) Obama will continue, by default, to be our man. The rebel may not trust the vacillating, centrist liberal further than a rebel can spit, but, within the confines of democracy, an uneasy alliance must be formed with the forces of compromise, and that requires the management of the fairly complex multi-tiered tactical perception too long to explain in this post. The answer is, of course, that he who places his thrust in politicians and expects them to provide anything beyond flawed half-measures is nothing more than a damned fool. But that also means we have to accept the reality that the real answers are in our own hands. And means blood and sweat and much disappointment before the mission is really accomplished.

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The secret word is Radical