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not this again...
first off, i am not a particularly enthusiastic obama supporter--i simply think he's closest to what i see as a rational choice for president, given how i understand the present states of affairs and what should be done to deal with them. i don't see a huge difference in policy terms between obama and clinton: more a difference in how they present their positions, with obama talking in more general terms and clinton working the policy insider angle.
so this is just to head off at the pass anything in response to what follows.
the problem i have had with the wright thing has NOTHING to do with my support, tepid as it is, for obama, and EVERYTHING to do with fundamental, visceral rejection of the entire way conservative politics frames the issue of racism, it's history and the relation of that history to situations in the present. it also has to do with a kind of repulsion directed toward television-driven politics in america, the politics of repeated superficiality in the place of analysis or even coherent discussion of the huge problems that the united states presently faces--structural problems like the simple fact that the state can no longer decisively control economic activity within its borders, the problems that attend transformations in economic organization, the massive transfers of wealth away from 70% of the population, the dissolution of older forms of political representation on the order of trade unions and the lack of any new alternatives--so the wholesale loss of political power undergone by the vast majority of people over the past 30 years--not coherent discussions about iraq, no coherent discussions about the disastrous policies of the bush administration vis-a-vis israel/palestine, of how they have played out in brutal, stark real-time in the gaza strip--no coherent discussion about any fucking thing--just memes about jeremiah wright and the resurgence of the upside-down conservative-specific mangling of the history of american racism.
we live in a context of busy denial--we substitute business for thinking--we confuse jumpcuts and attending velocity of infotainment with being informed--we do not think much outside the frames that are imposed on us across the jump-cut driven infotainment environment. we swallow the terminology and spit it back wholesale, unthinking, unreflective. THAT is my problem--not obama, not the damage this non-event has done to him, not the "choice" clinton-obama.
the other concern, really, is the horrifying prospect of 4 more years of inept republican control of the white house--but that's another matter.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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