FIGHT THE POWER

How come Obama has dissipated all that joy which billowed across the world just four years ago? How come a man of such inspirational brilliance is put to the pin of his collar to see off a numpty Mormon?

Thing is, he wants to be re-elected. Obama’s top priority since entering the White House has not been to maintain the fervour of the masses who’d mobilised for change but to mollify those others who feared that he’d veer to the Left. So, Guantanamo stayed open, tax cuts for the rich went untouched, social security was shredded, banks bribed, corporations coddled.
The alternative strategy would have involved being wary of Wall Street, challenging the chiefs of staff, curbing CIA excesses, telling the Israeli lobby to get lost, butting heads with the oil barons, putting manners on the media moguls, etc. None of which was ever going to happen.
Bill Hicks told a gothic tale of the secret service after every election escorting the new President to a darkened room in the West Wing basement for showing of a seven-minute 16mm film shot from a grassy knoll on Daley Plaza in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963.
Black Panther Billy X told me more directly on the night of Obama’s victory: “If he seriously tried to make the changes that are needed, they’d kill him… Maybe they will anyway.”
It wasn’t hard to work out that the romance with Obama would end in tears. Here’s what I wrote a week after his election.

The way I see it, best get your sense of betrayal in early, so as to ease disappointment later on.
The disappointment will be spectacular. The dizzier the hopes generated, the more dismaying the subsequent plunge into gloom.
Obama has touched the feelings of half the world. The night of his Chicago coronation was a Princess Di moment of global dimension. Many of those chirruping with joy from the sidelines – including the entire Irish media commentariat, it seemed – will feel foolish in a month or three or four… But they never learn. When you have none but nebulous ideas and no clear perspective on history unfolding, ersatz emotion substitutes automatically for rational assessment…
The foolish feel-good factor may last a little longer than I anticipate. It was impossible not to be moved by the sense of liberation… all those faces shining with joy, the sight and sound of middle-aged whites jitterbugging with joy in the arms of African-Americans on the streets of once-scary Harlem. My first prediction for the Obamage is that the polls will be showing before Xmas that fewer than half a percent of the electorate voted McCain.
Nobody wants to be associated with a loser who would have poured more troops into the Afghan mincer, bunged further billions to the Wall Street banksters, supported execution for crimes less than murder, and ruled out free medical care for the elderly. Nope. What the broad mass of the people came out in support of was a svelte and graceful, cool and cosmo, charismatic guy who promptly made it plain that he, too, as president, would do all such things and more.
The rest of us should stay real. This bubble will burst.
Hot Press, November 26, 2008

I would not like it thought that I extricated this piece to show off what a prescient fellow I am. I detest people who say, “I told you so.”
On the other hand, I did.
The lesson is not that political mobilisation is pointless, but that pressure generated from below is wasted when it is put to no better use than getting your guy into office.
In the past year, we have seen half a million assemble in Madison, Wisconsin, to support public sector workers on strike, a thousand manifestations of the Occupy movement from Wall Street to Wainright, Alaska, a mighty upsurge of rage coast-to-coast at the racist murder of Trayvon Martin by vigilante George Zimmerman in Florida in February.
They haven’t gone away, you know. Everything is doable if we keep it in mind that the point is to fight the power, not to drape one of our own in the raiment of power.

The BBC may have dithered for weeks before deciding what to do about the Savile affair. But it pounced in an instant when Frank Gardner revealed that Queen Elizabeth had demanded that a man not before the courts be jailed.
Gardner told Radio 4’s morning programme Today that the Monarch had berated the Home Secretary for not having Muslim cleric Abu Hazma arrested. “Surely this man must have broken some laws. Why is he still at large? He was conducting these radical activities… and yet he was sucking up money from this country for a long time.”
Within hours, Beeb bosses were beating their breasts in abject contrition. Nothing like this would ever happen again. That is, if another similar story came their way, they’d suppress it.
The Queen’s intervention was a serious, significant, legitimate story. But the corporation decided to ditch journalistic principle in deference to the royals. Yet, there’s hardly been a word about it.
Dropping the Savile paedophile story because it cut across tributes to the brute – that was a hanging matter. But agreeing that the Queen should be saved from herself is also impossible to justify.
Over here, we can hardly condemn the Beeb’s double standard. Kowtowing to this doltish old scrounger and her parasite offspring is as much an Irish as a British derogation from duty.