Barack Obama: The Politics of Promising Too Much

“Yes We Can.” You couldn’t go anywhere in the U.S. between September and November 2008 without hearing that campaign slogan, which became a chant, and eventually a catch phrase. While traveling in Pittsburgh this summer, I saw a hipster doofus, apathetic to politics of course, a conforming nonconformist, wearing a t-shirt mocking Obama, on it, “Yes, You Can’t.” Now, herein lies the inherit flaw in that mockery: yes, he can’t, because he is not a supreme dictator. He does not regulate every government policy. He does not override all branches of government. He is part of the checks and balances. For example, I once overheard a Tea Partier state, “We don’t have NASA anymore because Obama ran out of money.” Never mind the harebrained idea that somehow Obama personally funds NASA. And never mind the economic history leading to the spending cuts in the space program. There are too many factors involved in that decision to lay the blame on a single person. This holds true no matter the problem. And, truly, the American people, if they understand and support their democratic republic as they claim, can’t have it any other way. So, yes, Barack Obama can’t. And he shouldn’t have to.

            Obama, once our media darling, has become the Right Wing whipping boy for everything wrong with the United States. I concede that the Left Wing gives him too much credit, but let’s stick with a healthy dose of Right Wing crazy shall we? Obama is a radical Muslim, secret Kenyan, Malcolm X’s love child. He smokes cigarettes, plays basketball in a do-rag, and is only good at public speaking. He fucked up the economy. He wasn’t really responsible for taking out Osama bin Laden. And, he’s a shade darker than the white majority, who are perfectly fine with adapting to global economics and power and realizing they are, in fact, the minority. Okay, now we’re done with “the crazy.”

            I’m not going to detail Obama’s presidency or his policies. That’s not my issue; although I have sympathy for the man in that he inherited a country so entrenched in corporate greed, global policing, and class warfare that it will take a massive, nonpartisan movement to correct it. My issue is with the public backlash on Obama and the complete one-eighty it has taken since his election in 2008. I blame two parties: the campaign system and Obama himself.

            The presidential campaign in 2012 will only further demonstrate my point that our politicians’ media campaigns are absurd. They are worse than a high school class election. There you can at least meet the candidates face-to-face. You know who they really are, even if the election is no more than a popularity contest. And that’s all the 2012 presidential election will be, a popularity contest. Yes, there will be issues at stake. There will be "hard talk" about these issues. The candidates’ campaigns, however, will have to bow down to the media in order to continue the sensationalizing of American politics. Gotta keep those ratings up. Sell, sell, sell!

Unfortunately, this is exactly the three-ring circus in which Obama partook. Study that campaign and you’ll find more propaganda than our country has seen in a long time. The Obama posters, bumper stickers, and pop art were geared toward heaping the thrust of change onto one man’s shoulders. Obama accepted this without question. He stepped into this role and he promised too much. Yet, is he at fault? If this is what it takes to win an election in this country, why not play the game in hopes that when you secure power, you’ll stick to your guns and do what you say? Here is the tightrope on which Obama teeters, the politics of promising too much.

Again, who is to blame? Do we blame our president for saying what we wanted to hear? Or, do we blame ourselves for allowing the media firestorm to continue? At what point to do we vocally and physically oppose the popularity contests and demand actual, honest, intelligent debate? At what point do we turn off our TVs and silence the media? Peter Travers of Rolling Stone asks all of us to stop complaining about this summer’s crappy movies because, after all, we’re paying to see them and thus funding the corporate machine. Can we afford to pull the plug on how we’ve let candidates be elected? Can we afford to allow them to actually tell us the truth? Can we allow ourselves to hear that in bettering this country there are no easy answers and voting along party lines only inhibits the process? I don’t have any answers to these questions. It’s up to all of us, as citizens, to find our own. But we need to stop blaming the man we elected to fix our problems, because we allowed ourselves to be blinded by his promises of change.

I’m Sorry I’m Alive: Part IV – Don’t Want to Hear Your Ancient History

Christianity is the only modern religion to have a doctrine like Original Sin, with a primitive ancestor being the cause of human nature. In other religions, such as Judaism and Buddhism, the world is the twister, a broken place wherein humanity must do their best with their free will. In Judaism, free will should be exercised as one of God’s chosen people to benefit all mankind, while in Buddhism it is used to ease the suffering of all living beings. Christianity adds other rules to the playing field. Free will should be exercised to benefit all beings. However, this will be problematic because of man’s sinful nature. Yet, this should not hinder man, for if it does, man will not reap the benefits of God’s kingdom, the reward of the afterlife. All of these religions attempt to explain suffering. What is relatively unknown, and not taught in today’s churches, is how Christianity developed the concept of Original Sin. It is not rooted in the Old Testament. You’ll find it nowhere in the Adam and Eve story. Instead, the Fall of Man originates in a difference of philosophical opinion between ancient Christianity and Gnosticism.

            Gnosticism is a complicated, mostly because its ancient texts and practices were destroyed or hidden after Christianity’s established dominance. Here’s the short version—a Creator God made the world, while lesser gods conceived its operation. Because of this creation by committee, the world is a broken, evil place, filled with suffering and death. Man, whose soul is divine, moves through it of his own will, yet sometimes this broken world causes him to act evil. His hand is forced. Early Christian clergy had problems with this philosophy. First, it did not recognize Jesus Christ as man’s redeemer. Second, it let man off the hook for his own reprehensible actions. Bishop of Lyon Irenaeus, part of the Roman Gaul clergy, developed Original Sin as a method to counter these Gnostic beliefs. In Irenaeus’ view, Adam should be held at fault. Notice how this does not condemn Eve, as later church doctrine would. Because of Adam’s original sin, and since mankind is born through Adam’s seed, all of us have propensity to sin. Because we battle temptation, and often cannot overcome it, we are slaves to our weak, sinful natures.

            This view was countered by Christian apologists, who maintained that with free will no one is enslaved to sin. They have choice. Even if one lives a righteous, sinless life, one does not enter the afterlife with one strike, original sin, already against them.

            In the fourth century, Augustine of Hippo made original sin more depraved. He added that since Adam is present in all mankind, mankind was present during the Fall of Man. Thus, we all inherit Adam’s guilt for having defied God. Augustine also surmised that sex is the vessel which passes original sin. The more children you have, the more you are making little sinners. Mankind’s will then becomes weakened, but not destroyed, and mankind itself becomes a sort of wayward crowd who never sees the path to heaven. Of interest is the Mormon Church’s view of this. It recognizes the inherit contradiction in telling your creations to be fruitful and multiply, while thinking that such an action is in itself sinful.

            Original sin’s philosophy was batted about for centuries within Christianity. In Catholicism, baptism washed it away. Children who died before baptism went to purgatory, a heinous lie which only now the Church admits to inventing. Reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin were more extreme. You could not “wash away” original sin. You were condemned to it throughout life and thus should feel a strong sense of guilt for your own nature, as if somehow that accounted for all the worldly atrocities that came before you. Old world orthodox countered the Protestant idea. It says no one inherits guilt from anyone. Mankind only inherited a fallen nature, not guilt or damnation.

            All of these ideas merely try to explain suffering and answer the question, “Why does mankind act the way it does?” It is a good question. It is an important question. The problem, as I’ve said, is basing it in Adam and Eve, who by their very definition, did not know the divine rules they were breaking on the scale which God judges them. It’d be like kicking your three-year old out of the house because it took a dollar from your wallet. If you have not explained stealing, money, or respecting another’s property, how can you expect the punishment to suffice or even stop the behavior? Original Sin is an abhorrent doctrine that uses to a time that did not exist to explain an action that did not exist to explain a world that does exist. 

To use Adam and Eve as metaphor is fine, if done correctly, but it is a crime when done to make people, especially children, feel as if they are broken, sinful vessels without the power to change the fundamental core of their natures. Such ancient thought, and ancient history, has no place in the modern world, but only as a teaching tool to show how far man has come in its ideas in the last two-thousand years.