political dreams and dreads

I have been meaning to write something about the primary for a while, but I am just too tired of it all. I am tired of what is reveals about the underside, or maybe not so underside of this country's psyche.

A couple of weeks ago I commented on some blog or other how Clinton and Obama seem to be taking on these mythic qualities. The candidates have just about disappeared as individuals, become these avatars of gender and race.

This pretty much guarantees that lots of people have pretty much stopped thinking. This is true of both Clinton and Obama camps. I think I had been bothered a little more by the Obama supporters than the Clinton ones for a couple of reasons.

First, the misogyny has really been making me crazy. A couple of years ago when someone or other raised the possibility of HRC running for president, I thought "Oh fuck, no!" This was because I knew that the right wing that had been on both Clinton's case while they were in the Whitehouse, would be out in force against her. And I've been right. But all over the liberal fauxgressive blogosphere are the bitch jokes and the complaints about her clothes, her voice, her demeanor.

But now Clinton is wearing me out, too. The appeal to "hard-working Americans, white Americans" jeez. I hope that it was exhaustion taking her there because I don't really believe that she's a holds some weird racist notions about who in this country is hard working and who is not.

There's a post over on one of the big progressive blogs, Hullabaloo, that suggests that Obama is
attempting to build a different Democratic Party from under the DLC. In some ways that would be a good thing.

If.

If it were a progressive move. But there's really not much in Obama's policies or public speaking that makes me think he's anything of a progressive. His stand on abortion is pro-choice, but framed in language that bows to the anti-choice side. (i.e. that an abortions is something that a woman decides after consulting with her pastor? oh really?) His excuses for the McClurkin mess back in the fall, i.e. that he believes in communicating with both sides, troubles me because I believe he has little to offer the lgbt community but patronizing rhetoric. Finally there's his tossing Reverend Wright under the bus. Because Wright - with all his cracked notions about HIV and right and left sides of the brain - is a real working progressive, with an acute critique of US social, political, economic, and foreign policy. This is what Obama is stepping away from, as he assuages the nerves of white people who are ignorant about African American experience in this country and who want to stay that way.

And to tell the truth, I cannot stand white Obama supporters who, for some reason, think that we will have entered the New Jerusalem in this country if we just elect a black guy.

As though this one act will wipe out all the bad stuff, as though we can finally forget about slavery, about Reconstruction, about Jim Crow, about the Tulsa Riots, about little girls getting bombed, about segregation north, south, east, and west, about the way that poverty in this country is still color-coded, about driving while black, about all the tiny, tiny insults that pile up day after day, until . . . . Well, I'm really not shocked that many of the crazy people wailing on the street corners in San Francisco are black. We should all scream.

But, some think that having those nice black people in the Whitehouse is really all we need.