In which I like him. I really, really like him.
I’m not a political animal.
I think politics are in equal parts numbingly boring and distressingly childish. While legal language is probably a neat game, I particularly loathe political talking heads and find them to be a most repugnant breed of humanoid: self-important and brash, and doing nothing but deconstructing the work of others and contributing nothing but dissent. Ick.
I think it is impossible to govern a capitalist democracy because it’s impossible to please everybody all the time. It’s impossible to be fair to everyone. Impossible to guarantee rights, when one of those rights is to have more wealth than everybody else does, and another is to be a total fucking ignorant moron that the state cannot legally or morally allow to starve to death.
But I really dig Obama. It’s nice to have a proper orator in the White House. It’s nice not to cringe when imagining his meetings with leaders of other countries. He probably actually reads his briefings and manages not to look like an American punk.
I watched much of his address [transcript] while eating my omelet and toast this morning. While I don’t care enough to speak to specifics of policy, I do have to say that I like the man. (He’ll be reviled and feared by the time he leaves office, but that’s the office’s fault, not the man’s.)
I like that he is still responding to public opinion (they all quit doing that after they’ve been in office for awhile). I like that he states opinions in the first person, like, “(A)nd I promise you, nobody is more frustrated than me with AIG.” I like that he explains his administration’s rationale with care, as here:
“And although there are a lot of Americans who understandably think that government money would be better spent going directly to families and businesses instead of to banks — one of my most frequent questions in the letters that I get from constituents is, “Where’s my bailout?” — and I understand the sentiment. It makes sense intuitively, and morally it makes sense, but the truth is that a dollar of capital in a bank can actually result in $8 or $10 of loans to families and businesses. So that’s a multiplier effect that can ultimately lead to a faster pace of economic growth. That’s why we have to fix the banks.”
I like that he rather scolded us a little for our greed and short-sightedness. I like that he seems to think our educational system sucks, and that he’s pro-science. I even like the Biblical references. Not because I’m Christian, because I’m not, but because it’s a time-honored tradition to reference one’s own culture’s historical documents. (I call the Bible an American historical document because we wouldn’t all be here if our ancestors hadn’t been such total whacko splinter Christians in the first place.) The Bible’s a powerful piece of literature when properly used, and I liked his use of the ‘house upon the rock’ parable. It worked.
I live with a woman who remembers The Great Depression. She lives frugality. She saves rubber bands, gives plastic bags back to the newspaper boy so he can recycle them, eats all of the groceries she buys (no slightly-soft tomatoes in her garbage), and buys nothing on credit ever. When Obama said that his administration intended to create legislation that would protect future generations from ever experiencing this sort of recession, she snorted because she knows shit happens; she’s seen it.
I waste a tremendous amount of resources. My whole generation does. We buy food, don’t eat it, and throw it out. We replace tools and electronics rather than bother to repair them, because we consider our ‘free time’ to be more valuable than money because we have more of one than the other. I can’t even guess how much paper I’ve wasted in my lifetime of using computers and printers; just today I printed two addresses on two sheets of paper, cut out the addresses, and threw 95% of the paper into the garbage.
I toss clothes rather than re-purpose them; I have an attic full of computers that still work but just not well enough; I’ve filled landfills with household waste and empty plastic bottles and bleached toiletries for forty years. I’ve lived in the bubble all my life. I don’t really know how not to.
But I know that I like having someone who seems intelligent (and less than wholly corrupt) in the office of president for once in my life. You couldn’t pay me twelve times his salary to do his job; and I cannot fathom why anyone would ever want to be the president of the United States and therefore distrust any creature who self-selects for the position, but the dude really seems to be well suited to it.
I wish him luck with it. I really do.
Last night, while sitting at the brew pub eating a Gardenburger and idly gazing at the cable commercial showing on the glass teat hanging above the bar, I, who am really not much of a television watcher anyway, wondered why the television industry hasn’t yet invented TV that doesn’t suck.
