Dear Obama,
I was delighted and moved, like millions of others, that you will be our next President. Now I am in the uneasy but exciting predicament of wanting to know why I was moved and excited. The reason cannot just be that you will be our first Black or African American president: that is too facile, too visceral, and in the final analysis too epidermal. You, sir, are no Clarence Thomas, thank God for that, nor are you and nor need you be Martin Luther King or Malcolm X. It is not how you look, or who your parents are that should make the difference, but rather, the perspective and the perspectival understanding that you would bring to your mighty and globally consequential office. Now that you have won the Presidency, could we talk not about the “winnability’ of what you stand for, but rather the “win-worthiness” of your perspective? I hope you agree with me when I maintain, along with formidable thinkers in the American tradition such as Henry David Thoreau and others, that democracy, for lack of ideological direction, has degenerated into a mindless horse race where the vox populi has been constrained to back the horse that is most likely to win and not the horse that deserves to win, qualitatively speaking. The point is that whereas in the horse race context, value is what winning does, values in a democracy are not, and ought not to be, the exclusive and monopolistic creatures of the mere act of winning. In other words, you are much more than the horse that won. I am sure you are aware that both Gandhi and Tagore, despite their many disagreements about the relationship between decolonization and true freedom, believed and argued passionately that there were intrinsic values that had to be fought for even if they were not “winnable” in the opportunistic sense of the term. My simple but important point is that idealism has to be cherished in and for itself, and not merely accommodated if and when feasible.
Now that you are no more the candidate, but the President elect, let us talk about the all important word that has been bandied about irresponsibly and fetishized with a vengeance: “accountability.” How can we afford to forget that “accountability” is a devious and slippery term, for it can easily, and by a rhetorical or demagogical sleight of hand, be rendered as no more and no less than the function of “creative accounting.” Accountability has to be accounted for morally, politically, and philosophically as an a priori value before it can result in a series of critical practices. Without such an axiological/ideological understanding of the term, any so called “accountable practice” would only beg the question of what it is supposed to be all about. Take for example, the anomalous and angering fact that companies that have been bailed out continue to “dole out” exorbitant bonuses to their high echelons; or take the example of lush executive parties, after the bail out, at fancy resorts. I am sure that those who have engineered these self-indulgent practices think that the bail out does not by definition rule out or criminalize their festivities. Moral turpitude! My foot, they say, as they revel in their orgies. They may even say, by way of “creative accounting,” that the millions that went into these galas of self congratulation and aggrandizement, were not drawn from the bail out budget. They might well argue that there is nothing incommensurable between the abjectness that warranted the bail out and the opulence that affords high level binges. Well, my dear Obama, how will you answer them and hold them accountable? There can be no accountability without principled, ideological policy regulation. If America wants to learn from its mistakes, it cannot then be business as usual in the midst of calamity. Accountability is not a self generating software program left to the so called experts. For one thing, there is nothing called free self generation, and more importantly, the jury is still out as to who the experts should be. And if there are multiple experts who are in disagreement among themselves, you as President will have to make a painful adjudication and choose those experts who will be accountable not just to their narrow fiefdom, but to the people at large. It is not for nothing that people are shouting out from roof tops that “Wall Street is not Main Street.” Either trickle down economics, or a genuine populism: that is the choice you have to make.
My next point, and I am sure you have already anticipated it, is about leadership and directionality. My question is this: how do you read the relationship among leadership, directionality, and bi-partisanship? I am aware that “ideology,” after the putative demise of socialism, has become a dirty and unusable word. But let me ask you a humble and naďve question. What is direction if not the staking out of certain ideological choices? Ideology, my dear President elect, is not a bad word: it was consolidated as a bad word during the Cold War years when US was good and natural and THEM was bad and ideological. My next question for you, and I dread to ask this of my next President for fear of being immediately recognized and castigated as “un-American,” is this: Do you seriously believe that Capitalism is not Ideology? If that is going too far against the American grain, would you not concede at least, that Capitalism is a policy and not a free and neutral description of the world? Perhaps I am just an academic radical-intellectual, but I was delighted when McCain called you a “socialist.” (I am reminded here of that earlier controversy when candidate Michael Dukakis was accused of being a card carrying ACLU member). I am hoping against hope that you are a closet socialist and that the choices that you will be making as President will not take the form of mindless capitulations to the rationale of Capital or the freedom of the market. You inherit the Presidency at a time, and this is the outcome of the Clinton years, when centrism has become ubiquitous, and politics itself, in the name of bipartisanship has become post-political. “Don’t politicize an issue” is the clarion call in the name of a free and democratic USA. I would beg to submit that there is indeed nothing more ferociously political than the cry, “Don’t politicize.”
All of this brings me to the term “bi-partisanship,” a term that both you and your erstwhile maverick opponent loved to use, albeit differently I would like to think, in the context of the overall invocation of Change. So, what is the difference between Mc Cain’s and your delineation of bipartisanship? Is bipartisanship a procedural issue or a substantive issue? Is bipartisanship always desirable? When should a good old fight over values be preferred to the inane civilities of a procedural bipartisanship? For many of us in California, the euphoria over your victory was rudely counterpointed by the passing of the vicious and ideologically virulent Proposition 8. Sure enough, the people had spoken, and in that legalistic sense, the outcome of the ballot has to be respected. And yet, rightly so, activists are protesting the very legal passing of Prop 8. To me and thousands of people of that ideological ilk, the passing of Prop 8 is tantamount to the passing of Jim Crow. So, the question is this: when are the people right and when are they wrong, and who decides? In a truly rigorous and auto-critical democracy, where the auto-critique is not high-jacked by mere procedural rectitude and high-mindedness, the people need to correct themselves ideologically and qualitatively. As Lani Guinier and others have argued, democracy cannot just be the ongoing hegemony of the majority: In the ongoing battle among the Judiciary, the Legislative, and the Executive branches of government, popular sovereignty is balanced delicately and is indeed vulnerable. And you dear Obama, succeed a President and a Vice President who have masterminded the creation of what a distinguished political theorist calls the “mega state.” Both Bush and Cheney have been valiant in their endeavors to protect the American people, in the name of freedom, from their own Constitution. What will you do if “the people” threaten to overthrow Roe versus Wade, or Brown versus the Board of Education (let us not wallow in the romantic illusion that just because you have been elected that racism is “over” and that we live in a post-racial world)? How would you differentiate between a progressive and activist bipartisanship (workers of the world unite and not the CEOs of the world unite) and a bipartisanship of spineless compromise and an un-refereed or undecidable centrism? How will you referee where “real America is,” and what if real America is not where it should be? If to be a realist is to banish idealism and vision in the name of commonsense and the brute facticity of “what is,” then all that the Presidency, and yours would be no exception, can ever achieve is the glorified mis-recognition of the status quo as change. You as President need to have the courage to anger, disappoint, and alienate some interests so as to honor your commitment to other interests which you consider more worthwhile and valuable: and what is more, you are obliged to produce, and here is that ugly word again, an “ideological” justification of your choice makings and prioritizations. If Wall Street (and here I cannot but be reminded of that magnificent work of critical negativity, Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener, or the Story of Wall Street”) should not be Main Street, will you have the courage to convey to Wall Street that very message, with courage and without prevarication?
I realize you cannot be everything to anybody. When McCain duplicitously claimed that he was going to give a break to “all” and accused you of indulging in the violence of distributive justice, when “Joe the plumber” was invoked as the exemplary and authentically representative American, both you and your opponent overlooked the problematic of representation that both frustrates and enables democracy. I wish you had said, with some polemical heat, that you were indeed interested in the politics of distributive justice, and that it was not just a matter of providing relief to the middle class. There is nothing to be ashamed if you are “branded” as the champion of distributive justice in a world that is uneven and structured in dominance. There is no one, no one constituency that can pretend to be the exemplary and authentic microcosmic representation of “all America.” Yes indeed, American polity is made up of multiple, and often contesting and contradictory, interests, some of which we have been trained/brainwashed to recognize as “natural” (the interests of defense, corporate capital, the military industrial complex) and de-legitimate others interests (providing for the poor, the weak, insuring all, leveling the play field in the name of all) as special, ideological, and non-mainstream. For too long, we have been playing the democracy game as a zero-sum winner take all sport. Will you change the game itself, rather than play the same game with minor modifications?
Let me now ask you a series of climactic questions. Dear President Obama, are you really prepared to re-think America? Will you be an activist President not through executive fiat but by way of consciousness raising and opening up the American populace to the multiple languages and literacies of the world? Are you prepared to be, what in our academic jargon call, a “new Americanist?” Are you prepared to celebrate and work critically for the greatness of America, as one of the world’s many nations, without anchoring America in the mystique of exceptionalism and its ontology of dominant world leadership? When fellow American citizens steeped in provincialism and global illiteracy wonder, “Why do they hate us?” will you be honest enough to tell them that the rest of the world has more than enough “reason” to hate and distrust America? You, dear Obama, talk about your willingness to talk unconditionally to world leaders including those who belong to “the axis of evil,” will you have the ethico-political integrity to allow fellow Americans to perceive and understand America as others understand it? In other words, will you submit the country that you dearly love to be the narrative object of other gazes and perspectives? Surely, you are not advocating an Americo-centric multilateralism? You who talk about Bin Laden being the real enemy and insist that our military efforts in Afghanistan be redoubled and quadrupled, are you ready to remember history after history of US foreign policy debacles, treachery, betrayals, operations overt and covert, and spectacular boondoggles? The father of the President whom you are about to replace had the gall to proclaim in triumphalist terms that the memories of Vietnam have been buried in the sands of Iraq. Will you repudiate the exceptionalist hubris that underlies such a claim, or will you as President, though may be not as Obama, acquiesce in the fait accompli of US foreign interest that is easily summed up in the following motto: We think, ergo the world exists.”
Will you let America participate in what we in our field call “the worlding of the world” without the polarity of dominance? It was heartening to see some coverage of Kenya on the day of your victory. My question and challenge to you is, “Will you be USA’s first immigrant/diasporic “double” or even “multiple” conscious President? In the formulation of USA’s formidable foreign policy, will you step beyond the stranglehold of American interest, and acknowledge that the objectivity of the world, that includes American reality as one of its many heterogeneous components, has nothing to do with what America wants? When we use terms like African-American and Asian-American, we always wonder how real Africa and America are in these appellations. Are they symbolic, cosmetic? Are these ritualistic gestures eviscerated of their potential world-historical meanings? Can you persuade your fellow Americans to achieve a “dialogic awareness” of who they are and who they can be: an awareness that will help them, as a leading postcolonial theorist has put it, “unlearn their privilege” and liberate themselves from their “self-sanctioned ignorance?” We say that we are a nation of nations (good old Walt Whitman who tried to sing both himself and America by way of a micro- macro-cosmic reciprocal reduction), but our exceptionalism forbids us from marking ourselves as a belligerent nation in search of Empire. To be truly a nation of nations, we as a people need to cure ourselves of our willed amnesia (we are a “forgetful nation,” a recent work reminds us), and remember our many histories that made us who we are. We are multiple, heterogeneous, hybrid; and there is nothing wrong with that. There is no harm in conceptualizing America as a work in process, a process that warmly welcomes radical and fundamental debates about what America is. An Arab, a Palestinian, or an Iraqi-American has as much to say about America as an assimilated Euro-American.
All great thinkers from all over the world and from different traditions have attempted to think of Home as the World, and the World as Home. If America is Home and you are the Chief Executive of that Home, will you allow your precious Home to change and correct itself so that it can truly be the World, or will you in the name of Homeland Security perpetuate paranoia as our only way of entering and accommodating the World? By way of summing up, here is my last question.
Dear President Obama, will you be capable to think, in the name of America, a profoundly un-American thought?
With all good wishes to you as you embark, I hope, on a two term Presidency.
R. Radhakrishnan
Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and African American Studies
University of California-Irvine
>2009, Issue 1
>Politics and Culture
>Special Issue: Letter to Obama
>http://aspen.conncoll.edu/politicsandculture/arts.cfm?id=79
Contributors:
>Toby Miller
>R. Radhakrishnan
>Ilan Kapoor and Anna Zalik
>Rachel Ida Buff
>Anthony Alessandrini
>Jonathon S. Kahn
>Benjamin Ballthaser
>Cynthia Young
>Derek Stanovsky |