AMERICA'S SPECTATOR PRESIDENT -- PRESIDENT OBAMA PERSONIFIES A CULTURE OF COMPLACENCY

 AMERICA’S SPECTATOR PRESIDENT

OBAMA PERSONIFIES A CULTURE OF COMPLACENCY 

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

Obama’s second term has been preternaturally unlucky.  The stymied enrolments for his healthcare plan, the multiple errors of computer coordination that forced people to wait days or weeks in front of blank screens, marred the new faith in government the plan had been intended to affirm.  Just when, around the end of April, the trouble seemed to be halfway resolved, with millions finally insured and several deadlines put off, there emerged stories of faked records of treatment and months-long waiting lists at Veterans Hospitals.  It was another failure of managerial competence, in another branch of government to which Obama had professed the warmest commitment.  And there has been nothing resembling a success in foreign policy to offer the embarrassments at home.  The United States, which always needs to be doing something, was in no position to do much about the Russian annexation of Crimea or the conflict in Ukraine.  

David Bromwich, “The World’s Most Important Spectator,” The London Review, July 3, 2014

It would be easy to indict President Barak Obama, given this assessment, but that would be wrong.  Obama did not create the mold, but simply allowed himself to personify it in every real sense.  Face it, America is obsessed with distractions, failing to ask the right questions, or focus on the right problems, that is, the vital few 20 percent that make 80 percent of the difference.  Instead, it focuses on the trivial many, or the 80 percent that could be ignored without consequences.

The most damning criticism by author David Bromwich is this:

The United States needs to do something even if it is wrong.  

It is a mentality that General Motors has recently displayed, as well as the IRS in targeting Tea Party conservatives, and the fake records of the Veterans Administration.  Alas, it is endemic to the land, and the President of the United States behaves consistent with that boilerplate.

Bromwich goes on:

A common feature in all these events was that Obama himself seemed far from the scene.  He was looking on, we were made to think, with concern and understanding.

In this Information Age, conspicuous spin on events is the protocol for the government, academic institutions, industrial and commercial enterprises, indeed, for religious affiliations.

All these corporate society operations have their public relations departments, schooling their leaders in how to appear before the television cameras or on Facebook, et al.

We have become a contrived society with the emphasis on presentation and appearance and not on performance.

The President of the United States did not create this boilerplate.  He has simply given it novelistic distinction.

The purpose of a society is not what it says it represents or will do, or threaten to do, but what it does.

We have been reduced to the cover on our cereal boxes that establishes our brand not realizing brand is an advertising gimmick and has nothing to do with when the rubber hits the road. 

Bromwich continues:

Obama is adept at conveying benevolent feelings that his listeners want to share, feelings that could lead to benevolent actions.  He has seemed in his element in the several grief counseling speeches given in the wake of mass killings, not only in Newtown but in Aurora, at Fort Hood, in Tucson, in Boston after the marathon bombings, and in his meetings with bereft homeowners and local officials who were granted disaster funds in the aftermath of recent hurricanes.

Again, the president didn’t invent this tact.  President George W. Bush used it in New Orleans after devastating Hurricane Katrina, claiming  that Director Michael Brown and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had everything under control when it had nothing under control.  Thousands of people were stranded with no logistical support from government, not for days, but for weeks.

President Barak Obama has not been able to escape this malady of leaderless leadership that has become a debilitating disease in American corporate society.

Corporate society is run by narcissistic managers with infallible authority, operating with impunity with business as usual practices, failing to learn anything from cataclysmic disasters, such as the 2008 economic meltdown, which was caused by blatant and egregious excesses on Wall Street.

With the Dow Jones Industrials now in the neighborhood of 17,000, it is apparent that nothing has been learned.  The boom is only a matter of time before another bust.

Bromwich agrees:

Disengagement has become the polite word for Obama’s grip on his own policies.  Absent and not accounted for was the general view of him as the crisis in Ukraine built up in January and February.

Americans are obsessed with the wonders of electronic technology, and those in positions of power are quick to point out all the capabilities of this technology in terms of surveillance, assessment, and the evaluative value it provides.  Yet, there isn’t a condition or a contingency that doesn’t surprise those in charge despite this arrogance, over and over and over again. 

Those in positions of leadership, the president included, create first and second echelons of people who are fanatically loyal to the man in charge, placing on the sideline if not making redundant those who have no ax to grind other than to state facts as they appear, and strategies of possible use in their discharge.

Wall Street had its alarmists in the late 1990s, people who pay attention to chronic problems and were able to see the 2008 meltdown in the headlights, but to no avail, as no one was paying them any mind.

It has become more important to be liked than effective, more important to make others comfortable than to reveal their incompetence, more important to write books and articles that can be read and discarded as the blowhard sentiments of pessimists and discredited on that basis. 

The United States of America has been declining since 1968, and has never recovered from the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Robert Kennedy.  Instead, it has become preoccupied with its toys of distraction while the world continues on without it.

The United States still persists in saber rattling, and drawing meaningless red lines in the sand, red lines that no one takes seriously, collapsing into complacency while still maintaining the rhetoric of relevance.

David Bromwich is writing about President Barak Obama as “The World’s Most Important Spectator,” but the American people are right behind the president in their collective passivity waiting for something to happen, while sitting complacently in some NFL, NBA, NHL or MLB emporium or listening to talk radio. 

Bromwich concludes his theme with these words:

The Republican Party and some Democrats are saying the US should do more, though they don’t know exactly what.  To judge by the chaos in the region and the confusion of the American political class, whose most ambitious members continue to outbid one another in delusion and posturing, there will have to be further echoes of the disasters of Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan before the US is forced to think again.

This author writes books in the vernacular of work, workers and the workplace crying for a wakeup call, only to sense no one is listening, and that saddens him deeply.

   

*     *     *