
Funny, as an African American -- or is he, since his father was African, not African American, and his mother was white -- he should know in American history, there has always been a multiplicity of Americas. The very Constitution itself is a testament to that multiplicity, of the fundamental duality of America: the slave states and the free states. The Founding Fathers created a no-party/one-party state (the same thing) and created an electoral college, and gave the slave states the counting of 3/5th of each slave towards the apportionment of seats in Congress and the electoral college, to keep the slave states viable, politically, vis a vis the free North. The Constitution wallpapered over the weak joint in the union caused by the duality of their being fundamentally two Americas, to create the fiction of one United States of America. These two Americas persist, Red States & Blue, the Solid South realigned from the pro-segregation, anti-black Democratic Party of 1876-1964 (this is just its core years) to the anti-black new GOP created by Nixon and Reagan.
Barack Obama is a black Republican, a throwback to the time before the 1964 coup staged by Barry Goldwater, that the Republican Party was the Party of African Americans. He does not represent working people (that falls to John Edwards), but is the candidate for the upper-middle-class voters and wannabes who would have been Republicans before the social revolution of the 1960s, and now are Democrats due to social issues.
In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?
-- George Orwell, 1984
Barack Obama is a black Republican, a throwback to the time before the 1964 coup staged by Barry Goldwater, that the Republican Party was the Party of African Americans. He does not represent working people (that falls to John Edwards), but is the candidate for the upper-middle-class voters and wannabes who would have been Republicans before the social revolution of the 1960s, and now are Democrats due to social issues.
In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?
-- George Orwell, 1984
No comments:
Post a Comment