OBAMA’S TEARS
“Even those tears, I
me mine
“I me mine, I me mine”
– the Beatles
John Chuckman
Had I seen the image of Obama, weeping over American gun
deaths, seven years ago, I know I would have been deeply moved. It would have
reinforced my view of him then as an empathetic, bright, and progressive
politician. And I did then, and do now, find America’s violence – all of it,
not just the small fraction of it seen in street killings - an appalling
assault on the human spirit.
But the image comes seven years later, following a period of
Obama’s proving himself an utterly cold and dry-eyed killer. Actually, apart
from seven years packed with regular killing and support of others doing
killing in at least half a dozen lands, he is reliably reported to have once said
at a high-level meeting, without tears or the least change in demeanor, "I'm
pretty good at killing."
I don’t know whether the recent tears were artificially
induced, as by an irritant placed on a fingertip to be touched to his face at
the right moment of his performance, or squeezed out from heretofore unknown political
acting talent. Perhaps they just reflect a kind of strangely compartmentalized
brain.
This last possibility would make him more bizarre than I had
come to regard him. I had come pretty much to accept him as just one more of
the garden-variety psychopaths who have held the American Presidency for
decades. There were even rumors, stemming from gaps in his resume, that he was
CIA, an organization that employs a lot of psychopaths and has now deeply
penetrated America’s elected government, having itself produced several
presidents – George Bush père for
sure - and other high office holders. The practice is equivalent to the Mafia’s
having a “made man” on the bench of a high court.
After seven years of mass murder, dirty tricks destroying
countless lives and destabilizing many peaceful lands, thousands of extrajudicial
killings conducted by young thugs from basement computer-games rooms at CIA,
and unblinking acceptance of such brutal savageries as we’ve seen from Israel
or Saudi Arabia or Turkey, his tears truly mean nothing, except perhaps somewhere
in the back of his own dark and terrible mind.
Only a few days before my writing this, I read of Israel
spraying a huge swath of land inside the boundary of Gaza with a deadly
herbicide. So these miserable people - these people who cannot even import
cement to repair Israel’s savage destruction of homes and schools and public
sanitation in 2014 – are now also to live with reduced arable land plus the
virtual certainty of heavy future birth defects, much as the Vietnamese still
experience from America’s hellish saturation of their land with Agent Orange
about half a century ago.
That Nazi-like behavior solicited no teary scenes from
Obama, just as Israel’s slaughter of more than 500 children and 1,700 adults in
2014 solicited not a tear from Obama, not so much as an awkward
throat-clearing.
I don't know what caused him to cry in his little performance
about guns in America, but if you tell me it was because a decent human was
overwhelmed momentarily by America's hideously murderous society, I will not
even bother to answer.
As remarkably few in other lands appear to grasp, America is
a massively brutal society. This is true both at home and abroad, and I should
know because I grew up there. I also know it will not change within the
lifetimes of any readers, the overwhelming size and nature of the situation
being beyond what many outside observers can imagine.
Certainly the insipid measures Obama has taken will not make
a dint in the toll. Strangers to American society simply cannot imagine how
many guns are floating around there. A recent Small Arms Survey estimated 270
million small arms, but there are a remarkable number of military-grade weapons
in private hands as a result of exposure to a vast armed services with its
galaxy of local military bases, major national guard organizations and
facilities in every state, and the past heavy arming of police and numerous
agencies such as the TSA. The kind of police who beat up drug suspects and take
their money are also the kind of police who illicitly trade in guns, and
America has large numbers of them amongst its rag-tag collection of a million
or so.
America swims in guns, and there is a vast market just in
private sales and stolen guns. There will always be a market under such
conditions no matter what regulations Washington may impose. And increasingly,
the individual states have permitted what was in my day in Chicago a serious
felony, the concealed carrying of guns. Some also allow citizens to carry them openly
in holsters.
Remember, there is not just the matter of thousands of
murders and countless maimings each year. There is, as was revealed by The Guardian for the first time ever, 1,134
people killed by their own police in 2015. It all charges the atmosphere of the
United States with a kind of regular, low-grade terror. And America’s prisons
have an international reputation for brutality. They include such barbaric
innovations as super-max prisons (in which prisoners live out entire lives in
total isolation), private profit-motivated prisons, and a prison population
whose total size dwarfs that of all other advanced countries.
I read in British newspapers, discussing Obama’s efforts, expressions
from readers such as "it's about time" or "those awful
Republicans," and I know they reflect views of people who just really do
not understand America.
America is a country which has killed at least 6 million
people over the last half century abroad, virtually all the killing to no
purpose other than America's trying to have its own way in places as distant as
Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Chile, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and still
others. If you think violence officially sanctioned on such a scale has no
effect on the country responsible for it, you are extremely naïve.
Much of the killing was savage beyond description, employing
fire bombs, napalm, white phosphorus, Agent Orange, carpet bombing, and that
truly hideous invention, cluster bombs.
America also remains the only country ever to use nuclear
weapons, twice, on civilian targets of no military significance, and this after
Japan had made strong feelers for its surrender. No, for America only
unconditional surrender was acceptable. And a series of 12 atomic bombs for 12
cities was scheduled. Some sensible minds questioned the lunacy, considering that
Japan had been almost flattened by a ferocious campaign of fire-bombing, so
that not one primary or even secondary military target was left standing.
The fact that only two atomic bombs were used had nothing to
do with America’s humanity. In later years, detailed plans for massive atomic
attacks on Russia and China were drawn up, the last of which so far as I am
aware was in 1961, being earnestly advocated to President Kennedy by the insane
men then running the Pentagon. Nuclear weapons also were seriously discussed as
options during the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam War.
America is, far and away, the world’s largest arms dealer,
literally dwarfing the trade in death machines of any other country, and it
sells its arms to tyrants and madmen across the planet enabling players like
Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, or Egypt to hugely expand the total number of
deaths for which America is responsible.
America also spends as much on its military as all the
world’s militaries combined. It is an obscene amount of money dedicated to killing
and oppression.
American advisors are in the business of advising kings and
tyrants how they can control people and efficiently kill them if needed.
America had an outfit called The Army School of the Americas which became
infamous for its teaching military personnel sent from Latin America in the
fine points of killing and torture. Today it’s been reborn as the
bland-sounding Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.
In a county like contemporary America, with its often poor
employment prospects for young adults, the military is a major employer. It has
an elaborate enticement system to attract young people. General military
training anywhere consists of just two central matters: how to be doggedly obedient
and how to kill people. So every year in America, many thousands of such young
people are dumped back into the general population. Many of them then go on to become
police because military service is a favorite entry qualification. Many of them
remain unemployed. Some even homeless.
There are not just the regular armed forces involved in
saturating the country with military values and attitudes, there are also the huge
national guards and reserves and high school and college ROTCs. It is a massive
effort, blanketing a supposedly democratic society with undemocratic and
violent ideas. You might view it as kind of a national immunization program,
immunization against democratic and human values, conducted year-in, year-out. So
the young generation of Americans is constantly immersed in the concepts of
blind obedience and killing. And all this is further reinforced by the vast
numbers of Americans dependent upon work at its many regional military bases
and other facilities.
Just a portion of this avalanche of annual spending on
murder might have created countless new opportunities in America with new and
better schools, better medical facilities, improved housing, and intervention
into troubled families. No, instead, everything is just allowed to rip, and on
the streets of Chicago and other cities, week-in and week-out, the toll of
young blacks resembles minor battle scenes with as many as twenty-five shot
(not all killed) on a single week-end.
That brings us to yet another aspect of American violence
and passion for guns. America remains in many respects just as divided a
society on racial lines as it was a century ago. The unspoken reason for many
Americans keeping guns is the same one that caused Southern plantation owners
to sleep each night with a knife and a pistol under the pillow. It rarely is
openly discussed, but it is there like a great unnerving presence in a thousand
dark places.
There is yet one more dimension to American violence. About
half a dozen years ago, a study, led by a Harvard Medical School researcher,
found evidence of mental problems in 26.4 % of people in the United States,
versus, for example, 8.2% of people in Italy. The researchers were concerned
with matters such as lack of access to treatment and under-treatment, but for
those concerned about a safe and decent world, I think the salient finding is
simply America's high percentage. The world is being led by a nation where more
than one-quarter of the people have genuine mental problems.
I’m afraid America’s movie industry has created sugary
fantasies about America which still influence the views of many abroad. There
really are no Jimmy Stewart types, with tears in the eyes and benign
expressions, running America.
And in case you missed it, even in as sugary a confection as
“It’s a Wonderful Life,” sobbed over by millions every Christmas season, some
raw truth creeps in. Jimmy Stewart’s run-in with Bert the cop ends with Stewart
running madly away in the snow and good old Bert pulling out his pistol and
firing several times, trying to hit Stewart in the back and putting at risk
pedestrians up and down the charming street. That’s the truest scene in the
film.
