Re American Jabberwock and a Sling-shot
http://www.opednews.com/articles/AMERICAN-JABBERWOCK-AND-A-by-rohjo-090127-95.html
Over nine weeks into his presidency, Obama disappoints. He pushes to print more Monopoly money. He slaps AIG's hand for giving out less than 0.1 percent of its bailout in bonuses but ignores the $183 billion of its bailout that went to Goldman Sachs. He ignores public sentiment that favors single-payer health care. He hedges on releasing remaining Gitmo prisoners. He plays a shell game with the term, "enemy combatant." He sends 17,000 troops to Afghanistan without public discourse. He defends John Yoo. He shows no sign of giving up the new and extraordinary executive powers handed to him by Bush.
And yet, and yet ... Wow. The President of the United States quotes Sheik Saadi in his Nowruz address to Iran. He sets precedent by including nonbelievers as part of our country in several speeches. He takes over 100,000 questions, and over three million votes to help prioritize those questions, from over 90,000 people on whitehouse.gov’s Open for Questions to prepare for an online town hall conference (a first and an end run around mainstream media, but only on this side of the digital divide). He promises to take care of veterans. He infuses some green into green infrastructure.
Is Obama a silver-tongued devil of the New World Order or a slowly emerging people's hero who needs all the pressure from the people he can get?
My sister, a Ron Paul fan, chided me for promoting whitehouse.gov's Contact section. Knowing I wanted Mike Gravel for president, she wondered if I'd been overtaken by Obama body snatchers. Ron Paul advocates peaceful revolution and ending the Fed (however that is done, peacefully—JFK wanted to end the Fed and keep conventional forces out of Viet Nam).
The word now is that Obama's big plans for whitehouse.gov have been curbed by the limitations of White House servers. There's plenty of dough for financial bully boys, apparently, with nothing left over to upgrade the Executive Office computer system. Whitehouse.gov's Contact section has been called a "black hole" by computer mavens, but one that is still in progress. The ACLU has submitted at least one petition to it.
Last Wednesday night, the New York Society for Ethical Culture held a discussion with Liz Holtzman, former member of the House Judiciary committee during Watergate and co-author of The Impeachment of George W. Bush; Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights; and Lewis Lapham, former editor of Harper's Magazine. The topic was "Obama and the Future of the Imperial Presidency."
The last question from the moderator was what can average people do about anything? The panelists' answer: Make a lot of noise. Like Naomi Wolf, they said we can demonstrate, run for public office and write op-eds. Democrats.com, the disaffected grassroots organization, supports candidates at the local level for bottom-up takeover.
Che once remarked on New York radio that to participate in armed revolution you have to be part crazy, and that the Cuban revolution was successful only because it occurred on a small island.
So I still say hound whitehouse.gov's Contact section as well as media and our representatives. Who knows? Efforts from disparate corners could cumulate in critical mass of public influence. I suspect reaching critical mass is proportionate to losing comfort zone. In which case, our comfort could be completely lost before our critical mass is reached. Like frogs in hot water, we might not know we're cooked till we're boiled.
The race is on.
The most important political office is that of the American citizen.—Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
