Article: How Goes the Battle Under Obama

Second, I have not COMPLETELY let go of that idea that felt to me like an insight back at the end of February of 2008: that Obama does fight against evil, but he chooses an indirect strategy. I am now about 85 percent convinced that his indirect strategy, if that is what it is, forfeits power unwisely. (See my "If I Could Give President Obama a Message, in 800 Words, at <a href="http://www.nonesoblind.org/blog/?p=5190">http://www.nonesoblind.org/blog/?p=5190</a>.) That leaves about 15 percent (really, probably less) of a sense that Obama is operating from a sense of how things operate that will show itself --by, say, 2016-- to have been a wise LONG-TERM strategy for defeating evil.

There is an idea --for explaining Obama's reluctance to confront the evil more vigorously-- that I still pretty much wholly reject. It's what I hear from most of those who comment here on opednews whenever I post something about Obama: these people of the left believe that Obama has not been a better warrior for the good because he himself is indifferent to the good and has in fact sold out to the forces of evil himself.

As I say, I do not buy that view. I believe Obama to be pretty well committed to the same sorts of values of humanity, justice, responsibility and compassion that I am. My belief is that the explanation for Obama's unnecessarily weak response to the dark forces --forces that have been continually working to block his achievements and to make him fail-- lies elsewhere.

Let me posit two elements I believe to be important to the picture.

First, I believe that Obama, by character, is <em>averse to conflict</em>. This seems to go deep in him. (As I imagine it, besides whatever family dynamics may have shaped it, another important factor that has molded it has been his learning what it takes in America for an extremely able man who's considered black by the larger society to rise and gain trust in the power structures dominated by whites.) Even though it seem pretty clear that Obama's power has increased every time he's become more confrontive with his opponents, so great seems to be his preference for accommodation and reasonableness that as soon as he's thrown a punch he retreats back into his corner, having stunned his opponent (but not having knocked him down, let alone out), and giving the other guy a chance to recover and come back fighting at full strength.

But there is a second component that I intuit, and that, while more subtle, may be even more important: I do not believe that Obama's worldview is conducive to the experience of MORAL outrage.

THE LACK OF MORAL OUTRAGE

Have we ever seen him manifest moral outrage? I can't recall an occasion.

One of the things I appreciated about Obama as he came across in DREAMS FROM MY FATHER was that he seemed to have this expansive spirit that encompassed all human failings with compassion. Like Montaigne, with his "Nothing human is alien to me."

But there may be a problem with his way of mapping humanity's darker side. Compassion is great. But in addition to loving the sinner, there's also a call --I believe-- to hate the sin.

Obama doesn't seem to mind --he does not seem offended by the fact-- that the Republicans have become the monsters they have. Being cool with acceptance of all the human permutations, he seems to have no line, for human wrong-doing, beyond which his predominant response is moral outrage.

In America, with its dynamics in the moral drama, Obama's quiet correctives --free of the edge and fury of moral outrage-- are not enough to combat and overcome the intensity of the dark forces. In some other cultural system, with a different way of registering moral power, Obama's gentle, subtle and tactful way of addressing the lies and self-aggrandisement and greed and utter lack of principles of his right-wing opponents might dissolve and disarm the dark energies he must contend with.

But we are in America, where the film climaxes in a gun battle in the street, a direct confrontation of force against force. In this case, what the audience has been culturally shaped to require is moral outrage against outrageous immorality. The American people cannot be taught with subtlety how to regard this darkness, to recognize it for what it is and to repudiate it. They must be taught through a dramatic form of combat.

It's possible that Obama's apparent weakness here is encompassed by the famous lines of Yeats: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." But I do not believe that Obama lacks conviction.

I'm more inclined to think that there is a mismatch here along the lines of what I described ("Steps in the Dance: Chapter 9 of A RIVER AND ITS CHANNEL," at <a href="http://www.nonesoblind.org/blog/?p=457">http://www.nonesoblind.org/blog/?p=457</a>) in a discussion by the fine book by the French scholar, Francois Jullien, THE PROPENSITY OF THINGS: Toward a History of Efficacy in China. Jullien describes how the Chinese have traditionally sought to win without direct battle, by observing and trying to manage the flow of things, so that the opponent's power dissolves and disappears and one triumphs without having struck a blow; whereas the Greeks wanted the outright, direct, hand-to-hand <em>agon</em> to resolve the battle.

The battle that Obama is fighting is one that will be decided by which sides can mold public opinion. And this is a public that is the heir of the Greeks. This is a public that is shaped by a culture in which the reluctant Shane (like various other non-confrontational heroes in our movies) must, to gratify the audience, give up on his commitment to non-violence, strap on a gun, and go out to shoot down the black-suited Jack Palance and the greedy cattle baron who hired him.

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