The American Nightmare: The Blind Leading the Blind

During the primary season here in D.C., it seemed like all anyone wanted to talk about was Obama, Clinton and McCain. Most of those conversations were pretty forgettable as everyone was sort of regurgitating the views of their favorite pundits. I do remember a couple of those conversations though: one conversation that truly stuck with me was at a friend of a friend's birthday party that I crashed. When I got there, I was escorted downstairs by the hostess' mother. Downstairs there were roughly 30 people, all young members of the black alumni population of one of D.C.'s Catholic private high schools, St. John's College. They were all sitting around listening to music and reminiscing about high school. I noticed immediately that my friend, who is notorious for being late, was not there yet. Since I was sort of crashing the party, I played the back a little bit trying to go unnoticed for as long as possible. I quickly decided to look for some liquor to loosen myself up and help me break in to the festivities smoothly. Luckily enough, the first person I asked was eager to run up and get a refill, so I was set.

When we got upstairs, a few people were struggling looking for wine bottle openers and cups so, as we waited for the liquor to come to us, he asked me what I thought about the election. He didn't seem terribly interested in my opinion, honestly. There seemed to be something that he really wanted to say so I gave him my quick, stock response, "I'm pretty excited about it. I wouldn't be too unhappy with any plausible result... at least Bush'll be gone." He forced a quick laugh and got right to it, "I don't want Obama to win, man. If he wins, considering how messed up shit is right now, the first black president is going to be presiding over the worst national situation in American history. How's he, or anyone, supposed to fix it. I'd rather somebody else be the fall guy." I had never really heard this opinion before and thought his point was interesting, so I sparred with him a little bit, mentioning that his point seemed to be underestimating Obama's abilities, challenging his assessment of the national situation, proposing that the health of the country is more important than the "black image" that his failure could damage, and suggesting that Obama might be someone that is truly post-racial and that, therefore, any failures that he might have wouldn't be attributed to blacks or detrimental to the "black image"... but I felt like there was something to his point. He said that he didn't think Clinton was in any way less equipped to take office, that "she's at least as experienced and she's probably just as smart and worldly, so, why don't we let her take the fall." "Wow," I remember thinking, "are things as bad as this dude is saying? Is the next president really signing up for failure?" I think it's become clear that times are just as bad as this guy thought and noone knows if Obama, or anyone else for that matter, is capable of fixing whatever is broken. But, we certainly know one thing: He will be given the credit for how our nation does over the next 4-8 years, be it good or bad. Let's not jinx ourselves by harping on every little success, and let's not say we've failed while the verdict is still out.

Yeah... before we pass judgement on whether the new administration is being effective or not, we must give them time to get things done. Some things take longer than others to accomplish. More to the point, certain things are really hard to understand, and some things may even be beyond human comprehension. Our hope, as citizens relying on the decisions made by Obama and his economic team, is that we are no longer making the 'go-with-your-gut' moves for which the last president will go down in infamy; our hope is that the powers that be truly understand the mechanics of this economy and are able to develop solutions based on science. However, our economy, with its enormous volume of transactions and all of its moving pieces, may be beyond human comprehension. The complexity of subjective human choices in the economy makes mathematical modelling of the evolving market extremely difficult (or impossible). So, despite the intelligence of Obama and his economic advisors, who include some of the brightest minds in economics, the blind is kind of leading the blind right now. Positive economics can tell you how things are, really shitty, and normative economics can't tell you anything real. Noone really KNOWS anything about the economy... Some people have THEORIES; but every economist that has a theory has a counterpart on the other side of the argument with equally good research. So we're left having to HOPE for better.

Obama is, if nothing more, an incredible story, but one has to qualify this... he's a great story SO FAR. How many times have you walked out of a movie or finished a book that you had been enjoying until you saw or read the awful ending? Obama's may turn out to be such a story: Opening Scene, the narrator asks us to live with the "Audacity of Hope" for ummm... change or something... He poetically invokes Martin Luther King, Jr. and describes Obama as the realization of the dream King once spoke of. The next scene sees Obama rise to the highest post in the land and... the rest of the story is yet to be written. All we know as yet is that the stage has been set, and it's looking like the set designer may well have Obama's tale mixed up with a modern adaptation of Dante's "Inferno". See because, taking on the role of president means alligning one's legacy with the state of the union, and things are pretty hellish right now. Obama will continue to be the American dream, but he wakes up everyday to a nightmare. But it's not really his fault... (ellipsis)