This preference has a utopian quality. It expresses the people’s will to smash the state, to break free from the paternalistic hold of a totalitarian government. But, it is also a very dangerous desire.

The majority of U.S. voters prefer economic collapse because they’ve been convinced by elite propaganda that this will create more economic opportunities for them in the future, but this probably isn’t the case. It is more likely to create a short-term economic disaster that would disproportionately affect the middle and working classes and possibly lead to violent social and political fallout (e.g. hate crimes, political assassination, etc.).

The desire for failure on the part of middle and working class workers in the U.S. is fueled by their resentment for racialized minorities, who they believe benefit disproportionately from social welfare programs. It is also fueled by a misguided belief in meritocracy, that the white middle and working classes still “count” in the U.S. from the point of view of the corporate elites and that through hard work and persistence they can achieve greater economic and social rewards. One need only glance at the trends in U.S. wages and wealth inequality since 1968 to see that this is just not the case. Although it is unclear whether default will benefit anybody, it will almost definitely not benefit the poor or working classes in the short or medium term and will much more likely benefit the current elites who still hold the keys to military power, natural resources, and securities in the long term. To agitate in favor of default would be to sell one’s birthright for a mess of pottage.

Such a desire might also be appealing from an anarcho-Marxist, i.e. revolutionary point of view, however deceptively. Nowadays, well-intentioned leftists seem to mistake catastrophe for revolution, something that Marx, for one, never had in mind. Instead, in the short term, leftists should support raising the debt ceiling, but only in support of a state working towards a more just, egalitarian, and democratic political arrangement. As leftists we need to have hope that at least some members of the power elite posses the desire to see this change take place. Otherwise, we are in for many more years of suffering by the people who deserve it least, the poor and working classes, and the continued flourishing of a corporate elite whose greed and callousness seem to expand day by day.

Here was my response:

This is a moving essay, although his complaints about culture seem to assume a rather simplistic model of cultural reception. For instance, in my opinion, the reality TV that he mentions, “Jersey Shore,” “The Apprentice,” and “The Jerry Springer Show” (does anybody watch that anymore?), are not a transparent indicator of the oligarchy’s disdain for the poor, but an expression of their viewers’ drive towards their own destruction. These people may be middle class, not poor, which still supports his point, in a way, but my inner-Zizek tells me that in order to dissuade people from this destructive behavior (globalization), we need to understand their enjoyment of it a little better (and possibly with more respect).

Also, I hate to say this because I fear that people will jump down my throat for it, but I think that Democrat-bashing, while deserved, is still dangerous in the current political climate, and I say this as an independent socialist who has only voted for the Democrats twice (Obama and Tom Perriello). To take just one example, what is happening to Bradley Manning should serve as an indication to Democrats of their party’s complicity with the corporate state, but for the worst off in the U.S. (LGBTQ people, Arabs and Muslims, other minoritized populations and immigrants who are also often poor, women in need of reproductive health services), the Democratic party constitutes a thin blue line between survival and annihilation, and it seems irresponsible of Hedges to dismiss that. Even Chomsky (in his latest interview with Amy Goodman) suggested that, in swing states, U.S. voters are going to be forced to choose Democrats in the next election, no matter how much they might want to do otherwise. You will be voting for the possibility of glacially slow, incremental change, and against the possibility of revolutionary terror at the hands of right-wing neo-fascists. (I think Chomsky uses the term “paleolithic dinosaurs.”) I’m inclined to agree with the linguist.

But I voted for Obama anyway, because I bought into the message. I read his book Dreams from My Father, and I thought, This is a guy who speaks my language. He understands how bad it is. He’s conversant with dissidents. He’s dabbled in radicalism. He’s complex. He’s autonomous. I’m gonna vote for him. And even today, after Obama has more or less extended Bush-era military policies and in some cases worsened them, and reacted to the crisis of capitalist accumulation by listening to the very people that created it in the first place, I still support the man, but I do so with a knot in my stomach and the feeling that I’ve been taken for a ride.

I still appreciate the dialectical significance of Obama’s victory with regards to race relations in the U.S. that many “old New Leftists” (like Nader and Chomsky) underestimate. Obama’s election energized previously dormant segments of the U.S. population, like African-Americans and young people, and even though this new energy has not had strong results in the policy arena, it still burns brightly and in a way that it didn’t, and maybe couldn’t have, without the charisma of Obama to spark it. Also, I think that our country is better off with Barack Obama and Joe Biden as president and vice-president than John McCain and (perish the thought) Sarah Palin. Obama entered the White House during a crisis of epic proportions, and his way of dealing with it has been flawed, but I take some heart in the fact that if McCain had been elected, things might’ve been a hell of a lot worse. Shit, if McCain had been elected we might already have declared all out war on Iran abroad, and further scapegoated Hispanic immigrants and Muslims at home.

What makes me angry right now is Obama’s refusal to stand up for himself. On the day after the election, I was sickened to hear that he described himself as “humbled” by the result. Considering the economic climate in which the election took place, he should have said, “Is that all you got?” What’s frankly more shocking than the Republican “wave” is the fact that they weren’t able to take over both houses of congress. They did it in 1994, why not 2010?

To my mind, the right wing and left wing responses to Obama have been similarly galling. In spite of myself, I can’t understand the right wing’s resistance to Obama as anything less than racism. Besides healthcare reform, George W. Bush did every bad thing Obama ever did with the economy and the military, and we never saw the populist upswing against him that we have witnessed against Obama. What’s the difference between the two? Brown skin. Furthermore, an apparent sticking point for the right wing, Obama’s healthcare legislation, is a similarly vexing racial proposition. Healthcare reform is something all working people should favor, and it seems to me that the only reason to resist it is the fear that someone “less deserving” than you will receive better care than you, and the only way to imagine these “less deserving” people is to buy into the fantasy that most of the poor are merely lazy, when in reality, most poor people in the U.S. today work multiple jobs for starvation wages under constant threat of incarceration for behaviors that many of their racial “betters” get away with all the time. Another plurality of the working poor don’t even have legal status. No matter how you cut it, the belief in the laziness of the poor is a racist one that goes back at least until the days of U.S. slavery and probably beyond. It seems nothing less than obvious that it is these racist fantasies that have fueled the populist elements of the Tea Party movement, and contaminated the sphere of civic discourse to such an extent that casually racist statements that were at least frowned upon before Obama’s election have suddenly become acceptable again, for instance, the racist discourse about Obama’s religion, the threats to burn the Koran, or the uproar over the Park51 project. Even if many independents moved back to the right during the mid-term election, I suspect that it was less out of principled disagreement with President Obama than it was out of a desublimation of racist feelings that had been tamped down during Obama’s spectacular campaign.

(For people who opposed the recent health care legislation at the level of policy, because they thought it should have done more or done the same thing in a different way, I sympathize. I am extraordinarily disappointed with the details of the legislation. But I think that it’s important to recognize just how complicated a coalition between right wing racists and health corporations made the legislative process. Obama and the Democrats certainly made tactical mistakes, but on balance, I think they at least tried to do more harm than good, and made difficult political choices that absolutely had to be made. If not then, when?)

The left wing, however, hasn’t been much better, especially “old New Leftists” like the ones that populate my profession (academia), and public intellectuals like Nader, Chomsky, or Tariq Ali. To me, it has seemed as though many of these leftists, as well as many more run-of-the-mill leftist friends, suddenly became radical communists overnight. As someone who has identified as a radical communist for most of his adult life, I can vouch for the fact that this ideology was not shared by most of my peers and colleagues before Obama’s election. The night after Obama’s election it was as though he was expected to initiate a cultural revolution on par with the most radical Maoist fantasy. Anything short of declaring an end to all foreign wars, the abolition of police powers and prisons, the nationalization of banks and oil, and the adoption of a single-payer healthcare system seemed inadequate. I think that it’s marvelous that Obama’s election enabled these fantasies. I would have encouraged all leftists to hold them before his election, and I encourage us to embrace them after he leaves, but I think that it’s at least disingenuous to judge him by his inability to achieve them. With figures like Nader, Chomsky, and Ali, I sympathize. They’ve been on the frontlines for a while now, and they’ve earned the right to fantasize. But for the average left-leaning person who became radicalized overnight, I think we owe Obama a bit of a wider berth.

In the end, the reason why I feel so shitty isn’t the fact that the Democrats lost. I disagree with Democrats just as much as I disagree with Republicans. And it’s not because I’ve become disenchanted with Obama, although I’m very close. (The more I think about his foreign policy, especially, the more the grinning visage of Larry Summers pops into my head, the more disgusted I get.) What upsets me the most a few days after the election is a feeling of hopelessness and frustration that I haven’t felt since the darkest days of Bush. I feel lonely, and I resent the fact that Obama tricked me into feeling like I was part of something in which I never believed in the first place, the U.S. state.

(I’m not printing the name of the event’s sponsor so as not to give them any further publicity.)

I’m usually very leery about events like this one, but I went for a few reasons. One, the price was right. Two, Pavement was booked to play as part of their reunion shows. And three, I thought that seeing Ludacris, T.I., and M.I.A. wouldn’t be a waste of my time. So I graciously accepted Jason’s offer.

The concert more or less lived up to my expectations, which were never very high in the first place. The general vibe of the concert was tedious. You couldn’t help but feel as if you were part of the cast for a big mobile phone commercial. Corporate memorabilia dominated the venue’s stage design, and every phase of the concert’s multimedia “experience” was calibrated to conscript you in the ad campaign. Roving camera crews broadcasted images of concertgoers wandering the grounds back to audiences waiting for the next act. Video screens encouraged concert viewers to post their pictures, tweets, and texts on-line so that they could be concatenated into a media narrative of a pseudo-event taking place somewhere between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Of course, the music press and media agencies have faithfully bit, closing the feedback loop on a promotional strategy that was probably a hell of a lot cheaper than a national ad campaign. Why not trick the newspapers into doing it for you?

The main selling point of the concert is that it was free, but it really wasn’t. The free tickets only got you as far as the lawn for most of the headlining acts, and an utterly confusing ticketing system forced concertgoers to shift sightlines and positions from uncomfortable seat to dusty lawn and back several times throughout the day. Many concertgoers actually paid for their tickets, at least $125 a pop, to wait in long lines to see their favorite bands play truncated sets. The fact that the concert wasn’t really “free” didn’t escape the attention of at least two acts—Pavement, and Matt and Kim—both of whom addressed its crassness during their sets. Of course, the venue also charged ridiculous prices for food and, I assume, memorabilia. I didn’t actually check the memorabilia prices. 24 oz. cups of Budweiser sold for $8 and a soggy, flavorless sandwich cost me $9. It wouldn’t have been hard for the sponsors to have allowed concertgoers to pack their own lunch, and it would have been closer to the spirit of an event that was supposed to be free for all involved and dedicated to charity.

Since Ludacris was scheduled at the same time as Pavement, and T.I. had to back out because of legal issues, my only rooting interests at the concert ended up being for M.I.A. and Pavement. I also caught most of Joan Jett’s set and a snippet of LCD Soundsystem’s. The first was kitschy and the latter merely boring. I actually like some of LCD Soundsystem’s music, so I was ready to enjoy their set, but they had nothing going. Sure, some of their songs had good grooves, but randomly banging on a timbale does not count as improvisation, and James Murphy can’t sing, so I don’t really get what the performance was supposed to do for me that the record hasn’t already.

Pavement’s set was predictable. Malkmus was acting like an idiot and Steve Kannberg can’t really sing anymore. He used to be my favorite in the band, a perpetual underdog, but I’ve developed serious reservations about what he ever contributed, and Preston School of Industry kind of sucked. It was fun to sing along to the songs, which I still love, and they played two that I wasn’t necessarily expecting—“Here” and “Two States.” But there was little doubt that the band was going through the motions, collecting a paycheck. It’s kind of an insult to their legacy that they don’t even seem to be making an effort to do anything creative on this tour. Malkmus has improved as a guitar player, but that almost made it more painful to see him fake his way through songs that are obviously too “easy” for him. If old fans really like Pavement for being Pavement, I think they would have appreciated new interpretations of the old tunes—a punk rock “Stop Breathing,” “Two States” as a ballad, “Here” as power pop. Why not try it? It’s sustained Dylan for 40 years and I still think he’s interesting. It’s tragic to see indie rock bands who staked their reputation on deflating rock star poses cash in the second time around on simpleminded authenticity. Maybe the band will surprise me and do something exciting after this tour, but I doubt it.

M.I.A.’s performance was fine for the opposite reasons. The music sucked, but at least she put on a show. Halfway through the set she admitted that it was “confusing,” and I walked away with the impression that it was intentionally so. I don’t think she was trying to gain any fans by performing “Steppin Up” from her new album in front of back up dancers dressed in day-glo accented hijabs, fooling around with day-glo colored electric drills. The song is dissonant on the album, and she didn’t back off in concert. M.I.A. has recently criticized pop stars like Lady Gaga for the simplemindedness of their presentation and I couldn’t help but think she was trying to do something more challenging, more “difficult” in this performance. Whether or not it was successful is another matter. I think it might have pissed off some people, and at the end of Saturday’s concert I didn’t exactly mind that.

All in all, the concert left me asking what rock n’ roll is “for” anymore. It certainly isn’t “fun” unless your idea of fun is drinking overpriced beer, eating shitty food, getting your ass covered in dust, and your shoes covered in piss. Or at least the Web 2.0 corporate variant of it isn’t, which shouldn’t have surprised me very much in the first place.

I’m not always a fan of Sharpton–I think that he plays too fast and loose with the media to the detriment of his own message, which is valuable–but we went anyway because we were so upset about Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and other right-wingers’ exploitation of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legacy and mystique. As you may know, Beck and Palin chose today of all days, the 47th anniversary of King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech and march on Washington, as the one on which to stage their own “Restoring Honor” event on the very site of King’s famous speech, the Lincoln Memorial. (Go to http://mediamatters.org/ for extensive coverage of the ways in which Beck has exploited the King legacy in spite of his own racial insensitivities, which are many and appalling. As of this posting, coverage of the Restoring Honor event occupied Media Matters front page.)

Due to our last minute planning and a reluctance to get up at 6 a.m.–we left at 8:30–we arrived in D.C. after noon. Thinking that the rally event at Dunbar High School would be over by then, we attempted to meet the marchers halfway at the National Mall. In retrospect, this was a bad strategy. We probably would have walked less and maybe gotten to see the tailend of some speeches if we’d ventured on to the original rallying point, but our lack of insight did allow us to observe some of Beck’s event, which was banal yet still harrowing. On the positive side, we did not see any of the downright racist or misinformed placards that have turned up at other Tea Party, evangelical, or Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin-affiliated rallies since Obama became president, but this may be because Beck instructed his followers to keep them at home:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/us/politics/29beck.html?hp

(See also, the list of prohibited items on Beck’s own website.)

Still, the crowd was creepily homogenous. Despite the Tea Party’s claims to the contrary, and Beck’s attempts to “diversify” his presentation with appearances by black musicians and a relative of King, the Beck crowd was overwhelmingly white and old. Very few Beck supporters looked to be under 30, and the few of those that were there were with their parents. When the mostly black NAN crowd descended on the Mall, Beck’s people seemed a bit shocked. Again, I am happy to report that I witnessed no serious altercations between the Beck people and the marchers. At one point, a marcher shoved a sign in the face of a Beck supporter, an admittedly inappropriate and agressive gesture, but the situation was quickly resolved, and in the marcher’s defense, she looked to be a teenager emboldened by the spirit of the day and resentful of the Beck people’s barely concealed disgust. Many of the Beck supporters wore “patriotic” apparel colored red, white, and blue, and labelled with mildly aggressive slogans such as, “Restoring honor starts here,” and “I can see November from my house too,” and there was a general sense that you were either with them or against them. Besides the many “Don’t Tread on Me” flags and t-shirts that were crowd favorites, many supporters wore clothing declaring themselves “rebels,” and the U.S. a “Christian nation.”

At the end of the day, tired, dehydrated, and sunburned, and my feet calloused, the NAN’s intervention on the Beck event seemed minuscule, but I’m still glad I went. Despite my physical exhaustion, I feel energized in mind and spirit, ready to prepare for the November election in which far-right candidates must be defeated. Also, the one thing that gave me hope amongst such a contentious and polarized crowd were the gazes of the young children of Beck supporters, many of whom I’m sure travelled from heavily segregated, almost all-white parts of America. It gave me great hope to imagine that when they saw the truly diversified NAN marchers, it might have inspired them to return to their hometowns and cities, and realize that the parts of the U.S. that their parents don’t want them to see or experience really aren’t that bad. That people of color, like Obama, are not the enemy, are not a threat, and that there is a way to work together, to march together, arm-in-arm, out of this horrible present into a better future that is only as great as what we might dream it to be.

Even granting that some of these people might not know how to identify a Muslim person (based, for instance, on that person’s religious beliefs), the idea that President Obama is a Muslim seems to me closely related to the notion that all black people (especially those with foreign-sounding last names) might possibly be Muslim even if they state otherwise. And that’s racist. And that’s crazy.

Now consider that only 22% of Americans actually voted for Barack Obama–a rough figure that I arrived at by dividing the number of votes received, 67,066,915, by the current U.S. population according to this census clock. Obviously, my number is flawed. For instance, children couldn’t vote and the clock counts children. Nevertheless, it frightens me that the psychotic 18% could give the Obama-supported 22% a helluva run for their money either in the polls or in a street fight. How do we, as citizens, combat this mania since the media-sponsored discourse on Obama only seems to fuel the hallucination?