08 March 2009
 
The Man
 
(James Earl Jones as The Man, 1972)
 
The clock change hit me pretty hard this morning, so I am moving slow and a little jerky. The change always does, but each passing year makes the idea of traveling a time zone to the east as I sleep a little more difficult.
 
I wandered around Tunnel Eight changing the assorted clocks starting in the late afternoon, to accustom my brain to the idea of the change; the cable box was the only one that would change automatically except the computers, and as you know, it is the ubiquitous little timepieces on the walls and side tables that enable me to get out of the house in the morning.
 
Heading east in spring is always worse than heading west in the Fall, though the extra time after work with sunlight will enable the fitness program to commence once more.
 
There is a lot to be accomplished, and I need to get focused. The Bluesmobile is crusted with salt from last week and needs a sluice-down, and there are three prescriptions I am going to try to alleviate the dull constant ache in the damaged knees that wakes me in the night to look at the clock, and wonder what time zone I am in.
 
I was looking up in the darkness, thinking that the setting on the alarm clock was the one I had not messed with, when sleep came once more, deep, with dreams of The Man.
 
Paul Robeson, was one of them, the quintessential revolutionary man of the 1950s, whose rage against the system brought him to admire Communism, and it ostensible egalitarian approach to relations between the races. He was a controversial figure, with that magnificent voice and imposing presence, and scared the hell out of Middle America.
 
Comedian and activist Dick Gregory actually ran as a write-in candidate for President in 1968, which until this year was the one filled with the greatest mayhem and madness in post-WW II American History. I think that was the year the term “Community Activist” stopped meaning “Outside Agitator” in a lot of places, and Comedy started to get comingled with politics so that you could not tell the difference.
 
As part of his campaign literature, a raft of bogus dollar bills with Gregory’s portrait were distributed. They were pretty funny, and a collector’s item now. There were problems, though. See, in those days, the Treasury Department took the integrity of the dollar seriously, and didn’t print off trillions of them at the drop of a hat. The production of the notes nearly landed him in jail. With the embryonic state of automated money machines of the time, some of the fake dollars actually worked. As the prospect of federal charges loomed, Gregory quipped that he was innocent "because everyone knows a black man will never be on a US bill."
 
Fiction was running in parallel with reality, or at least a step ahead. The first movie to imagine a black president of the United States at any length was the satirical drama “The Man,” released in 1972.
 
James Earl Jones, the man with the stentorian voice appeared as President. This was after his turn as Jack Johnson, the revolutionary pugilist, and before his voice's incarnation as Darth Vader. The Man was science fiction, designed to shock and tantalize. The plot device does not include election, which would have been too implausible. Mr. Jones becomes president only after his character, the president pro tempore of the Senate, happens into the Oval Office after the president and the speaker of the House die in a ceiling collapse. 
 
It is no coincidence that it is The Voice that gives Jones the ability to channel Robeson's baritone into the ultimate figure of authority, and it is entirely appropriate that Twilight Zone's Rod Serling was entrusted with adapting the screenplay of Irving Wallace's original novel.
 
Black Presidents had here-to-fore existed mostly in fictional scenarios, highlighting the air of unreality and the possibilities of alternate realities. Imagine a reality where science fiction was not the prevailing market force, and fraud not the norm in the mortgage business. 
 
It was in the thriller television series "24" that the first credible African-American President strode into the public consciousness, just a few steps ahead of reality. Actor Dennis Haysbert played President Palmer with a gravity that was impressive and thoroughly credible, as befits his day-job as an insurance pitch-man. The way he radiated dependability could only have been made possible by the real-life presence of icon General Colin Powell, one of the greatest figures of trust in American life after DESERT STORM. 
 
I still feel bad about his not being the First Black President. Think what we would have avoided if Carl Rove's politics of destruction had not ruled the Republican Party!
 
In the wake of the turbulence of the 1960s, I cast my first Presidential vote, November, 1971, for Socialist Gus Hall. It was a protest of some kind, I forget why, and every election since I have voted the GOP ticket, though I do not consider myself a member of that party.
 
If there was a time when I considered myself as such, it was in the days of Nelson Rockefeller, when a generally progressive social policy coincided with a generally robust foreign profile and strong national security posture.
 
Daniel Patrick Moynahan, the great Senate Liberal and legendary drunk, shared a lot with Nelson. He got away with his spot-on analysis of the dolorous consequences of the welfare state on the African-American family only because of his liberal bona fides- and the fact that time bore him out.
 
You can quibble about the politics of New York, but there once was a liberal wing of the GOP that coincided with that of progressive thought before Liberal, with a capital "L," became a synonym for surrender.
 
Anyway, I voted Republican not because I believed in the inversion of the Party in the Southern Strategy, or the religious zealotry, or the strange infusion of narrow morality into the debate on social issues. If only Alma Powell had been up for the hurly-burly of politics the way Hillary or Michele were! General Powell had a real concern for his family, and a love them that precluded dragging them into the arena with him.
 
Then, remember the weird contention that Bill Clinton, with his public charisma and anarchic private life was actually the First Black President? I still don’t know what to make about that.
 
If Colin Powell had been The Man, which in many ways he was, I think things would have been much different. Think of the National Issues that dominated the agenda in the last eight years. I don't give a rat's ass if gay people marry. I think they should be entitled to the same misery as the rest of us. Stem Cells? So long as the genetic material was going to be discarded without ceremony at the clinics, so what? Where is the sanctity of life in all that?
 
Would we have leapt into the great vortex of Iraq as we did? Would we have ground the force into the sand in the way that it was done? Would the General have allowed the criminal shenanigans to rule the markets that have brought us to ruin?
 
Maybe. But I think not.
 
The War on Drugs that is lost in the domestic demand for the commodities right here in America? Interdiction cannot succeed so long as demand is voracious. Some pragmatic answer that does not ignore that the problem begins right here in America might be a start to ending the subsidy of Narco States on our borders.
 
Legalization, control and taxation are not good things. But like the use of alcohol, it is not something that can be dictated by the state, only channeled and taxed to mitigate the damage of illicit use with vast profits to the Bad Guys.
 
Colin Powell is a pragmatist above all things, but one with a moral core. I think he might have had an approach to all of these distractions that prevent us from confronting the real things that will spin us out of control.
 
The list of might-have-beens is too long to list, and none of them, regardless of their importance to the various constituencies, was really important in the greater scheme of the nation's survival. 
 
I agree that our new President is no socialist, since the term is so loaded with baggage. He is no socialist, not in the way I understand it, nor a member of it’s big brother Communism. He is a pragmatist above all things, or he could not have advanced to the oval office through hard work, cool persona and the curious confluence of our crises. He does come equipped with a moral compass that came from a worldview that is extraordinarily different from those Chief Executives that have gone before.
 
Colin Powell knew about that, from his first days in the Army, in the shadow of the pervasive racism of the American South, a Bobby Kennedy bumper sticker on his Volkswagen, and the subsequent experience with the thoroughly egalitarian nature of the war in Southeast Asia.
 
President Obama’s view was shaped by factors that do not have much to do with the reality that many of us share. On Friday, he talked to the Press in an open-ended half hour chat, always a dangerous thing. He will learn about that, I suspect. He was on Air Force One, the airplane with the big desk bolted to the floor, which has the best pilots in the Service, and flight plans that minimize turbulence.
 
The President brushed off the heated rhetoric emanating from what is left of the Republican opposition that he is “driving the country toward socialism.” His handlers were alarmed that he wasn’t strong enough in that, and upon reflection, they got him to call reporters from the Oval Office after he landed at Andrews AFB and helicoptered home.
 
He called to reinforce his position that all his plans are “entirely consistent with free-market principles”
 
That is nonsense. Even George Bush was apologetic about what he had to do to the Free Market in the last days of his Presidency. The new President can be forgiven for having a blind spot on that, since he has never actually experiences much in the free market. That explains that unfortunate off-the-cuff remark in San Francisco during the campaign, when he said he understood why small-town America clung to it guns and religion.
 
He did not know he was being recorded, and was just speaking his mind. The President is no socialist- public acknowledgment of that would not fly even in the Blue States.
 
He is, though, a graduate of the Marxist dialectic. There was a photo of him in his teaching days that showed the Brooks Brothers white shirt, sleeves rolled up, open collar kind of academic, inspirational and dedicated. Unintentionally caught on the black board behind him were his class notes- and reading them made my eyes bug out, since they were straight out of the Marxist dialectic 101.
 
Thesis, anti-thesis and synthesis, just the way I learned the components of historical progress, way back when in Blue Ann Arbor, Michigan.
 
Marx understood the free market; it was all around him. He just didn’t like it.
 
I’m concerned that the lurch from fundamentalism to Marxism-lite is too hard a stress on the airframe of state. The inevitable reaction to the imposition of Big Government all at once will bring a corresponding reaction, since the laws of physics, any more than those of economics had been suspended.
 
The oscillation caused by yanking back and forth on the controls, could overstress the delicate integrity of the machine. It could even prove catastrophic.
 
The difference of opinion here has always been close. Most folks forget that this is not a democracy- the Founders shuddered at that- and gave us a Republic, where those with the least could not vote to confiscate the property of those who had more.
 
Mastery of the controls has always been why the government is constructed in way that balanced power, and tends to solutions of compromise and inaction. 
 
That is why Carl Rove sought to build a permanent Republican majority through pandering to the distant and unpalatable fringes of the Right, and why the new Administration will seek to pad the rolls with new voters of unconventional patrimony.
 
No matter. We have to buckle our seat belts tight, and curse the fact that we are trapped in a common airline flight. We will land together. The only choice is how hard that landing will be, and whether we will be able to walk away.
 
I just wish Colin Powell was The Man on this flight. He really had a deft touch, and for an armor solider, he was a hell of a pilot.

Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com