Is it just me, or do you too think it highly significant that Inauguration Day this year came the day after Martin Luther King Day? MLK Day is an American government holiday established to honor the legacy of the martyred civil rights hero, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In the famous "I Have a Dream" speech he gave at the 1963 March on Washington, he gave voice to the idea of equality between Americans of African descent, most of whose original ancestors were brought to America as slaves, and their European-descended fellow citizens. Today, the dream has still not been fully achieved. However, today represents one big step closer.
Barack Hussein Obama, son of an African immigrant, has just been sworn in as the 44th President of the United States of America.
Hell has officially frozen over.
Much of the credit for the seemingly impossible becoming reality rests with President Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, who I like to call Emperor Shrub "Dubya" Enron (in honor of the corporation that bought him into the White House). He actually said, "If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator." Bush ran for office under the slogan "compassionate conservatism" — whatever that was, other than a meaningless yet emotive duckspeak catchphrase coined by a hired ghostwriter. But when, during his first year in office, 9/11 came around and the gang lord Osama bin Laden sent his goons into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon using hijacked civilian airplanes, Shrub Enron at once placed the imperial crown on his head and proceeded to invade the world. At home, he had a rubber-stamp Congress pass laws aimed at curtailing freedom, and used executive orders (read: royal decrees) and signing statements to try to counteract the barriers the U.S. Constitution put in the way of his absolute power. However, he had no such barriers abroad, especially in the Middle East. The first thing he did as emperor of the world was to invade Iraq — a war still going on, and which will likely destroy America as well as Iraq.
Did I mention that Enron, of which he used to be a vice president, bought the presidency for him? Bush, like his father, declared war on "welfare queens", but he immediately became the sugar daddy to the corporate welfare kings, starting of course with his good buddy "Kenny Boy" Lay — who just happened to be Bush's owner, the chairman of Enron. It was orgy time for the financial oligarchy, and especially the infamous military-industrial complex. His vice president — Bush's, not Lay's (that would be his hitman, Jeffrey Skilling), was Richard Cheney, the former CEO of Halliburton (corporate welfare watch here). Sure enough, with Shrub Enron and Dick Halliburton in charge, the military-industrial corporate welfare queens charged into Iraq like an all-destroying Mongol horde and proceeded to steal everything. Since one of Bush's top priorities was to outsource America's jobs to slave-wage countries, the American economy now rests upon the corporate welfare kings who rule Iraq, which is why American troops continue to occupy Iraq to serve them.
Bush may claim membership in the theocratic Christian Right, but his dictatorship was the high point of the neofascist political movement called neoconservatism. Besides being politically authoritarian, neoconservatism is also corrupt on principle.
I say: Good riddance to Emperor Shrub Enron, his chickenhawk cabal, and their gods, the corporate welfare kings.
Now, a whole lot of skeptical Americans, and countless millions of even more skeptical non-Americans, are doubtful that the new president will be able or willing to change much about this. However, this is only President Obama's first day on the job, he hasn't done anything yet. He's said a few things about what he plans to do; but we'll have to see whether or not he can actually reverse Bush's biggest mistakes.
But now the dictator is gone, having blown us off on his way back to Texas. Now a new era has begun. Even if everything continues to stay the same on the political level, at least at first, everything has changed on the symbolic level. The impossible has finally happened: a member of the former slave race is now presides over the country from the Oval Office. Some phenomena defy reason. President Obama may disappoint us in the next 4 or 8 years; some are even predicting that he will be an epic disaster in his own right; but on day one of the Obama presidency, hope still reigns.
Back to "Take Nothing On Faith"...
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