This guest post comes to us from NISSIM MANNATHUKKAREN

And I have seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The euphoria of Obama’s ascension to the presidency of the United States slowly ebbs down to its logical culmination. But its glow has been such that it has drowned many other euphorias and the reality. For sometime now, since last year the world has been living in the bubble of the arrival of Barack, the “blessed” one, so much so that it has prevented us from asking important questions. It also made us forget many important things. It made us forget that on another wintry January day three years ago, Evo Morales, of the Aymara tribe, ascended to the presidency of Bolivia, the second poorest country in Latin America and with the largest indigenous population. He became the first fully indigenous head of state of any Latin American country since the Spanish colonized the Americas nearly 500 years ago: the unfolding of a magical dream of world-historic proportions for the genocide and dispossession of the indigenous peoples of the Americas is on a scale unparalleled in human history. The whole world which is generally only preoccupied with the affairs of the most powerful nation in the world failed to see this incandescent dream. After all, Bolivia, a poor ‘Third World’ country is not the United States, and Evo Morales, who failed to finish school, is no match for the Harvard-educated Barack Obama. In December 2008, Bolivia became fully literate in just three years on the back of a remarkable social movement launched by the Morales government to eradicate the one thing that kept its people colonized for so long. Considering that it is only the third country in Latin America, after Cuba and Venezeula, to do so, it is an extraordinary achievement. And in the end of January, again, quietly, without the world taking notice, Bolivia voted through a referendum for a landmark new constitution which would empower the indigenous people to an extent considered impossible before. As Morales leads his party Movement Toward Socialism and his country, which has the second largest reserves of natural gas in South America, towards a historic alliance with other nations of the continent to reclaim their land, resources and culture from imperialism and neocolonialism, his dream, ironically, stands in stark opposition to the American dream of even an Obama which can scarcely afford to tolerate this assertion of sovereignty by the dispossessed of the earth. It is here that another dream beckons us, that of a certain Martin Luther King which would have chastised the United States for being “on the wrong side of a world revolution” (1) for failing to stand by the “shirtless and barefoot people” of the ‘Third World’ when they rise up to throw away the yoke of oppression (2).

The Obaman dream might have unfolded through a $ 160 million inaugural. But let its luminosity not drown the dreams of an Evo Morales and a Martin Luther King, one living and the other alive in the hearts of many. Even as reams and reams of pages were spent on the effervescence of the Obaman dream, few asked how we got here.  Once we do that we realize that the Obaman moment, of all the world-historic events, is probably the only one without a historic past-one which is a built on a foundation of apparitions. Of course, chronologically it follows the glorious historic struggles for black liberation, from the non-violent Civil Rights to the militant Black Power, and thus it gives the illusion of continuity, of it being their culmination. But in actuality, it is a dream which reaps the reward of those struggles rather than one which partakes in those dreams and is ready to pay the price for those dreams. Especially, it is one which dreams of a different world than Martin Luther King. Shockingly, in a CNN poll conducted just before the Obama inauguration, two-thirds of African Americans believed that King’s dream has been fulfilled (3).  King’s dream was not one of putting a black man in the White House, but that of ending all kinds of exploitation. For him, black liberation is only an aspect of the larger goal of human liberation. There is not anywhere in the Obaman dream a trace of King’s recognition almost fifty years ago that “We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered” (4). The reconstruction of human society cannot ignore the systematic flaws of these triplets. The Obaman dream seeks to redress only the first one and that too partially.

The radicalness of Obama’s economic program which does not extend beyond sops for the middle classes does not realize that the prosperity of the few is built on the misery of many. The first budget presented by Obama does not show any signs of reversing this reality. Nothing in it suggests that despite the magnitude of the financial crisis the fundamental structures of the economy built on the principles of what the economist Susan Strange has brilliantly  characterized as ‘casino capitalism’ (5) are in any way being revamped. Instead the ‘New Age New Deal’ built on the highest federal deficit since the Second World War scandalously seeks to transfer public wealth through bank bailouts, to the very institutions that are the perpetrators of the ruinous crisis. According to even ideologically mainstream economists like the Nobel Prize-winning Paul Krugman, this is showering benefits,” on “people who don’t need or deserve to be rescued” (6).

The American dream, which Obama wants to reinvigorate, is also built on an avaricious lifestyle which would require the resources of six planets if generalized to the entire world and which causes ecological degradation and diseases in the poorest parts of the world. And despite the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and the greatest ecological threat the humankind has faced, there is not an iota of recognition (save for some ‘green’ overtures like $ 150 billion for clean technologies) that the material basis of the American dream needs severe scaling back. Instead, the most indebted nation of the world with a zero percent saving rate continues to postpone its tryst with reality by a mounting and already gargantuan public debt, which ironically, is mainly handled by the same banks and financial institutions whose main activity is speculation!  Here King’s dream would have reminded us that “something is wrong with capitalism” and “a true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries” (7).

In Obama’s ‘audacity of hope’ for the world from Afghanistan to Palestine, there is not the courage of King which acknowledged that the United States government is “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”(something chillingly true even after four decades and after the fall of many ‘walls’ and ‘curtains’) (8). This courage saw the inevitable connections between the oppression of the blacks and the American oppression of the Vietnamese people: “The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit” (9). The condition of African Americans has only marginally improved since King’s time with huge numbers being relegated to ‘Third World’ status. Thus they continue to be an easy fodder for American imperial expeditions abroad. What King said then is all the more relevant now:  We are “taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem” (10). When the Obaman dream wants to increase the size of the American military spending which is already touching a scarcely believable $ 1 trillion a year (11), we can only think of the other dream that tells us, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death” (12). The United States, the only Western country in the world without universal health care will continue, even under Obama, to allocate twice the health care expenditures and five times the anti-poverty expenditures on defense (13). And Obama’s shocking decision to increase the number of troops in Afghanistan will bring down those people who have been riding the dream wagon of ‘change’ to reality. Even in these dire circumstances, it seems the best way to stimulate the economy is the ruling elites’ time-tested formula of increase in military expenditure ignoring King’s passionate words: “This business…  of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love” (14).

Revolutions are not manna that fall from the heavens. They are built on the blood, sweat and tears of the countless, faceless foot soldiers over many years and decades as a Gandhi, a Che Guevara, a Castro, a Mandela, an Aung San Suu Kyi and of course, a Martin Luther King and an Evo Morales can attest to. The Obaman dream blinded by the light of a gargantuan $ 650 million spent on an election campaign fails to see that. It is probably only in the United States, one of the most depoliticized societies in the world, that an individual can aspire to become the most powerful person in the world, without the backing of a movement and a program, but on the sheer success of engineering an electoral majority in the course of a few months. But alas, electoral majorities are not moral majorities which embody the collective dreams of a people. In the age of the mass media, they live from one sound byte to another and dissipate after the event of an election. Americans have contributed the most to the reduction of politics to a media spectacle based on individual personalities and television debates. Here the dreams that emerge are based on 30-second television ads which can make or break history, or careers.

The real task of a revolution begins after the event. It can only be sustained by a vigilant struggle more daunting than the path that led to it. Even the glorious revolutions against the monstrous communist states in Eastern Europe soon transformed into mafia capitalisms run by the same apparatchiks of the previous regime.  If Obama’s team from Hillary Clinton to John Brennan to Robert Gates is any indication, it makes us painfully aware that revolutions cannot be built on the old guard dressed in new uniforms. The Obaman dream, ultimately, is without the foot soldiers who will make it their own and guard it like their lives. And where will we find the foot soldiers in a nation which sends one third of its African-American citizens to prisons, which has more shopping malls than school districts and hospitals, and which spends thirty hours a week watching television? Where will we find them in nation where the social bonds in all spheres-family, friendship, community and politics- are corroded so drastically that more and more Americans, as the scholar Robert Putnam put it, are bowling alone rather than in bowling leagues (15). It is this context of social alienation and depoliticization that the teeming queues at the polling day for this election inspired awe. But even those translated into a mere 63 per cent of the total electorate- in contrast to the 84.5 per cent voting turnout in the last elections of poor Bolivia.

The entire world which is waiting for a New New Deal from Obama does not realize that the Rooseveltian New Deal in the 1930s was the result of an unprecedented mobilization from below of labor. Now the labor movement in the United States is hardly existent. That is why even the mild retraction by Obama’s administration from the extreme right of the economic spectrum that America has inhabited from Reagan’s presidency has drawn such virulent opposition from the private health insurers, multinational corporations and real estate agents. This is despite the fact that almost all the revenues of the federal government under Obama’s budget will go to financing the bank bailout, the war and interest payments on public debt making the economist and activist Michel Chossudovsky terming it “the most drastic curtailment in public spending in American history” (16)

All this does not mean that we should not acknowledge the magical and mythical quality of the Obaman dream and the authenticity of emotions of millions of people when they saw a black man taking oath on the steps of the Capitol built by the slaves. For the black people who feel the unbearable pain of “all those lost hours of brutalizing toil and labor leading to spent, half-fulfilled lives, all those humiliations that..[their] ancestors had to suffer through each and every day, all those slights and rebuffs and recriminations, all those rapes and murders, lynchings and assassinations, all those Jim Crow laws and protest marches, those snarling dogs and bone-breaking water hoses, all of those beatings and all of those killings, all of those black collective dreams deferred” (17),  the moment is undescribable.Nor should we fail to recognize the horizon of aspirations unleashed by it-the allure of the dream of equality and justice which makes people in distant Kenya to stay up at night waiting for the day of reckoning and in Brazil to change their names to Barack Obama. After all, dreams and utopias act as a critique of the imperfect present, driving us towards bettering ourselves. They are what make Maya Angelou, the legendary African-American poet write: “Out of the huts of history’s shame/I rise/Up from a past that’s rooted in pain/I rise…/I am the dream and the hope of the slave./I rise/I rise/ I rise” (18) But even as we build dreams and dream them, we have to suspect them too, relentlessly challenge them to dream bigger dreams. Ultimately, it is a sacrilege to believe that Obama is a culmination of Martin Luther King’s dream.

On September 11, 1973, the democratically-elected Salvador Allende government of Chile was overthrown by a US-backed military coup. It would put in power the barbaric regime of General Augusto Pinochet for the next seventeen years and inaugurate the neoliberal regime in Latin America. Shortly afterwards, Victor Jara, theatre director, poet and singer was arrested, tortured and put to death by General Pinochet’s army-for speaking the truth; for singing about peace, love and social justice. In that month of September, there ended one dream, of Latin America and of the world. As Latin America dreams again, let us hope that the celebrity ‘sellers of dreams’ of the entertainment industry who descended on Washington, DC to sing paeans to the Obaman dream will one day speak the truth about grander dreams and the promised land.

Notes

1]  Martin Luther King, Jr. quoted in Howard Zinn, The Power of Nonviolence: Writings by Advocates of Peace, Beacon Press, 2002, p. 122.

[2]  Martin Luther King, Jr.,  “A Time to Break the Silence,” Speech to the Riverside Church, New York City, April 4, 1967, Information Clearing House, http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2564.htm

[3] “Most Blacks Say MLK’s Vision Fulfilled, Poll Finds,” January 19, 2009, http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/01/19/king.poll/

[4] King, “A Time to Break Silence.”

[5] Susan Strange, Casino Capitalism, Basil Blackwell, 1986.

[6] Paul Krugman, “The Great Dither,” New York Times, March 6, 2009.

[7] King, “A Time to Break the Silence.”

[8] King, “A Time to Break the Silence.”

[9] King, “A Time to Break the Silence.”

[10] King, “A Time to Break the Silence.”

[11] Street, “‘Obamanots’: People Who Care What David Brooks Thinks,” Znet, March 11, 2009, http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/20842#11351

[12] King, “A Time to Break the Silence.”

[13] Street, “‘Obamanots’.”

[14] King, “A Time to Break the Silence.”

[15] Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Simon & Schuster, 2002.

[16] Michel Chossudovsky “America’s Fiscal Collapse,” Global Research, March 2, 2009, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12517

[17]  Henry Louis Gates Jr, “In Our Lifetime,” The Root, November 4, 2008, http://www.theroot.com/views/our-lifetime

[18]  Maya Angelou, “Still I Rise,” American Poems, http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/Maya_Angelou/1347

(The writer is an Assistant Professor in International Development Studies at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada.)