Djelloul Marbrook

Barack Obama is a thoughtful, serious, palliative sort of man who is being smeared into a corner by people addicted to the politics of anger and bitterness.

A man of humble origins, a community activist, he is said by a significant sector of the bought-and-paid-for-press to be an elitist unable to connect with ordinary citizens. What an irony, to have a press that is profoundly disconnected from the plight of the working classes, a press in the pockets of its internationalist bosses, smearing a candidate with its own worst failings.

And when the press isn’t disguisedly smearing him while feigning objectivity, the drooling dogs of the Internet are painting him as a Muslim terrorist. Most of them claim to adhere to a religion of love and compassion. God only knows what they would do if they weren’t pretending to be Christians.

All of us have encountered people so perverse they cannot under any circumstances be persuaded to change their minds, to examine their prejudices. Sometimes we even marry them or are born to them. These are the people the press now celebrates for not being flip-floppers. And this is in a country whose religions call for forgiveness and repentance. Repentance, you may recall, means turning around, flip-flopping.

The press has invented the flip-flop issue because it is so much easier to “report” than the relationship between profit taking and quality of life for most citizens, for example—so much easier to yak about than to examine whether our thirty-year experiment with trickle-down economics is working for most of us. We know it works for the very rich.

A serious election has been hijacked by trivialists and taken to the Land of Yak where a man who tries to think before he opens his mouth, a man who has pulled himself up by the bootstraps by dint of his excellent mind is tarred as an egghead and snob, while a man whose career was greatly helped by his illustrious forebears and a rich father-in-law is celebrated as a straight talker.

Perhaps the race card that President Bill Clinton, a man who owes a very great deal to African-American voters, played in South Carolina and that Senator Hillary Clinton played in western Pennsylvania will at the end of the day trump Senator Obama. Not so very long ago we elected a Roman Catholic to high office, but perhaps we are not ready to elect a man or woman of color. That would be to our discredit, to ourselves and the world.

But one of our great parties has nominated a person of color, and now we are hobbled by a corrupt election process and a press in the service of Daddy Warbucks. When we talk about reforming the way we vote in the future we ought to talk about what we can do to secure a more honest and responsive press, and that would mean more media in the hands of local and regional ownership, more diversity. It will be as hard, if not harder, as reforming Wall Street or election campaigns, but it is probably even more important. And it would go a long way towards preventing liars from hornswoggling us into voting against ourselves.

As for the nitwit and dangerous flip-flop issue which the press has cooked up to distract us from its refusal to get serious about reportage, examine all the great military campaigns and you will see, from Alexander the Great to Julius Caesar to the great generals and admirals of World War II, an ability to change course and adjust to new circumstances and new intelligence. How does that work for our media trivialists? We know that entertaining us to death works pretty well for their bosses. —DM