The tribes of fly over country
In his recent book, former White House aide Ben Rhodes described President Barack Obama’s shock at the outcome of the election of 2016. Obama mused, “Maybe people just wanted to fall back into their tribe. . . . Sometimes, I wonder whether I was 10 or 20 years too early.”
The conservative media pounced. “Smug, condescending” charged Matthew Continetti of Free Beacon.com. “Too early for what?” The Week magazine accorded Continetti’s column accolades as one of the Best for the issue of June 15, listing it in the table of contents under, “Obama’s smug belief that he was ahead of his time.” Talk about “balance.”
Obama did not say it and probably did not mean it, but I do. Yes, here it is — the race card. Millions of Americans were not and are not ready for a black man as president and, maybe, won’t be even in 10 or 20 years. One need only cite the persistence of the “birther” myth that is to say the “lie” knowingly promoted by Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell’s pledge to block Obama at every turn. Gee! Why didn’t Obama just invite the senator over for coffee?
What I believe Obama did mean was his commitment to the pursuit of peace by diplomacy; by fostering alliances based upon common interest, principles, and trust; by reaching international agreements; and by the soft power of promoting human rights and democracy.
Ironically, the Iran Treaty, recently broken unilaterally by Trump, had instituted a strict system of inspection while to date Trump has given North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong Un international respectability, ignored his violation of human rights, suspended joint military exercises with South Korea, caught our allies South Korea and Japan off guard, alienated other members of the G-7, and gained nothing from Kim. This is how Trump makes a deal? America first means America alone. We’ll see how that works.
Meanwhile, the real problems that beset “the tribes of fly over country” being automation, climate change, adapting to shifting demographics, grossly unequal distribution of wealth and income, the loss of democracy (one person — one vote) to plutocracy (offices and influence to the highest bidder in dollars) continue and intensify. Denial, a wall, further deregulation and concentration of corporate power, tax cuts for the wealthy, re-opening of coal mines, tariff wars, and disenfranchisement to meet a false claim of voter fraud, won’t solve them.
Yes, there is a problem of liberal/progressive arrogance, and I challenge my fellow liberals/ progressives to knock it off. President Obama by the way is a man of great empathy, a man beloved by many, a man who with his wife and children stand as a portrait of family values.
A last word. Many of those who claim to feel the scorn of others may need to look inward to the sources of their own feelings of inferiority.