I begin this blog on Barack Obama’s Inauguration Day. Many of us have waited for this moment, the way children count down the days to Christmas.
Now that it’s finally arrived, let’s enjoy it. It may be the high point of Obama’s Presidency.
Barack Obama is arguably one of the most gifted men ever elected to office in this country, but he can’t succeed. Things have gone too far.
He doesn’t believe this, of course. He tells us we can make “a clean break from the past.”
If only. If only we could chip off the past and float it out to sea the way Greenland calves an iceberg.
But Obama has a plan. He’s going to alter our thoughts. And thoughts, we are told, create reality.
That’s what he means by “change we can believe in.” The change will occur, it is hoped, because we believe in it. It will be revolution by tautology.
This is the message of The Secret and Jiminy Cricket. Don’t empower the recession with negative thoughts, sings Jiminy, and soon your home will be a gold mine once again and your job will return from its long, long visit to another continent.
If belief is all it takes, seismographs will soon chart mountains moving. A USA Today/Gallup poll released last week says a majority of Americans are convinced Obama will be able to make good on all ten of his major campaign promises mentioned in the survey. You can’t ask for more belief than that.
Maybe what makes people think he can pull this off is that he’s so different from the failed President he’s replacing. With George Bush’s near-opposite in the White House, why wouldn’t history now make a U-turn?
But really, what changes could we hope for, even if our new President were not only a vast improvement over George Bush but a different species altogether?
Will the government find a way to re-inflate home prices so re-fi checks will cover our credit card bills again?
Will we conjure a substitute for eighty million barrels of oil a day? And when we do, will China be kind enough to buy some of it from us, correcting our ruinous trade deficit?
Will a bank on Mars or another distant, unknowing planet loan us five or ten trillion to put our infrastructure back in working order?
Will someone, somewhere suddenly see how to fix our health-care system and give us the solution? (And will we listen?)
Will the one million or two million teachers who don’t belong in the classroom realize they’re in the wrong place and enroll in the nearest truck-driving school?
Will AARP organize a voluntary die-off for the burgeoning population of retired people who will soon bankrupt the country?
Will we replace the current U.S. population with improved Americans who aren’t addicted to low prices, brand worship, physical inactivity, pharmaceutical problem-solving, religious certainty, wishful thinking, high-fructose corn syrup, and zero interest till 2011?
Will Obama make a speech or sign a bill that alters the thoughts of the enraged, unappeaseable millions who stockpile weapons they’re dying to use on us?
I’m sorry, but Obama’s change is change I can’t even begin to believe in.
Soon, no one else will believe in it either, because it isn’t going to happen. Then they’ll say he screwed up, not that he was doomed from the start. They’ll say he didn’t do enough of the right thing or he did too much of the wrong thing. (They were already saying it, before he even took office.)
But personally, I won’t blame him for anything but hubris. You can’t ask a man to do the impossible, even if he thinks he can.
If you want to blame someone, do what comes naturally and blame George Bush. His breathtaking blunders were so much noise distracting us from underlying system failures, like a captain on a sinking ship drawing attention away from the main emergency by going berserk.
Without Bush’s delusions dominating the conversation, maybe we’ll have a chance to reflect on our own. Maybe we’ll start to examine the thinking that P.J. O’Rourke scoffs at:
Go to the doctor when you’ve got cancer, and he’ll say, “Don’t worry. Everything will be fine. I’m going to treat your disease by going inside this small, curtained booth and putting an ‘X’ next to a very special name.”
Like sixty-three million others, I went into the small, curtained booth and marked an ‘X’ for the man who won, because I didn’t know what else to do. And yes, I’m glad he won. I think he’s a prince.
But I have to ask: If this very special man with the very special name doesn’t have a hope of curing what’s killing us, what is it that we’re really inaugurating today?
I for one am betting that today marks the beginning of the Age of Bitter Disappointment and Wholesale Finger-Pointing.
However, the hope I can believe in is that by giving up false hopes, some of us will wake up to reality, and that at least a few of us will come to our senses in time to make preparations for the hard times to come.
With that in mind, this blog will explore the possibility that our society is headed for the rocks, no matter who’s steering the ship. And it will ask: What can you and I do to protect ourselves and our loved ones when, in our 43rd President’s immortal words, this sucker goes down?
