By Rabbi Ben Kamin
ENCINITAS, California — In director Steve McQueen’s haunting movie, “12 Years A Slave,” the kidnapped black protagonist, during one long grueling and painfully allegorical segment, is shown hanging from a tree with a noose choking his neck and one foot desperately tapping the muddy ground for balance and life. The spiritual and political equivalent of this is now being endured by the first black man ever (twice) elected as President of the United States.
While physical threats to him are significant and quietly managed by secret forces loyal to an old oath, the mounting, corrosive assault on the status and legacy of President Obama can no longer be rationalized as anything but a prejudicial pasting unparalleled in American history.
Presidential policies and decisions have been brutalized before—no illusions here. But few people disagree that the mood—and mindless stalemate—in Washington, and the uncivil war between Red and Blue provinces in this nation are unprecedented and not without an underlying racial component.
A disastrous computer glitch has sent Obama haters into cyber heaven and into an extraterrestrial festival that has further separated them from the basic human disaster that pervades in this country: people have unequal access to reasonable and affordable health care.
Put another way, rich people (most of whom who have worked hard to make their money) simply get superior medical services even while paying a grossly disproportionate share of the general tax burden. Any other interpretation of this travesty generally winds up in wildly heated diatribes about Obama “turning us into a socialist state.”
The two presidents who actually “socialized” this nation (meaning, they attempted, at least on paper, to make work, food, and education accessible for most folks) were Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson, with, respectively, “The New Deal” and “The War on Poverty.” Unlike President Obama, both men had documented personal lives of marital infidelity and both were reviled (FDR less so) for their war policies. The New Deal degenerated into a vanished middle class under Reagan and both Bushes; the War on Poverty was a debacle more resounding than Vietnam.
FDR maintained a segregated military with which to defeat the Axis and prevented A. Philip Randolph, the great civil rights icon, from mounting a march on Washington for human rights. LBJ signed landmark civil rights legislation (now emasculated by our government) but privately declared, “I’m going to try to teach those niggers, that don’t know anything, how to work for themselves instead of just breeding…”
Unlike the martyred (and brilliant) President Kennedy and the impeached (and smooth) President Clinton, President Obama is wildly in love with his wife, and unlike the Clinton crew, has never been remotely associated with a financial scandal. Obama neither likes nor traffics in gossip; people criticize him for disdaining small talk! We mocked George W. Bush for small syntax but his opposition in Congress didn’t mobilize all of its energy and resources to absolutely and categorically “make him a one-term president.”
I’m embarrassed that many American Jews have joined the conservative pundits in a feeding frenzy over the president that is seriously threatening his legacy. No Caucasian chief executive would have ever endured the hounding of a Congress and the excoriation of the press that this good and thoughtful man is suffering. He’s not always right on foreign affairs but nobody was more wrong than JFK when it came to Cuba.
The Christian Right, when not spewing homophobic bile, co-opts scriptural melodrama in the name of vilifying Obama for “abandoning Israel.” Too many Jews basically assert that his heart is actually a crescent (value judgment there, not here). You see “Impeach Obama” booths in San Diego malls and learn about “Kill Obama” posters in Nashville.
The problem, tragically, that unlike Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton, and Bush, Barack Obama, unscathed by any personal ethical implications, overwhelmingly elected twice to national office, is not just the president. He is the black president. And he is being left to hang in a spiritual noose that will ultimately choke the American dream.
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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer and author based in Encinitas, California. He may be contacted via ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com