7th International

HIPSTER FOR PRESIDENT - OR THE RETURN OF THE WHITE NEGRO

Ah, if Norman Mailer had lived to see himself twice a prophet with the appearance of the Millennial Hipster, Barack Obama. The White Negro was the title of Mailer’s original prophetic contribution to the era of the fifties in which he pontificated on the rise of the Hipster after WW II and so gave the name to a generation of 48 – in an effort to save it from the slur of the come lately “beatnik.”

Mailer was presciently quick to see the emergence of The Negro out of his (sic) invisibility into a vanguard role. Obama, for Mailer as for me, would have inspired him to speculate on the abrupt return of the White Negro himself.

There has been a lot of talk about generational identify which seems to follow a cycle of twenty years – 68,(The Counterculture, Hippie or mass media’s Boomer), 88 (Generation X, the Slackers) and now 08 (dubbed the Millennial Generation by eager pop sociologists. The Hipster arises from the prehistoric slime of 48 after the disappearance of the Jazz Age generation of 28. (08 had seen the generational anti-corporate revolt of the Populists, Socialists, Progressives).

The Hipster had appeared with Auschwitz and Hiroshima freshly minted for a Western Society turned seriously and catastrophically psychotic. A book “Rebel without a Cause” had made the psychopath an emblematic figure. Here was a creature whose infantile demand for instant gratification put him at odds with a supposedly moral society. But what happens when the society itself is insane and without a moral center?

Enter Mailer’s Hipster. Mailer posited the emergence of an ethical psychopath – doing right without social sanction, in fact against the grain of a demonic state. No one had come to this position earlier than The Negro who, as Mailer saw, had the edgy edge of participating in a totalitarian and democratic state – simultaneously. The meeting of The Negro with the Bohemian and the juvenile delinquent produced the Hipster. The wedding ring of this union, said Mailer, was marijuana. The orgasm was jazz but a new avant-garde Cool jazz.

It was a world divided between the creep, the hip and the square. It was a time for making it, man, for getting with it and for putting it down. It was crazy, man, but you had to dig it or flip.

The Hipster, like his prototype The Negro, had his back against an evil past and faced a future that the Negro had always face, as blank and merciless as a police station wall. Like his straight relative the conventional psychopath, the Hipster shares an immoderate, childlike adoration of the present. The affirmation of Hip, says Mailer, the self-described anarchist Marxists, is to remove every social restrain and category, confident he would at his root be more creative than murderous, having thrown off his deadly conditioning.

Obama, literally a White Negro, arrives up out of nowhere to take stage center in our consciousness, eloquently spilling out his politically hip-hop in an unexpected adulation of hope. Hope of course is all future tense but in Obama’s presentation, his hope synchronizes with the Hipster’s adoration of the present because Obama’s hope explicitly rejects and negates the past – “the same old same old.”

Not only is Obama the foremost figure of GenX, a generation famous for rejecting the commercial conditioning provided by the Republic’s Poets of Advertising. but he also is essentially a “second generation” Afro-American. With the Negro revolt of the Civil Rights era, the Negro became the Black, no longer cloaked in the Invisibility of the past. Black people became suddenly Immigrants from a continent no longer dark. The right to a hyphen allowed Obama’s generation to take a visible place with all the other hyphenated Americans.

The past is a hindrance to Immigrants and even more so to their 2^nd Generation children, “born free” to parents issuing from an irrelevant Old Country. Obama inherits thus a heritage that is not settled and privileged but an open opportunity, as it was for my own 2^nd generation parents. Opportunity can be a merciless goad and it can make you heedless. It must be seized or be cattle prodded into unconsciousness like your 2^nd generation parents. Their chances were always slim and shady, in an unequal competition called “free” by those who start off loaded down with privilege and comparatively big bucks. To win you must seek solutions outside the box and without the rules. As a GenX, “2^nd Generation Afro-American”, this is Obama’s promise when he calls on Hope. After all, the future for a good Hipster, isn’t out there, it is right here, a suppressed part of the Present.

But dare we confuse the Present with the Presidency? Yet where can we most use a master Hipster but in the most dangerous position on the globe. In “normal times” when the crackpot realists think they are being reasonable, you can take an ostensibly sane human being and put in the Oval Office and its aura creates a flaming Psychopath. That’s why the ruling crackpot reality of the mass media seizes up Madman McCain as the perfect President, the good ol’ Saxon Mother’s Son with his itchy finger on that warm trigger. He’s all buffed up and chanting Bomb Bomb Iran for his title match against the steroid pumped up Hilary Clinton, ready to obliterate Iran, and who can’t wait to be Queen of the Crackpot Realists.

Our White Negro is at least halfway to the job as a Psychopath, albeit an ethical one. Here’s where my infatuation begins - I am turned on by the idea of Obama succeeding to Camelot’s Siege Perilous, the seat at Arthur/JFK’s table, the one with the blood and bullet holes just waiting for a new Galahad.

Of course I’m an anarchist opportunist, not a Crackpot realist, so I will vote for Cynthia McKinney. If this were an actual Democracy and not a Plutocracy where money determines all official outcomes – except for the ones settled outside the Market through murder, assassination, war – Cynthia would be leading the pack. However, such a sudden break with the continuity of Bush/Clinton/Bush (logically it’s Bush/Clinton/Bush/Bush 3 or Bush/Clinton/Bush/Clinton) would inexorably provoke the Madmen (and women) who think they own America and everybody in it.

Yet Obama, facing almost certain death, has got the psychopath’s cool. He won’t trade his Present for a fearful future. A generation after the Boomers - like Hilary and the High Hippies - got old, and got sold, and now don’t have a ticket to ride, we’re looking at fresh forces – a GenX Icon leading a mass of Millennial. He’s offering his extraordinary talents to – us. Like the late assassinated Paul Wellstone, Obama prefers to view politics from the point of view of a community organizer where he started off – the same spot that Hilary, the darling of the doyen of community organizers, Saul Alinsky, turned her back on for corporate law. Like Wellstone, Obama was so good at organizing that he found himself courted by City Hall, the power establishment, the state house. Ultimately – like Wellstone – he found himself elected to that cemetery for stately bullshit artists and millionaires – the Senate. But give Obama credit, a second term was not his idea of a career. He went for the Presidency itself.

Now Friends don’t elect friends President, right? Not me. I wash my hands of sending anyone to the doom of that social role. If I didn’t have certain losers to vote for I’d have to invent them. This is what – unconsciously or not – happens within the Democratic Party leadership. The template for of all subsequent Presidential losers was set by Adlai Stevenson. The Democrats realized that they weren’t bad enough to supply a President for the modern Empire. They realized the impotence of their position – fearing and rejecting Peace while their opponents lustily advertised their love and need for war.

Democrats just aren’t scary enough to terrorize the world. Even a proto-neoliberal like JFJ with a father every bit as much a Nazi sympathizer as Prescott Bush was too much a liability. It took a revolution to give us a Carter who started off blabbing about zero nuclear weapons and exited with a First Strike policy, who began with Amnesty for draft refusers and ended reinstituting draft registration, whose heart throbbed for Hyman rights and finished himself off giving sanctuary to the Shah, who lured the Soviets into Afghanistan, then threw a hissy fit and canceled our participation in the Moscow Olympics.

As the Democrats prepare to shower Bush with money for the war into 2009 to take it off the election year table, some say that Obama will be the Black Kerry. But perhaps he’s not quite that bad and that he will be another Carter, just waiting to be taught his limitations as the requirements of the Presidency overwhelm him?

Who wants to be a Democratic President really.(The less said about the power and money corrupted Clintons the better. Bill was only allowed to seek the Presidency as a white hope to undermine the Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition. Clinton was underestimated and actually broke the loser mold). Originally, the Presidency was part of the corporate Constitutional coup which purposely wasted the egalitarian potential of the Declaration of Independence and hooked up a federal machine that was part Democracy (the House), part Oligarchy (the Senate) and part monarchy (the President). The last two, along with the Supreme Corps, were indirectly selected. Who needs a Council of Clerics to pick Supreme Cleric, the Supreme Corps can do the job. There is a terror that the Democrats might actually get a shot at the office again.

Not a chance. All around me there is agreement – the white chauvinist self-righteous Anglo males will not allow a black man, let alone an Afro-American – to assume the pinnacle of power. That’s what God gave them guns for. Obama freaked them when he saw them cloaked in their guns and perverted religion – bitter failures who feel their country slip slip slipping away. Obama is suggesting that more people are saying “GODDAMN AMERICA”! along with the old pastor of Obama’s Chicago Church in lieu of a blessing.

Obama put his finger on a constituency which is bitter at having failed to meet their own and societies expectations. They can only dimly remember the days when their kind rules – before the niggers and the hippies and the bitches and the fags and the tree huggers began those incessant demands that were only too often met by a change of mores and law. These desperate chauvinists see the Country slip slip slipping away. Their religious leadership meanwhile doesn’t merely “Goddamn America!”, it says that God HAS damned America. And none too soon since people mostly won’t listen to spiritual unreason anymore – despite the fatwas of Limberger and O’Rilee, - and aren’t willing to do what their told. The control of the government has become crucial so that lucrative crimes like the Iraq can be cooked and rammed down people’s throats. It is not America, but the fraudulent Constitutional United States which is worthy of a preacher’s damn. The passion of the Preacher’s curse may be pumped up a bit as the result of a lot of forehead slapping whenever Rev. Wright recalls the something like 6 years of service he spent in service to the Empire in the marines. Add irony when you compare his service to everybody else’s Nothing, or Worse than Nothing in the case of Napalm McCain and his PTSD presidential campaign. Bomb bomb bomb Vietnam.

The GOP is supposedly touting Hillary because she can be beaten by the McManiacs but really she is a security blanket back-up. She’s not all that far from their God’s favor having availed herself of the services of Reverend James Dobson. They are old friends from the days when Hillary used his advice to handle childish behavior in her family circle – Bill’s not Chelsea’s. She’s a Global Zionist Lieberman Liberal in good standing. She will obliterate Iran on command and protect Free Trade in Columbia (Plan Columbia was her hubby’s brainstorm!) She will keep piling up the hundreds of millions of dollars in the crooked style she developed in Bill’s first gubernatorial term with Blair and Vince Foster. Gender is no problem here either. The Republican’s know that Hillary has more balls than Bill ever had and maybe more than McCant.

Now I really can’t go along with the Reverend. I’m too busy struggling with my own anger and the built in PTSD that comes with Being A Man in America. I want to bless more and curse less and I’m way behind with a lifelong profession of nonviolence. Nonviolence has to be sought with the passion of an amateur motivated – ama,amas,amat – by loving rather than the psuedocool detachment of a professor. Not profession – emersion.

But I empathize. I see chauvinists constantly coming out the other side of hate, sharing their shame for their practice – the profession of arms. I see now that though their responsibility is clear, it is still not their fault. They, like us, are undermined by National continuity – the same old same old taught from the days of stone age caves. What’s needed is a Sudden Break. That’s where I seize upon Obama as he eloquently raises expectations, something no Democrat has done since the New Deal sputtered out and Lieberman Liberalism became the norm.

We need a sudden break here with out past – a turning away, a Great Conversion turning toward a new lifestyle – sustainable, peaceful and just. Can we expect this from Obama, even should he survive? This is where I see his persona as a Millennial Hipster kicking in. I may deluded. I remember the contempt I felt for a colleague who became besodden with empathy for Mike Thompson while we were holding the Congressman’s feet to the fire. Granted you could go groupie for one of these officials but to them you were just a face in the crowd, one millionth of a fan base. Such infatuation has never happened to me in my adult life. And then along came Obama, eloquent, gracefully self assured and with an entrancing style of active listening. I am suddenly a part of a little clique of radicals and leftists who shamefacedly share our passion.

It is not all a stirring in the bowels. There is a rationale. We are rapidly catching up with our future. A lot of 3 am phone calls with people making animal sounds on the other end. We need an ethical psychopath with no lifelong commitment to a mad society. Awhile back Michele Obama was quoted to the effect that finally in her adult life she could be proud of being an American. As if the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush years could make any sane person proud to be an American, because this is the United States inhabited by our great Manchurian Candidate, John McCondon, or that of our Water boarding connoisseur, Nazi Pelosi, or of those 6 percent Richocrats who make over $100,000. These are the essence of the Court - the United States – about which there is little to be proud. The rest of us are America the country of two continents,without borders, presently melting down. Paul Encimer