Dear Good Concerned Engaged Enlightened Rule-of-Law Liberal Progressives: Is it clear enough for you now? Does he have to spell it out for you, slowly, using short and simple words, and maybe some cartoons to make it clear? Your noble Nobel Peace Laureate – bringer of hope and change, restorer of the rule of law, world-historical paradigm-shifter, etc., etc. – has just publicly (not to mention arbitrarily) committed the nation to “the supreme international crime”: aggressive war.

He has pledged the blood and treasure of the United States to "regime change" in Libya: that is to say, an act of military aggression designed to overthrow the government of a sovereign nation which has not attacked your own country nor posed the slightest threat to it. This is, of course, precisely the same blatantly illegal posture taken by that great monstrous bogey-man of all good concerned engaged enlightened rule-of-law liberal progressives everywhere, George W. Bush, in his invasion of Iraq.

On Friday, Barack Obama scribbled his name at the bottom of a newspaper article written by hired minions of the leaders of Britain and France, pledging to keep killing people in Libya until Moamar Gadafy is driven from power. Nothing short of "regime change" will satisfy these towering colossi of world statesmanship; as the Guardian reports, they utterly reject any calls "for an immediate ceasefire, or a negotiated exit for the Libyan dictator."

Peace? Pah! No, it will be war, war, and more war until these leaders of the great Western democracies get the outcome they demand: the ouster of their clapped-out former client-tyrant, and his replacement by what they hope will be more amenable operators. Or is that too cynical? Surely what these Three Amigos of the Apocalypse are seeking is nothing less -- and nothing other -- than the "freedom of the Libyan people," right?

You know, the kind of freedom where your leader can take your country into an open-ended campaign of military action without the consent of the people or the people's representatives -- and then escalate the conflict far beyond the mandate of an already rubbery UN resolution into outright, undeniable aggressive war, through the oh-so-constitutional method of ... an op-ed piece in the Washington Post.

That's real freedom, baby! Can't you feel it in the air? Can't you feel it all over your body -- like a rash?

Now, you might think that such a brazen act of criminality would raise one or two hackles somewhere out there in God's shining city on the hill. (That is, you might think that -- if you'd been in a deep, dark cave the last ten years and hadn't seen the veritable tsunami of atrocity, deceit and lawlessness that the American people have swallowed without complaint.) In any case, across the length and breadth of freedom's land, scarcely a bit of notice has been paid to this open commitment to a policy that was unequivocally condemned as a "supreme" evil back in the Nuremberg Trials. It seems that nobody bats an eye anymore when an American president adopts Hitler's policies.

No, instead of offering blastments of moral outrage at yet another president launching yet another illegal regime change operation in yet another Muslim country, our Good Concerned Engaged Progressives have nothing to say. They are still too wiggly about Obama's meaningless expectoration of blather on the "budget battle" -- that ludicrous puppet-show where two factions of hirelings strut and bellow over the few infinitesimal differences in their techniques of corporate whoredom. This is what seems to be the most pressing matter of the day to the Good and Engaged -- because of course it may have some bearing on what is their Tillichian "ultimate concern": the re-election of a man who is now embarked on his first wholly-owned war of aggression. That's right, the Peace Laureate is no longer simply following (and extending) the Terror Wars of his predecessor -- he's done gone and started one of his very own! Reason enough to fight tooth and nail to get him another term; after all, you don't want one of those militarist Republicans in there, do you?

(Of course, we don't mean to imply that the Laureate's new war of aggression is some kind of radical departure. Heaven forefend! An arch-conservative like Obama would ever do anything that was not deeply rooted in American tradition. His killing spree in Libya is an echo -- perhaps even an homage -- to similar actions undertaken by one of the presidents that he most admires: Ronald Reagan.)

The Three Amigos' joint declaration of aggressive war notes ominously that Gadafy is so evil that "the international criminal court is rightly investigating [his] crimes committed against civilians and the grievous violations of international law." This would, of course, be the same international criminal court that the Peace Laureate's own government refuses to recognize -- for fear that its own leaders and minions might rightly end up in its dock for "crimes committed against civilians and grievous violations of international law." Such as, oh, say, waging an aggressive war of regime change that blatantly violates your UN mandate.

But of course, that "mandate" was, as usual, just a threadbare fig leaf to mask the hardcore machinations of power politics -- which these days consists largely of soft, weedy cowards finding ways to prove how tough and "credible" they are by shedding other people's blood. Thus you will not be surprised to learn that the Amigos' diplomatic minions are now feverishly "considering how the language of the United Nations mandate can accommodate a more active role on the ground."

So this is where we've come to: from earnest, knitted-brow assurances of a "limited intervention" to outright declarations of open-ended war for regime change -- and "accommodations" to bring in more boots, bullets and bombs "on the ground." This is a crime, "the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole," and it's being committed, openly, proudly, by the Democrat in the White House.

But precisely because this "accumulated evil" is being committed by a Democrat in the White House, the "progressive" movement is silent. They don't care. Aggressive war? They don't care. International law? They don't care. A blanket refusal of ceasefires and peace plans that could spare countless civilian lives? They don't care. An "active role on the ground" -- new mounds of Iraq-style "collateral damage," corpses, chaos, breakdown, extremism, brutality, suffering? They don't care.

I’m in Atlanta, Georgia, at present, among the scent of pine trees and the reek of southern denial. The moribund economy has thwarted the city’s manic drive to silence its resentful ghosts by means of constant motion … Below the lilting southern accents here, one detects rage … Not simply the ubiquitous hate-speak on right-wing talk radio. But an animus bred by truth-deferred … that southern pride is a lie of the mind — a blown banner … foisted skyward to distract the minds of my fellow southerners from the ground level truths of a system rigged to enrich the privileged few and keep the many working for their benefit. (How do you think they filled the ranks of the Confederate Army to kill and die for the rights of rich men to own slaves.)

I arrived in Georgia by route of the US interstate system.

Traveling US interstate highways one suffers a confluence of so much contemporary madness and tragedy extant in the land … so much suppressed fear and aggression. Yet, through it all, the heart still yearns to see what lies over the next horizon. Although, lamentably, what is revealed, all to often, proves to be as sterile, inhospitable, ugly, and inhuman as what was beheld at the last.

"Who has twisted us around like this, so that no matter what we do, we are in the posture of someone going away?" ~~~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Any situation, as is the case with interstate highway travel, in which to momentarily stop or even to slow down, one risks death should be regarded as an affront (if not anathema) to common sense and the longings of the heart. When the landscape we pass through has been reduced to a meaningless blur, our lives grow indistinct as well.

The apologists of the present system tell us ad nauseam, and have convinced most, that a similar disastrous fate will befall the nation if the engines of global capitalism were to slow down even a bit. Interstate travel is emblematic of the manner a system based on ceaseless production and manic consumption degrades the senses and inflicts a dehumanizing assault upon the psyche.

When stopped at an anonymous interstate service island or some off-the-exit-ramp retail strip — those inhospitable nether regions evincing a paradoxical mix of sterility and toxicity — the permeating odor of exhaust fumes and processed food makes us woozy. These places, only distinct for their ugliness, reek of how soul-numbing and joyless travel has become . . . now a task nearly devoid of any sense of the mystery, the option of exploration, or the possibility of serendipity travel once offered.

Travel has been reduced to a tedious ordeal, whereby our inchoate longings to escape the quotidian prison of our economically circumscribed existence are mangled and suppressed, only to rise as the hollow appetite of reflexive consumerism and the ineffable sense of unease, so evident in the troubled American psyche.

Enclosed in our vehicles, we hurdle from one sterile, impersonal location to the next sterile, impersonal location, and then on to the next. As forbiddingly huge trucks, loaded with the cargo of extinction, bear down on us, we grip the steering wheel -- we know to stop is to risk death therefore we continue onward, believing we must drive and consume and drive and consume in order to survive. Yet the knowledge nettles, just below the surface of our harried minds, that to continue down this road will, in turn, cause the world to die.

Even the landscape itself of the US is stretched to the breaking point: Cluttered upon it are gigantic islands of garish light that torment the night …scouring away the stars. As, all the while, SUVs and oversized pickup trucks -- the overgrown clown cars of the demented circus of decaying empire trundle past -- the extravagant size of the vehicles vainly compensating for how diminished and powerless those within feel in relationship to the course of their fates.

The corporate empire is imprinted in us. If one listens one can hear arias of decay -- a death-swoon operatic in scale. Manifested before us, it is as visible as the noxious vapors of pollutants veiling the horizon line at sunset; it shimmers like heat spires above traffic-stalled interstates; it reeks like the endless archipelagos of overflowing landfills spanning the length of the land. Yet, as mortifying as it is, the vales and vistas of the US spread before us … are as horrible and beautiful as a great cry of grief.

Manifested en mass, as our collective way of existing in the world -- the flickering of our tiny desires have set the vast world aflame … There is needless suffering and death that history will affix to own names … We are destroying our planet and her exquisite, irreplaceable creatures, as well as, our own sanity.

Feeling the full implications of this, how does one make it through the day and sleep throughout the night?

Following their defeat at the Battle of Shiloh, the shattered Confederate ranks fled for their lives. General A.S. Johnston, desperate to restore order and rally his men to return to battle, commanded a fleeing soldier to stop, demanding, "Private, why are you running?" The soldier replied, "General, I'm running 'cause I can't fly."

The act of being in perpetual flight (even the somnambulant variety) from consequences requires a great amount of energy; one must have the endurance of a marathoner sleepwalker to keep ahead of the sound of the fast approaching footfalls of reality at one's rear.

Depression is what catches us.

I have been accused being a poet … I know I am a wanderer through the landscape of the heart. I navigate by narrative, by words and feelings: It occurs to me: the term depression is a misnomer for feelings of despair brought on by powerlessness i.e., disconsolation over the death of an internal verity -- or having our will thwarted by inexorable, outer forces. Grief is a living prayer of our vulnerable hearts.

The salesmen of the eternal, big happy ... are just that -- salesmen ... One is required to respond to the intoxication of the sales pitch and is not to question the condition of their heart ... The commercial come-ons insist that the heart's grief and a lost soul's emptiness and panic can be fixed by some new bright and shiny: a new appliance, therapy, "hope and change". By the incessant promotion of the gospels of the hyper-capitalist sects of Happiness Uber Alles, the implicit message imparted is … suffering is a character flaw that can be mitigated, elevated -- even redeemed by consumerism, antidepressants, acquiring a positive attitude -- all the uttered homilies and donned vestments of the consumer state.

"The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering." ~~~ Carl Jung.

What kind of miserable malcontent would resist changing this social milieu and personal mode of being: Sitting stuck in commuter traffic; eating high fat, low quality food from a drive-thru window; languishing in a cubical … stranded in a low benefits, little chance of advancement job -- until, of course, the job is outsourced; waddling around the mall ... clad in off-the-rack, sweatshop sown clothing; dozing off in front of the TEEVEE with Cheetos crumbs stippled in the folds of one's jowls. Aint that the life -- or what? By any means possible, we preserve the death-styles of empire.

This mode of being is far removed from the norms of nature and the revelries and attendant sublimations necessary to engage in civic life ... Here, ruthlessness and rationalization banish reason; ambition trumps merit; expediency pushes aside wisdom; and empty sensation masquerades as experience.

Like interstate travel, the collective mind of the consumer state propels us forward to the next empty agenda, the next perfunctory task, the next meaningless purchase … But depression slows us down, inducing us to feel the grief inherent in our alienation … to cease the incessant, habitual hurdling forward and striving upward … to stop and investigate the mysteries of our hearts … to feel the sadness of the suffering earth …

"I can't go on. I'll go on." ~~~ Samuel Beckett

But we must slow down: We are destroying our planet and her exquisite, irreplaceable creatures, as well as our own sanity.

Two weeks before the Deepwater Horizon, Macondo Well "spill" (what a dishonest word for that noxious, bleeding gash) into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, I dreamed of a badly injured fish who had had half his face torn off by some brutal method employed by the practitioners of industrial scale fishing operations to exploit the world's oceans … The fish had worked himself upon a rock on a craggy shoreline; holding an eternity of suffering in his one remaining eye, the fish turned to face me … Ever since, this dream image has lived within me ... I carry the fish's suffering and I bear his dark rage regarding what our species has done to his/our home -- this complex, mysterious, beguiling, dangerous, sublime, monstrous, and magnificent world we were cast into ... My sense of sorrow, at times, seems unbearable; my rage … bottomless ... Who will speak for the voiceless -- who will make amends for their suffering?

In childhood, I loved this body of water … loved it as one can love any living thing (which it is). I swam in it, collected jewel-like shells on its beaches of bleached sand, and went deep sea fishing with my father in its azure waters … Wherein, I was in awe of its (seemingly endless) bounty and abundance. Its winds and waves intimated to me the nature of eternity and the Gulf's living things drew me into the beauty and terrors of the living moment.

Approximately, ninety percent of the large fish (Tuna, Mackerel) in the world's oceans are gone due to overfishing. Oceanographers predict in 50 years time the oceans and seas the earth over will be dead. (And these are conservative estimates.)

Much like the denizens of late Cretaceous looking dumbly at the sky and barely giving a second thought to that bright, shining thingy that appeared above, this is a calamity so large in scale and so all-encompassing in its implications that we human beings just can't wrap our minds around it … In fact, by our elevation of willful ignorance and mindless consumerism to a cultural imperative, we human beings, acting collectively, are the equivalent the planet-decimating Cretaceous comet.

I try to resist losing myself to misanthropic rage when I read statistics such as this one. Yet I am enraged at the waste -- the sheer stupidity, mendacity, and hubris of it all. I want to grab the human race by the lapels and shout, "Stop it. God damn it. Just stop it. How could you destroy something so beautiful and then just continue to go through your sub-cretinous day? What the hell is wrong with you? Didn't anyone ever teach you the meaning of decency?

This is not a political debate. This is a choice between sanity and mass suffering; perhaps, even the survival of our species and a mass die off.

But listening to the pronouncements of Washington's political class and the mainstream media's ceaselessly shallow, miss-the-point narratives is like eavesdropping on the palaver from a petri dish.

Excuse my sense of fatalism: At this point, the system is too far-gone to be redeemed; it is in the process of systemic breakdown. Although, this is not as awful as it sounds, for one must let the old go and let a natural process of decay take over. When the rot is this advanced, at best, what you have is culture as a compost heap. Yet that doesn't mean in times of decay, there cannot be meaning and beauty, because life itself becomes vivid and alive in contrast to the extant ugliness.

Without decay, there is no change. The world would be as pointless as paradise. If you wish to find the future forest, look to the humus upon its floor. The future is decay; and decay is the future. The old ego must sing, even within the compost heap of its own putrefied concepts.

And, as it does, it must sing of its suffering and the sorrows of the earth … singing like the severed head of Orpheus floating to Lesbos.

Arias of compost sing of new understandings but you cannot skip the singing school of grief.

Frank O’Hara suggests:

“In times of crisis we must all decide again and again whom we love.”

Things are going to work out -- but not in ways we can predict.

There is a mournful beauty, even a providential utility, attendant to living through at time of putrefaction: Compost (the anti-Astroturf) nourishes fledgling life and novel forms. A new paradigm will morph from the remnants of the old, putrefied system.

If Confederate ghosts could shout through the prison of their enshrinement — they would call out to us, “Don’t believe it. Having seen the meaningless waste of war, we know now that we would have chosen to live out our lives, breathing in the humid, Georgia air, having our troubles softened by the sight of dappled light filtered through pine needles, and being lulled to sleep at night by the song of crickets and cicada.

Last week, President Obama offered a spirited defense of his party’s values — in effect, of the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society. Immediately thereafter, as always happens when Democrats take a stand, the civility police came out in force. The president, we were told, was being too partisan; he needs to treat his opponents with respect; he should have lunch with them, and work out a consensus.

That’s a bad idea. Equally important, it’s an undemocratic idea.

Let’s review the story so far.

Two weeks ago, House Republicans released their big budget proposal, selling it to credulous pundits as a statement of necessity, not ideology — a document telling America What Must Be Done.

But it was, in fact, a deeply partisan document, which you might have guessed from the opening sentence: “Where the president has failed, House Republicans will lead.” It hyped the danger of deficits, yet even on its own (not at all credible) accounting, spending cuts were used mainly to pay for tax cuts rather than deficit reduction. The transparent and obvious goal was to use deficit fears to impose a vision of small government and low taxes, especially on the wealthy.

So the House budget proposal revealed a yawning gap between the two parties’ priorities. And it revealed a deep difference in views about how the world works.

When the proposal was released, it was praised as a “wonk-approved” plan that had been run by the experts. But the “experts” in question, it turned out, were at the Heritage Foundation, and few people outside the hard right found their conclusions credible. In the words of the consulting firm Macroeconomic Advisers — which makes its living telling businesses what they need to know, not telling politicians what they want to hear — the Heritage analysis was “both flawed and contrived.” Basically, Heritage went all in on the much-refuted claim that cutting taxes on the wealthy produces miraculous economic results, including a surge in revenue that actually reduces the deficit.

By the way, Heritage is always like this. Whenever there’s something the G.O.P. doesn’t like — say, environmental protection — Heritage can be counted on to produce a report, based on no economic model anyone else recognizes, claiming that this policy would cause huge job losses. Correspondingly, whenever there’s something Republicans want, like tax cuts for the wealthy or for corporations, Heritage can be counted on to claim that this policy would yield immense economic benefits.

The point is that the two parties don’t just live in different moral universes, they also live in different intellectual universes, with Republicans in particular having a stable of supposed experts who reliably endorse whatever they propose.

So when pundits call on the parties to sit down together and talk, the obvious question is, what are they supposed to talk about? Where’s the common ground?

Eventually, of course, America must choose between these differing visions. And we have a way of doing that. It’s called democracy.

Now, Republicans claim that last year’s midterms gave them a mandate for the vision embodied in their budget. But last year the G.O.P. ran against what it called the “massive Medicare cuts” contained in the health reform law. How, then, can the election have provided a mandate for a plan that not only would preserve all of those cuts, but would go on, over time, to dismantle Medicare completely?

For what it’s worth, polls suggest that the public’s priorities are nothing like those embodied in the Republican budget. Large majorities support higher, not lower, taxes on the wealthy. Large majorities — including a majority of Republicans — also oppose major changes to Medicare. Of course, the poll that matters is the one on Election Day. But that’s all the more reason to make the 2012 election a clear choice between visions.

Which brings me to those calls for a bipartisan solution. Sorry to be cynical, but right now “bipartisan” is usually code for assembling some conservative Democrats and ultraconservative Republicans — all of them with close ties to the wealthy, and many who are wealthy themselves — and having them proclaim that low taxes on high incomes and drastic cuts in social insurance are the only possible solution.

This would be a corrupt, undemocratic way to make decisions about the shape of our society even if those involved really were wise men with a deep grasp of the issues. It’s much worse when many of those at the table are the sort of people who solicit and believe the kind of policy analyses that the Heritage Foundation supplies.

Editors Note: These are remarks Chris Hedges made in Union Square in New York City last Friday during a protest outside a branch office of the Bank of America.

We stand today before the gates of one of our temples of finance. It is a temple where greed and profit are the highest good, where self-worth is determined by the ability to amass wealth and power at the expense of others, where laws are manipulated, rewritten and broken, where the endless treadmill of consumption defines human progress, where fraud and crimes are the tools of business.

The two most destructive forces of human nature—greed and envy—drive the financiers, the bankers, the corporate mandarins and the leaders of our two major political parties, all of whom profit from this system. They place themselves at the center of creation. They disdain or ignore the cries of those below them. They take from us our rights, our dignity and thwart our capacity for resistance. They seek to make us prisoners in our own land. They view human beings and the natural world as mere commodities to exploit until exhaustion or collapse. Human suffering, wars, climate change, poverty, it is all the price of business. Nothing is sacred. The Lord of Profit is the Lord of Death.

The pharisees of high finance who can see us this morning from their cubicles and corner officers mock virtue. Life for them is solely about self-gain. The suffering of the poor is not their concern. The 6 million families thrown out of their homes are not their concern. The tens of millions of pensioners whose retirement savings were wiped out because of the fraud and dishonesty of Wall Street are not their concern. The failure to halt carbon emissions is not their concern. Justice is not their concern. Truth is not their concern. A hungry child is not their concern.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky in “Crime and Punishment” understood the radical evil behind the human yearning not to be ordinary but to be extraordinary, the desire that allows men and women to serve systems of self-glorification and naked greed. Raskolnikov in the novel believes—like those in this temple—that humankind can be divided into two groups. The first is composed of ordinary people. These ordinary people are meek and submissive. They do little more than reproduce other human beings in their own likeness, grow old and die. And Raskolnikov is dismissive of these lesser forms of human life.

The second group, he believes, is extraordinary. These are, according to Raskolnikov, the Napoleons of the world, those who flout law and custom, those who shred conventions and traditions to create a finer, more glorious future. Raskolnikov argues that, although we live in the world, we can free ourselves from the consequences of living with others, consequences that will not always be in our favor. The Raskolnikovs of the world place unbridled and total faith in the human intellect. They disdain the attributes of compassion, empathy, beauty, justice and truth. And this demented vision of human existence leads Raskolnikov to murder a pawnbroker and steal her money.

The priests in these corporate temples, in the name of profit, kill with even more ruthlessness, finesse and cunning than Raskolnikov. Corporations let 50,000 people die last year because they could not pay them for proper medical care. They have killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis, Palestinians and Pakistanis, and gleefully watched as the stock price of weapons contractors quadrupled. They have turned cancer into an epidemic in the coal fields of West Virginia where families breathe polluted air, drink poisoned water and watch the Appalachian Mountains blasted into a desolate wasteland while coal companies can make billions. And after looting the U.S. treasury these corporations demand, in the name of austerity, that we abolish food programs for children, heating assistance and medical care for our elderly, and good public education. They demand that we tolerate a permanent underclass that will leave one in six workers without jobs, that condemns tens of millions of Americans to poverty and tosses our mentally ill onto heating grates. Those without power, those whom these corporations deem to be ordinary, are cast aside like human refuse. It is what the god of the market demands.

When Dante enters the “city of woes” in the Inferno he hears the cries of “those whose lives earned neither honor nor bad fame,” those rejected by Heaven and Hell, those who dedicated their lives solely to the pursuit of happiness. These are all the “good” people, the ones who never made a fuss, who filled their lives with vain and empty pursuits, harmless perhaps, to amuse themselves, who never took a stand for anything, never risked anything, who went along. They never looked hard at their lives, never felt the need, never wanted to look.

Those who chase the glittering rainbows of the consumer society, who buy into the perverted ideology of consumer culture, become, as Dante knew, moral cowards. They are indoctrinated by our corporate systems of information and remain passive as our legislative, executive and judicial branches of government—tools of the corporate state—strip us of the capacity to resist. Democrat or Republican. Liberal or conservative. It makes no difference. Barack Obama serves corporate interests as assiduously as did George W. Bush. And to place our faith in any party or established institution as a mechanism for reform is to be entranced by the celluloid shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave.

We must defy the cant of consumer culture and recover the primacy in our lives of mercy and justice. And this requires courage, not just physical courage but the harder moral courage of listening to our conscience. If we are to save our country, and our planet, we must turn from exalting the self, to subsuming of the self for our neighbor. Self-sacrifice defies the sickness of corporate ideology. Self-sacrifice mocks opportunities for advancement, money and power. Self-sacrifice smashes the idols of greed and envy. Self-sacrifice demands that we rise up against the abuse, injury and injustice forced upon us by the mandarins of corporate power. There is a profound truth in the biblical admonition “He who loves his life will lose it.”

Life is not only about us. We can never have justice until our neighbor has justice. And we can never recover our freedom until we are willing to sacrifice our comfort for open rebellion. The president has failed us. The Congress has failed us. The courts have failed us. The press has failed us. The universities have failed us. Our process of electoral democracy has failed us. There are no structures or institutions left that have not been contaminated or destroyed by corporations. And this means it is up to us. Civil disobedience, which will entail hardship and suffering, which will be long and difficult, which at its core means self-sacrifice, is the only mechanism left.

The bankers and hedge fund managers, the corporate and governmental elites, are the modern version of the misguided Israelites who prostrated themselves before the golden calf. The sparkle of wealth glitters before them, spurring them faster and faster on the treadmill towards destruction. And they seek to make us worship at their altar. As long as greed inspires us, greed keeps us complicit and silent. But once we defy the religion of unfettered capitalism, once we demand that a society serve the needs of citizens and the ecosystem that sustains life, rather than the needs of the marketplace, once we learn to speak with a new humility and live with a new simplicity, once we love our neighbor as ourself, we break our chains and make hope visible.
(c) 2011 Chris Hedges, the former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, spent seven years in the Middle East. He was part of the paper's team of reporters who won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of global terrorism. He is the author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His latest book is, "“Death Of The Liberal Class.”

The old Obama reappeared this week.

Well, sorta, anyhow.

He gave a speech that liberals could find inspiring.

Again, sorta. And only if you don’t pay attention to a few gigantic caveats.

Let’s come back to that. First, though, the good news. The president got closer than he has in a very long to time to drawing serious lines of distinction between two very different approaches to the social compact in American society. This is work he has desperately needed to do these last two years, and work that has been wholly lacking from this most anemic of presidencies. When I and others criticize Obama for failing to present to the American people an overarching narrative that helps to define for us where the battle lines are drawn, who the good and bad guys are, and what we should believe in and fight for, this is what we critics are talking about. The absence of this narrative (and the gaping vacuum that absence has created for others to fill) is one of the main reasons that this presidency has failed so miserably.

Of course, the deeper problem may well be that such a clarion call is lacking from the president because any underlying convictions of that sort are equally absent. Every meaningful indicator suggests that if you pull back the facade of the anti-war, minority, young, community organizer Democrat, what you get are the politics of Dick Cheney, and sometimes worse.

But apart from that most serious of problems, Obama has fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the office he occupies. Even with all the power he has to push buttons that would destroy the planet, and even with all the millions of people who work underneath him in the federal government, and even with his trusty veto pen, any president’s greatest weapon in a system of separated powers is the bully pulpit. This soapbox is crucial not only for purposes of persuasion, but also for the deeper task of framing (which does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to persuading, anyhow). A smart and effective president gets what he wants by using the bully pulpit to set the agenda of what is debated, by framing how issues are perceived (to use the classic example – is it an ‘estate tax’ or a ‘death tax’?), by selling the public on his position regarding the issue, and then by persuading them to demand that Congress get on-board.

This president almost never does any of that. Worse, he sits by passively while others do exactly that sort of work instead, on their terms. The full measure of Obama’s failures in this respect can be taken by the sheer outrageousness of what Republicans get away with saying. If Harry Truman was in the White House, there’d be no death panel bullshit or birthers, and anyone stupid enough to talk that smack at the president’s expense would pay the heavy burden of being ridiculed for the drooling imbeciles they absolutely are. If FDR was president, we’d be sufficiently reminded that the same kleptocratic elite who crashed the global economy in order to steal from the vast majority of Americans should not be given remotely serious consideration with regard to anything they say (indeed, they should count their blessings just to be on the happy side of prison walls), especially when these thieves call for more of the exact same policies.

Ah, but that was back when Democrats were Democrats. We, instead, get Barack Obama.

Still, for those of us who have so much lamented the absence of political courage in this president, he appears to have taken a step in the right direction this week. A step. Nobody should get overexcited here. You wouldn’t exactly say that his speech showed balls. Well, maybe one. Or two-thirds, perhaps, rounded up to one. In any case it’s fair to say that this week, finally, Barack had a ball.

Or so it appeared, when the president actually went so far as to do the vision thing in his speech. Here’s the key excerpt, where he discussed the Republican plans for America’s future:

“Worst of all, this is a vision that says even though America can’t afford to invest in education or clean energy, even though we can’t afford to care for seniors and poor children, we can somehow afford more than $1 trillion in new tax breaks for the wealthy. Think about it. In the last decade, the average income of the bottom 90% of all working Americans actually declined. The top 1% saw their income rise by an average of more than a quarter of a million dollars each. And that’s who needs to pay less taxes? They want to give people like me a two hundred thousand dollar tax cut that’s paid for by asking thirty three seniors to each pay six thousand dollars more in health costs? That’s not right, and it’s not going to happen as long as I’m president. The fact is, their vision is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America. As Ronald Reagan’s own budget director said, there’s nothing “serious” or “courageous” about this plan. There’s nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. There’s nothing courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill. And this is not a vision of the America I know. The America I know is generous and compassionate; a land of opportunity and optimism. We take responsibility for ourselves and each other, for the country we want and the future we share. We are the nation that built a railroad across a continent and brought light to communities shrouded in darkness. We sent a generation to college on the GI bill and saved millions of seniors from poverty with Social Security and Medicare. We have led the world in scientific research and technological breakthroughs that have transformed millions of lives.”

Oh look, America. It lives! Finally the president speaks out about something. Finally he portrays a contrast between the forces of darkness and the rest of us. Finally he draws a line in the sand. Finally he awakens from his long slumber.

Well, like I said. Sorta. I despise Obama and feel passionately that he has betrayed the country. That said, I’ll give him (or even Sarah Palin) credit for getting it right when they do, should that miraculously happen. I do that because my biggest loyalty is to something grossly missing from American politics, and that is a little dose of honesty. So give the president his due for what he did. But while we’re at it, let’s also recognize this for what it is – and what it isn’t – in all its full glory.

The most important single observation to make about this speech is that the president has lost before he’s begun – his newfound willingness to make (mostly oblique) contrasts, notwithstanding. Or, more accurately, it is we who have lost before he’s begun. Anyhow, this is pure Obama. Yield, yield, yield. Then go into negotiations with vicious thugs where – shockingly – you wind up yielding more. That the president could end up in such a position on this particular issue is the most astounding example of this pattern yet. Have we really forgotten, already, who made this mountain of debt, which is now presented by the very same people as the implacable imperative requiring us to slash social spending? Was it liberals who insisted on tax cuts for the wealthy these last thirty years, saying ti would raise federal revenues? Was it liberals who decided to invade Iraq on the basis of lies, and not pay for a nickel of those trillions spent with increased taxes or spending cuts? Was it progressives who created a needlessly overly-expensive new prescription drug benefit? Was it liberals who blew the doors off of domestic boondoggle spending when they controlled Congress last decade? Was it liberals who deregulated the finance industry, then bailed Wall Street bankers out one hundred pennies on the dollar after they imploded the global economy? Was it progressives who funneled hundreds of billions of dollars in federal subsidies to giant oil and agricultural corporations? Was it liberals who massively expanded spending on so-called national defense, even though the US has no serious national enemies anywhere on the planet?

No, it was not. It was the exact same set of freaks and monsters who now demand that we must push poor and elderly Americans into the gutter, because the effects of their policies have now drowned us in an ocean of debt, and so that we can do even more of all of the above. It doesn’t get more obvious than this. The point is, if you can’t negotiate from strength on this issue, you can’t negotiate from strength, period. Need I say more about this president?

But negotiating to win appears to be the last thing on Obama’s mind, anyhow. I’m not the first armchair psychologist to note that the guy seems to prize being liked above all other virtues, quite literally including among those others the health and welfare of the nation, a responsibility which he himself sought. And he desperately seeks this social approval even when the people whose kind feelings he covets are spitting in his face, and rolling him, and trouncing him in elections by saying the most outrageous things about him personally, and – most importantly – not at all liking him at the end of the day, despite his very best efforts.

You could see Obama’s craving for acceptance in the content of this speech, and in what he left out. When he talked about how things had gone wrong in the past, he didn’t name names, leaving listeners to believe the Great Republican Lie that everyone is equally culpable. Or even worse, that theirs is, as they claim, the party of fiscal responsibility – a lie of astonishing proportions. You could see it when Obama was delivering the toughest lines of his speech. He kept doing this strange thing with his mouth and chin that made it look very much like he was in pain getting out those words. And you could tell by how he ad-libbed – both what he included, and what he omitted. At one point, he was supposed to say “Finally, there are those who believe we shouldn’t make any reforms to Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security out of a fear that any talk of change to these programs will usher in the sort of radical steps that House Republicans have proposed.” And he did say that. It’s just that he dropped the word “radical” when he delivered the line. At another point, he spontaneously added the following to the prepared text: “And even those Republicans I disagree with most strongly I believe are sincere about wanting to do right by their country. We may disagree on our visions, but I truly believe they want to do the right thing.”

The guy obviously has a hard time confronting people. Which is fine with me, if that’s how he wants to run his personal life. I don’t care if Michelle makes him dress up in a Bozo The Clown costume and rides him like a pony in the East Room, and he’s too wimpy to object. That’s up to him. But I’m not okay with Mr. Happy for my president. I don’t want Tom Hanks in the White House, man, I want George Foreman. Or, as former San Francisco mayor Art Agnos once put it, I want somebody “with a Peace Corps heart and linebacker eyes.” I can’t tell whether Obama has any sort of heart at all, but if he does, it’s a Wall Street heart. And as for the rest of his anatomy, I don’t think he’s quite pro football material, do you? Do they take people with cupcake eyes in the NFL?

Obama’s ad-libbed statement is telling in another crucial respect, as well. I don’t know if he really believes that ridiculous shit he mouthed about “those Republicans I disagree with most strongly,” but if he does we are in such a major world of hurt. I’m sorry, Barack, but John Boehner and Mitch McConnell and Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin and George Bush and Dick Cheney and Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and the rest of that ugly crew – they’re not sincere patriots who really want to do right for the people of America, but who just happen to have a bit of a different vision than most folks do. That particular lie – almost the biggest in the entirely of American politics, a sport with more lies than an endless-loop video of a marathon golf tournament – is such a huge part of our problem, and such a big chunk of the explanation as to why this country is in the state it’s in. These are not patriots, Fool. These are predators. If heroin dealers wrapped themselves in the flag, would you “truly believe they want to do the right thing”? If Hitler belted out the Star Spangled Banner right before the Battle of the Bulge, would you have believed he was “sincere about wanting to do right” by America? Y’know, I could very well be the world’s worst poker player that ever lived, but by god almighty I’d like to sit across the table from this guy for half an hour. Meanwhile, if we have any hope of saving this country, it’s got to start with some truth in advertising. Difficult as it might be for certain Harvard graduates to comprehend, kleptocratic sociopathic marionette politicians crushing the American public by ruthlessly doing the bidding of an insanely greedy corporate oligarchy are not exactly what you’d call patriots. Is it too much to demand a president who can sort out something that basic?

Obama was also vague in offering his supposed alternative to the Republican plan. You can see that, especially in the way he contradicted himself regarding one of the cheapest ploys commonly used by Washington politicians. He rightly pointed out that “Because all this spending is popular with both Republicans and Democrats alike, and because nobody wants to pay higher taxes, politicians are often eager to feed the impression that solving the problem is just a matter of eliminating waste and abuse – that tackling the deficit issue won’t require tough choices.” Good point, Barack. The old “waste and fraud” ruse is as tedious as it is unfortunately effective. But how is that you then, later in the very same speech, tell us that “Over the last two years, Secretary Gates has courageously taken on wasteful spending, saving $400 billion in current and future spending. I believe we can do that again”? Or that “We will reduce wasteful subsidies and erroneous payments” in healthcare? Isn’t this precisely the sort of nonsense you just got done criticizing others for doing?

Obama also throws out grandiose vagaries like this one about the cost of the US military, saying we need to: “conduct a fundamental review of America’s missions, capabilities, and our role in a changing world.” Really? Let’s me see here now. You’re two-and-a-half years into your presidency, your fighting that same number of meaningless wars abroad, your country is drowning in debt, and you’re just now figuring out that we need to rethink the bloody empire? And you’re proposing that some unspecified person is to begin this process, somehow or another, at some unknown future date? Maybe it’ll be like the Deficit Commission Obama created. He put the truly scary Alan Simpson in charge of that abortion. Given that George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense is also serving as Obama’s Secretary of Defense, I wonder how this would turn out. And when. After years – years, not months – of being a senator, running for the presidency and being the president, couldn’t we expect somebody to be able to articulate a real plan here?

There are gigantic opportunities sitting there for anyone who genuinely would want to chop federal spending. Opportunities that would not only permit real benefits to the country, and would not only be popular with the public, but would represent incredibly astute politics, forcing the Republicans to defend the worst monsters on the landscape, and forcing them to twist themselves into gruesome pretzels, indulging in the worst forms of overt and high comedic hypocrisy. We’re not talking about low-hanging fruit here, people. We’re talking about peaches, pears and plums that have been picked, cleaned, shipped, purchased, sliced and delivered to the president’s dining room table, sitting there in his expensive china fruit salad bowl that Nancy Reagan bought. Can we not agree to end massive taxpayer subsides to giant corporations making record profits? Can we not agree to have a genuine minimum tax for all well-to-do individuals and corporations, so that GE can’t make $17 billion in profit and still wind up being owed money by the US treasury? Can we not agree to end tax incentives for exporting American jobs overseas? And wouldn’t it look really embarrassing to oppose any of these initiatives? I mean, come on.

And then there’s the whole tough guy routine. Even when Obama says stuff like, “But let me be absolutely clear: I will preserve these health care programs as a promise we make to each other in this society. I will not allow Medicare to become a voucher program that leaves seniors at the mercy of the insurance industry, with a shrinking benefit to pay for rising costs. I will not tell families with children who have disabilities that they have to fend for themselves,” or, “In December, I agreed to extend the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans because it was the only way I could prevent a tax hike on middle-class Americans. But we cannot afford $1 trillion worth of tax cuts for every millionaire and billionaire in our society. And I refuse to renew them again.” – even when he talks tough like that, does anyone, especially Republicans, take this guy seriously? Isn’t he the guy who said he’d for sure close Guantánamo? And who wanted the public option? Why doesn’t he think Republicans will try the same game of chicken with him on tax cuts for the wealthy that they did last time? And why should we expect that the Capitulation Kid will have a better solution to their gambit than he did last time? And if he does have one, why didn’t he freakin’ whip it out in December? Face it, nobody folds like Obama. He’s the origami president.

Which means that I’ve given up believing his pretty words in speeches like this. Indeed, I suspect that this speech is actually just a bunch of pretty words meant to bring people like me back into the fold. People whom Obama will need a year from now, especially if jobs do not reappear, and if the GOP nominates Twit Romney, who then makes a case to a credulous and bleeding public that he’s got the ol’ private-sector-jobs-creating-know-how-magic in his fingers (you know, just like the kind that the ridiculously flush private sector is using right now, as we speak, to not create jobs). Obama knows he will be vulnerable in 2012, and he needs to bring his base back home, after two-and-a-half years bitch-slapping us with all the regularity of German train schedules, and some of the politics too.

This was not a real speech about progressive values. This was not the resurrection of Harry Truman, a fighter battling for the public interest, a pugilist willing to name names and bloody faces.

This was a campaign speech.