Obama, a Fallible Messiah

A person is more alone when at the head of a great power. Today, in a globalized world, we miss the presence of a charismatic personality. We cannot always remain closed in the pettiness of our own business and stuck in our thoughts, so we look at what is happening outside the window; we suffer, hope and dream. Obama has seemed, as they portrayed him during the primaries, to be the man who had to come. Obama was the man to be elected: America was ready to follow him. Obama was brought where he is now by a messianic wave.

The trip to Asia has revealed, it is cruel to say, a fallible Messiah, even a Messiah that failed. Obama’s image is not that of a winner. He has gone, played and lost. His presumptions or naivety have been punished. Great walls are everywhere, with no openings. The United States cannot lose, even when their ambassador leaves Saigon with the flag rolled up under his arm (one of the tragic images of the century), but they also cannot win, nor help to win for good causes.

However, they may lose the vivendi causas, the ethical reasons that justify and illuminate our otherwise brutish behavior. Obama’s creativity and divine surprise unrolled the American flag, summoning the hippies and believers of the Age of Aquarius, organic farmers, holistic practitioners, obscured and non-violent ground-lovers, disheartened Batesonians, heretic Christians, Muslims sickened by the carnage and thinkers of murderous thoughts, showing its stars and stripes after having washed it in an unpolluted Niagara, imprinted with an amazing legend formed just in the last 50 years: Power by imagination.

A few steps of this new power given by the imagination and a little more than a hundred days later, the severed head of America’s imagination is dangling from the Great Wall, promptly surrogated by realistic policy and help for those craving illusory freedom. The surrender of the U.S. imagination is fully decorated with flowers made of plastic before the ruthless, relentless and contemptuous convent grille of the ancient totalitarian Chinese.

Alas, Robespierre was right: “Virtue without terror is powerless.” La Fontaine’s words are also everlasting: “We must do perpetual war against the wicked.” Righteousness will never become law, warned Manzoni, but a right waved without the support of force ends up under the feet of those who vilely oppress human beings.

The great America did not get out of the Summit of Beijing in one piece: We have seen mirrored in the perpetual cloud of smog, an America with no imagination, transfixed by its own banks and stuck with the debt to the Chinese empire. We have seen the loss of a Messiah that failed, who bends to compromises and who is not even free to embrace the intrepid Tibetan messenger eternally wandering in exile, and we heard, one more time, the polished oratory of Obama, an elegant gentleman sitting on an impressive nuclear arsenal who, with an incongruous Nobel Peace diploma hanging on the nail, does not know how to do peace nor war, came back in a hurry to the school of practical realism, gave up the urgent fight of an environmental crusade, allowed the dollar to be endlessly sodomized by the Euro (which, for the most part, is, in terms of purchasing power, increasingly poor), and fails to even shut Guantanamo Prison, that Cuban jail that we can stand no more. For two months, he has hesitated to make a strategic decision on the Afghan war. If John F. Kennedy had hesitated this way in the Cuban crisis of 1962, the USSR would have made the island a walled city of steel and a symbol of death for the three Americas.

Dear Barack, why are you in such a hurry to remove the messianic paint from your furnishing, revealing the bare foot of the inevitable letdown? Could you not leave at least part of the dream alive? One is reminded of a famous novel from the 1930s written by Hans Fallada: Little Man, What Now?