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Can We Pull HAL 9000's Plug Without Making Things Worse?May 23, 2009 Thoughts on reading President Obama's speech and ex-veep Dick Cheney's, and some of the reactions thereto on AlterNet and the Boston Globe's website -- while trying to ignore the headlines and ledes that say they "faced off in back-to-back speeches." I don't think we (collectively) realize just what a number the last 30 years has done on our heads. We've forgotten how this country is supposed to work, and how it -- at its best moments -- aspires to work. Too many of us have this idea that leaders can fix things by snapping their fingers. Honey, I can't fix my own little life by snapping my fingers, and the U.S. of A. is a helluva lot more complex than my little life. The U.S. political system and the U.S. economic system have a deeply symbiotic relationship. The contradictions between the two are significant, but they can be kept in a dynamic balance. The Reagan administration set out to destroy the balance, and every administration since has continued the process. The economic system has been trumping the political system for years, accountable to no one, and now the whole thing has crashed. But the bankers and market speculators and everyone who benefits from run-amok capitalism -- they're very much alive, and they're still dangerous. Think HAL 9000 in 2001. They know they're being threatened, they're going to fight like hell to save themselves, and we know for damn sure that they are 100% unscrupulous. The Obama administration has got to be extremely careful dealing with these people. That said, Leslie Savan -- in "A Tale of Two Speeches," published in The Nation and reprinted on AlterNet -- has got it right. President Obama must keep these people under control. As Audre Lorde wrote, "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" -- and when the master's house has collapsed, they are utterly incapable of building a sounder one. How to do it? How to call the bankers' bluff and ensure that in their petulance they don't do worse than they've done already? (Cheney's refusal to go away should be a warning to us all.) Here's how. President Obama and the gutsier Democrats in Congress have to effectively mobilize all our rage and disgust with the financiers and use it to counter their formidable power. The way Martin Luther King Jr. and others mobilized the black people of the South to confront a white power structure that looked impregnable. Our job is to have enough courage to hope that things can get better, and to work like hell to make it happen.
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