Obama Kiss

by Jim Washburn

I was online the other morning, and the CNN.com tagline read: “Homeless woman gets Obama kiss, aid offers.” They were talking about Henrietta Hughes, the woman who President Obama (boy do I like typing those two words!) called on at a town hall meeting in Fort Myers, Florida on Tuesday. Instead of a question, she had a plea, which she stammered out as if she was before the all-powerful Oz.

“My son and I are homeless, and we need immediate help. I have an urgent need, unemployment and homelessness, a very small vehicle for my family and I to live in. The housing authority has two years waiting lists and we need something more than the vehicle and the parks to go to. We need our own kitchen and our own bathroom. Please help.”

Obama gave her a kiss on the cheek and told her, “We’re going to do everything we can to help you, but there are a lot of people like you.”

Republican bloggers responded to her plea in no time. One, Michelle Malkin on the conservative website townhall.com, cyber-sneered that if Hughes had more time to speak, “she probably would have remembered to ask Obama to fill up her gas tank, too.” According to CNN, another queried, “How does a 61-year-old homeless woman who's living in a pickup truck with her son JUST HAPPEN to get a ticket so she can VERY PUBLICALLY ask Prez. Obama for a HOUSE? Anyone? Who pushes her up on stage? She's right at the front of the crowd. Did she just happen to get a seat there?”

Gee, I don’t know, maybe the same way Joe the Fucking Plumber did? Except, unlike Joe, she didn’t have a fabricated name, vocation and financial situation. The press investigated, and she’s really named Henrietta, is really homeless and living in a pickup truck with her unemployed son. They both have AA degrees, both have long work experience, and both can’t find a job to save their lives.

I can understand conservatives’ confusion. For the past eight years, the Republicans’ presidential “town hall meetings” have been so heavily screened, restricted, scripted and stage-managed that they’ve forgotten what real people look like. A lot look like Henrietta: used up and cast aside, heading into her “leisure years” trying to sleep on a half-reclined pickup truck seat. She didn’t end up there by her design. 

The president was speaking in Fort Myers, for Christ sake, a town that lost 12,000 jobs last year, had the highest foreclosure rate in the nation, and where houses are worth one third of what they were four years ago. But to these bloggers this middle-aged woman must be selfish and lazy or else she’d be out pounding the pavement as she’d been every day for months instead of waiting in a line to ask her nation’s leader for something so outlandish as help. Doesn’t she know help’s for bankers?    

Fortunately, many Republicans are human beings. One of them, the wife of state representative Nicholas Thompson, offered to let Hughes and her son live in one of their homes for free for a while. If a Democrat had done that, no doubt the conservative bloggers would be saying it was just a cynical publicity stunt. I think we can be more charitable than that, can’t we, even if Republicans have been torpedoing Obama—and this nation’s chances for recovery—every chance they get? 

I think it was a gracious thing Obama did, reaching out to Republicans, meeting with them to seek their views, naming Republicans to his cabinet, and refraining from prosecuting Dick Cheney’s moribund ass. And Obama’s outstretched hand has earned him nothing but spite and willful obstruction, this from calcified souls who would have this nation sink beyond rescue rather than face the fact that their philosophies, given full rein these past years, have put us utterly in the shitter.

Patrick Leahy, that nice old senator—the one Dick Cheney told “Go fuck yourself” on the Senate floor a few years back—has called for a “truth and reconciliation committee” to get to the bottom of how we were led into an unjust war, how our Justice Department was subverted and so forth.

A smart man, old Pat, and he chose his words well. Truth and reconciliation commissions originated in South Africa, when Mandela and the ANC came to power at the end of Apartheid. The evils that nation was emerging from dwarf ours, and threatened to fester at the heart of the state. The commissions worked like this: If you publicly revealed the evils you’d done, before your community and those you’d wronged, you would be forgiven—at least from prosecution—and everyone might find a way to move on.

ANC fire-bombers, government goons, snitches and torturers confessed to their crimes. Some confessed with a sneer, without repentance, flinging their crimes into the victims’ faces, knowing they were now free to go. Others wept uncontrollably, finally admitting to themselves the monsters they had become. Many were tearfully forgiven by the survivors of those they’d tortured and killed. Some also found their own families couldn’t forgive them once they learned what dad did when he went off to work every day.

Here at home, Leahy is proposing that persons from the Bush Administration who actually know what happened in that moral abyss come clean with us, telling Americans what our government has done, supposedly in our name. That’s how representative democracy works. If we don’t know what they’re doing, it’s not representative or democratic. With rare exception—and then only when national security absolutely demands it—we’re supposed to know what our government is doing. That’s what makes it ours.

Maybe conservatives are so distrustful of government because they have such direct experience in how it can be corrupted. Holding secret meetings with Enron or Iraqi conmen is not conducting the public’s business. Shipping billions in untraceable bills on pallets to Iraq is not conducting the public’s business. Outing CIA operatives to cover up your own lies is not conducting the public’s business. Turning the Justice Department into a political crony machine is not doing the public’s business. Censoring and manipulating science is not doing the public’s business. Gutting and subverting the agencies that are supposed to protect the public’s health and welfare is not doing the public’s business, as we’re still finding out with peanuts. Cheney and his ilk were saying “Go fuck yourself” to all of us.

We need the truth to move forward, so that we might learn from it. If that learning and moving is to lead to healing, maybe retribution will have to go by the wayside. There’s a lot we can learn from South Africa’s example.

But there is also this: President Obama is stuck holding the biggest sack of shit that has ever burdened a leader in our history, and it is not a sack of his own making. It was created by those who were in power these past years. They would do well to develop a sense of humility and shut perhaps the fuck up about how Obama’s leading the nation down the wrong path. They ran their path right to its end, and there is only the abyss beyond that.

That someone is willing to tote their sack of shit, and haul it the long way back to hopefully find a right path—where mayhaps in the sunlight of disclosure on the fields of truth, that shit might become manure, tra la—should inspire the gratitude of those who created the mess, and their fervent prayers, since we are still standing at the abyss.

Instead we get Rush Limbaugh saying that he hopes Obama fails—which means we all fail—while Congress’ GOP leaders are up on their high horses, acting like they’re the only true defenders of—well, hello!—the public’s business!

Comity and graciousness only go so far, and the next time Republicans use the proximity Obama’s allowed them to kick him in the teeth, I hope he does not respond in kind. But I do hope he stops bending over backwards to be fair to people who’ll never understand the meaning of the word. I hope he talks about My Pet Goat and Katrina, and the Republican-made deficit, and the American lives and trillion dollars spent on the wrong war, and the unregulated financial meltdown, the uninspected poison foods and everything else that can be dragged right to the doorstep of the GOP. It’s always easier to forgive someone who knows they need it, and they evidently need some help in that department.

Then, if they ask real nice, maybe they’ll get an Obama kiss.

I felt like I could use a little snuggle myself, after freezing my ass off in Norwalk the other day. Every town needs a motto: Tan your hide in Oceanside! Freeze your ass off in Norwalk!

I had to go to the L.A. County Recorder’s Office there to get more death certificates on my dad. Here’s some advice: to settle an estate, you’ll need approximately as many death certificates as it would take to paper the walls of your dining room. The blue color is a nice match for Colonial-style dinnerware.

It was a brisk day but I was in shirtsleeves, since I figured I’d be waiting in some fetid government office, not like the 94 schmucks I saw queued up outside the building. I counted those 94 schmucks as I walked past them to be number 95. The line snaked around a corner, then another, like one of those sneaky Disney rides.

It took just over an hour to get in the building, and we were all in the shade the whole time, with a cold breeze didn’t let up. Most of the folks in line were bundled up. They’d brought food in containers, books, games and their families to keep them company. They were more acquainted with how government works. When life gets hard, you suddenly need documents. But there were also some people getting marriage licenses, and their expectant faces and bellies were banners of hope for the future.

It’s that crowded every single day, a clerk informed me, as I paid them $432 to tell me my dad’s still dead. That means the lines will be longer still if the governor cuts the workweek and municipalities follow. There’s another part of the lasting legacy of the last eight years: The people who hate government and say it doesn’t work have left it so broke and dismantled that it can’t work.

On the other hand, the new Paul McCartney album is pretty good.

Comments

Comments closed.