Martin LeFevre: “Day of Reckoning”

Living in America, I have long wondered when life would place limits on a way of life so removed from reality, so dedicated to superficiality, so devoid of meaning. Now I have my answer.

I found it difficult to listen to Obama’s first big speech before Congress and the American people on Tuesday night. Many of his speeches during in the past, while they didn’t stir aspirations for humanity at this “crossroads of history,” did at least stir the aspiration that this country would find its way out of the morass of the Bush-Cheney years.

But sadly, for me at least, there wasn’t a line in this speech that did not ring hollow, fall flat, or sound false behind and beyond the fine words and exceptional delivery.

Since Barack was at his rhetorical best, was it me, I wondered? Or has he already reached as high as he can, and will, from this moment forward, fall short of the challenge, not merely for ‘my country,’ but for humanity?

CNN has given the economic crisis in America a name—“The Struggles.” I wonder if anyone at that network has any idea of just how psychological those struggles actually are.

To divert attention, the mainstream media is getting their panties in a twist over the possibility that a North Korean rocket might have the capability of reaching Alaska. Why Kim Jong-il feels so threatened by Sarah Palin I don’t know. But someone should tell him Alaska has only slightly more significance to most Americans than South Korea, which means next to nil.

Except for the comic relief the Palin family saga provides, Alaska has fallen off the radar since the primaries. But maybe the cunning Kim has a plan to knock out America’s frontline radar installations, and thereby promote Palin for our next president, rendering half the population deathly ill.

Seriously, people are scared, but few are hungry. People’s homes are losing value, but the number of homeless is not rapidly rising. People are losing jobs, but most are still working.

Comparisons with the Depression bear little resemblance to the 1930’s, although the word itself is telling. Our collective psychological condition, for nearly 20 years held at bay with Prosac, E-Bay, and every form of diversion, has become manifest. Now people feel there is everything to fear, including fear itself.

Obama is like a gifted conductor directing a dysfunctional orchestra playing a sentimental symphony that strikes few chords anymore.

“As we stand at this crossroads of history,” he said from the rostrum in the House chamber, “the eyes of all people in all nations are once again upon us, watching to see what we do with this moment, waiting for us to lead.”

But how can America fill the vacuum of leadership in the world where ‘zombie banks’ epitomize a zombie people?

Obama’s speeches, no less than Bush’s, contain a subtext of denial of the fact that the ‘mystic chords’ have frayed and broken. ‘American spirit’ and ‘American dream’ are phrases that mock what the people actually feel, and the direction their lives are actually taking.

The sinking sorrow I felt in listening to our best try to reverse our worst was confirmed when I read what South Korea’s former ambassador to Washington, “Lee Hong-koo, said: “There is no one who can replace America. Without American leadership, there is no leadership. Americans, as a people, should realize how many hopes and expectations other people are putting on their shoulders.”

In the echo chamber of America, we are also still being told by the loudest voices in America that “the alternative to a U.S.-dominated world is not a world dominated by someone else or someone better…it is a leaderless world.”

When a people perish, they must first recover their own spirit before they can participate in, much less lead, the messy march of human history.

The issue is not the nationalist dead-enders’ fabricated dilemma of too much or too little American power. The question is the fearsome dilemma of the power of man, which is destroying the earth and humanity.

At bottom, the crisis, in whatever facet and through whatever prism we want to consider it, has no more to do with America than anywhere else.

Even though Bush & Co. cut America off at the knees, it is increasingly futile to try to squeeze a global society into the Procrustean bed of a nation-state mentality and system.

As far short of the mark as we are falling however, America’s ‘struggles’ don’t necessarily mean inward turning. Not at least in the usual negative sense of that phrase, with all its connotations of nationalism and protectionism.

There is another kind of inward turning, in which a people do not turn their back on the world but search for a new place in it, as they reconnect and rediscover long neglected dimensions of their own being.

Martin LeFevre is a contemplative, and non-academic religious and political philosopher. He has been publishing in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe (and now New Zealand) for 20 years. Email: martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net. The author welcomes comments.

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