The following is my own admittedly biased interpretation of what President Obama really meant in his State of the Union speech last night. I will loosely follow the transcript provided by the Washington Post,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/state-of-the-union-2013-president-obamas-address-to-congress-transcript/2013/02/12/d429b574-7574-11e2-95e4-6148e45d7adb_story.html
and, for brevity’s sake will omit a lot of it, well, most of it, always seeking to emphasize what I consider the important points. Here goes…
Mr Speaker, Mr Vice President, members of Congress, it is my task to report the state of the union. To improve it for the sake of our corporate paymasters is the task of us all.
Tonight, thanks to our capacity for deception and kabuki theater, the loyal coverage of the mainstream media, and the seemingly inexhaustible gullibility of the American people, there is much progress to report. After a decade of grinding war, our official military is mostly coming home, but don’t worry, there are still plenty of oppotunities for private contractors such as Blackwater, or whatever it’s called now, to reap rapacious profits at the expense of the American and Afghan people.
After years of grueling recession for the many and soaring profits for those we represent, we can now deceive the people further by proclaiming that the recession is over and the recovery is at hand, and most of them are stupid enough to believe it.
Corporate profits have skyrocketed to all time highs, but the middle and working classes have seen their standards of living decline and are starting to get nonplussed. So it is our generation’s job to reignite the myth of a thriving, rising middle class so that we can fleece the suckers even more.
We can’t just cut our way to permanent corporate domination; we have to preserve the illusion that we really care about the American people. So let’s put party interests aside and work together to make it look like we really do care, and we can accomplish this by getting just a few corporate interests to sacrifice just a little for just awhile before somebody out there gets the idea that there might be a market for guillotines.
We are already part of the way there. We’ve reduced American wages and benefits so much that some great corporations are bringing relatively low-paying and highly profitable jobs back to America, and we need to trumpet that to the people. That’s why I’m going to Asheville tomorrow for a photo op.
We’ve accomplished much. We’re producing more natural gas than ever before, lowering costs for many corporations and setting the stage to export it to less fortunate countries at a profit. But I’ve got to talk about climate change because of these recent big frackin’ storms that are starting to wake the people up. We must try really, really hard to at least pretend to be thinking about doing something about it and, who knows, some of our corporate sponsors might even find a way to profit from it, so let’s give it a try.
And together, we have to take steps to insure that Latin American immigrants and their descendants don’t get the idea that they have the numbers to force real change for themselves and their black and white working class brothers and sisters, so let’s do some immigration reform that will spare us the cost of deporting millions while insuring a source of cheap domestic labor for decades to come.
We also have to do something simple and concrete that will fool tens of millions into thinking that we really care about them, so let’s bite the bullet and raise the minimum wage to nine dollars an hour. That way, we can proclaim that anyone who is willing to work can live above the artificially low official poverty line that I, of course, will do nothing to raise, and then we can really turn the screws on those lazy slackers who prefer to get food stamps, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and unemployment insurance over real work that is profitable to ourselves and our sponsors.
We’ll continue to protect our corporate interests overseas, no matter what the cost to our own people while convincing them that we are doing so in order to preserve their freedom, which we will continue to erode by more national security legislation and policies that ignore that quaint old Bill of Rights.
And now, I’m sorry, but I’ve got to throw tub to the whale of my Democratic base: We need to vote on reasonable gun control! Hear that applause? They love it, the suckers.
Remember, my fellow members of the power elite, that while we may take jobs with different corporations or think tanks when we leave what the people still foolishly think of as public service, while our ties may be blue or red, our skin tones white, brown, or orange(heh! Got you there, Mr Speaker!) we share the same proud title.
We are all Corporatist Americans who know which side our bread is buttered on. It is up to us to write the next chapter in the rise and consolidation of American Corporate Fascism. May Mammon bless us all. Good night.



16 Comments

Pretty much on target. But the GOP will balk at even that. Unless they get to have their brand on it.
Nice summary.
If the inauguration is the ritual of the people consenting the legitimacy of the President, the State of the Union is the ritual of reaffirming the mythology that there still is a Union and that the Constitution still holds sway. It’s also a frat trick to get the opposing party to clap for the governing party.
The next ritual is the presentation of the President’s budget, pure and without blemish, as an acceptable sacrifice for the Congress. The money really gets appropriated in continuing resolutions, unless the priests decide to return to the ritual of the appropriation bill.
You will note that you cannot find a unified statement of the current budgeted authority for agencies, nor what they actually spent during the previous fiscal year. The accounting systems are too incompatible, there is too much in the “dark budget”, and too many civil service managers want to preserve their latitude.
Thanks. You’re probably right about what the Republicans will accept. Too many of them worship what they consider “true” capitalism like European Christians 400 years ago worshiped what they considered the “true” interpretation of the Bible.
That led to the Thirty Years War. Things got so bad that my German ancestors fled to England, which was in the throes of revolution and civil war, because it was safer there, even in the service of Cromwell, than it was in Germany.
I’m not predicting a Thirty Years War here, but the intractable attitudes and fanaticisms are somewhat similar. Both Democrats and Republicans mostly accept corporate capitalism as Undisputed Truth and Goodness, and only fight over details.
I don’t think Obama is stupid. He is many things, most of them despicable, IMO, but not that. Nor is he insane. He wants what is best for himself and his family, at least. He wants to keep the current system somehow going during his lifetime and that of his children, and realizes that the oligarchs in their quest for more power cannot go too far, too fast, and survive.
Most of the Congressional Republicans, OTOH, want it all NOW. They also have a very simplistic view of the world. Get gubmint out, let bidness do bidness, and Paradise for themselves and their heirs will be realized. Those types are either clinically insane or batshit crazy, take your pick.
Interesting times.
If you’ve not yet read Scott Reynolds Nelson, A Nation of Deadbeats: An Uncommon History of America’s Financial Disasters, you have no idea at all how long we’ve been in “interesting times”. Sometimes we choose not to see through the veneer.
Oh, I’ve got a pretty good idea. I haven’t read the book, though I did read some reviews. Thanks, I’ll check it out. It’s probably available at the socialist institution down the street called the Public Library.
Good Satire. You and Norman Solomon are expressing some of my feelings about the speech.
What’s actually happening and what’s funny about it make me think about the ancient roots of Satire, the Satyr Plays.
Each year at Athens’ annual festival, playwrights would each present a trilogy of fairly serious dramatic plays on one theme, followed by a comedy, a Satyr Play.
The Satyrs were hairy naked men who lived in the woods, playing music, drinking wine, and chasing women. They may have really existed. Many writers’ fantasies called them part goat or part horse. In art and literature, they represent the id of Man – males that is: Our basic animal desires.
These horrible things are happening, and we can laugh at it by recognizing how ridiculous it is that these crazy men are letting their ids carry out these outrageous acts.
But it is real.
Almost nobody in Greek Mythology died a natural death. One reason for that is that they were all royalty. Otherwise, there would be no story about them.
The reason royalty or powerful national rulers are likely to be killed is that someone will inherit the throne; and how that succession will work out is why the national leader is killed. Places like Saudi Arabia, where absolute rule passes to a family member, still hand down power that way: Relative kills relative and a relative inherits the kingdom.
As a student and collector of ancient mythological literature (Greek, Roman, Norse), I’ve taken an interest in what are called “the lost plays”: Only 3 ancient Greek tragedians wrote plays that survive today (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides): Just a handful of plays survive from each, but the titles of about 100 other plays apiece which they entered into contests do survive.
From those titles we can partially reconstruct the plays named, because they are typically named for a mythological character about which some things are known, and because a few quoted lines and contemporary published reviews exist.
Hungrily poring through a book of lost plays, I came to one named for a king. No lines survive from the play in question. No reviews survive. We know that the one famous episode from the king’s life must be what the play is about.
The king killed his wife and children and guests. Gruesome actions. Oh, and we know it was a comedy, a Satyr Play. In a masterpiece of understatement, the editor lamented “It’s hard to figure out what was comedic about this madman.”
He went on to explain what must have happened: The violence will have occurred offstage – the Greeks were much more advanced than we are on this – and after each Murder, the king must have emerged with a bloody dripping knife, perhaps musing about who or what he’d kill next, or ranting an insane fantasy. This must be what was funny.
When the Satyrs hanging out saw the king in this state, and maybe even had seen the Murders, they probably went into stock routines akin to “Feets don’t fail me now!” running away yelling with their eyes and mouths wide open.
I love Satire, but it is sad.
Remind me why we’re still paying attention to what Obama says?
LOL!
Rec’d, of course.
I didn’t/couldn’t watch, but given most of the commentary, this phrase typified most of his calls for ‘benefits to the people and planet’:
“We must try really, really hard to at least pretend to be thinking about doing something about it….(wohn, wohn, wohn: adult voices as heard by the kids on Peanuts cartoons).
Rec’d.
Interesting.
You, of course, know what happened to all that ancient and even earlier literature and myth….Justinian burned it in the Library of Alexandria. then came the Dark Ages. Christainity…..so insecure.
I’m still resentful of that deed and I wasn’t even there!
You should try a few of Joseph Campbell’s books. His group of books on mythology from all over the world is pretty mind-blowing and he DOESN’T skip the Goddess stories like so many do.
Occidental Mythology is a real treat
Superb!
I thank you, OB, for powerfully employing the very best of biting satire, that I have had the pleasure of encountering for quite some time, to lay bare the truth …
Recommended to the consideration and conscience of everyone at FDL … and beyond …
DW
I love Campbell and Robert Graves and James Frazer and Hamlet’s Mill.
Partr of how the ancient Greeks censored Goddess worship: Ishtar was an important, powerful, sexual goddess. The Greeks made her Zeus’s oldest sister, the oldest in the family of gods.
Her adventures? There’s just the one. She was an old virgin. She was one of the 12 great gods and goddesses (the Olympians). But when a young male god came along, Dionysus, she gladly gave up her throne to him.
Yes there was an Ishtar, but all she ever did was get out of the way to let the men take over.
Personally, I think OB’s take is truth, and Obama’s actual speech was the satire.
OB speaks truth to the heart, while BO seeks to cynically manipulate the soul …
The body politic is, according to the political class, which includes the media, up for grabs … to poked and prodded, to be intoxicated, to be drugged, miserably misled and thoroughly abused.
How refreshing it is to encounter those, like OB, who cherish the life and well-being of that body, who would comfort, feed, clothe, and encourage that body …
But then, OFG, you are such a healer yourself, for your words encourage understanding, community, peace, and genuine prosperity.
Many such healers are to be found at this place, and each and every one of you (you know who you are) have my deepest appreciation.
Namaste
DW
Ohio Barbarian, I consider your satire a work of art.
I did not watch it. The initial installment was panned and I am no fan of reality shows anyway.
This one is poorly cast, badly written and the production values suck.
No needless to say the satire fell kind of flat on me. Sorry..
Excellent, Ohio Barbarian! My hat’s off to you!
And, for what it’s worth, I owe you an apology. Some time ago, you were criticizing our dear Governor John Hickenlooper, and I stood up for him, school ties being what they are, and all that jazz. But his more recent actions – clearing the Capitol grounds of Occupy protesters, having the State sue the City of Longmont to overturn its ban on fracking, and his consumption of fracking fluid to prove its utter goodness (http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_22586146/hickenloopers-sip-fracking-fluid-recalls-mag-chloride-cocktail) – all demand that I say – You were right and I was wrong. Let’s hope that Governor Frackenlooper has finally risen to his upper level of incompetence.