The New Consciousness...

The world just keeps right on spinning around, doesn't it? I'm functioning on very little sleep - I don't know what it is, maybe the change in the seasons or something, but if I pull down four hours of shut-eye I'm doing well. I've been sleeping lightly, dreaming a lot, and waking up early every morning. The dreams seem important, but I can never remember them.

But who cares? I don't have many important decisions to make. I do my job, I write this column once a week, I try and take care of my business. Who can know the thoughts that lurk inside someone else's mind?

Win at Any and All Costs

I'll tell you what I'm glad I'm not Obama right now. The guy has got to feel like he's running through an obstacle course. He comes into office and his own party is telling him “health care, health care, health care!” So he gets right on it and gets the health care legislation pushed through. Meanwhile it gets scuttled by the Republicans and, frankly, by the cowardly members of his own party. Then it's jobs jobs jobs – so he tries to move forward on jobs, but then oh no, it's not jobs anymore – now it's a debt crisis! So Obama does an about face – ditches his Keynesian economics and agrees to start slashing – no scalpel, we're talking machete. The debt commission is established, but now it's back to jobs! Meanwhile the two wars we are fighting have morphed into three, or maybe four, depending on how you count them. And underlying all of this mess is the pledge by the Republicans that they will not allow one penny of tax hikes to pay for it all. Speaker of the House John Boehner says one day “We've got to get rid of this 'my way or the high way' mentality;” and almost the next breath is “no tax hikes period.” I'm paraphrasing – but seriously, Obama must feel like a pinball, or one of those morons in the “cowboy poker” competitions – the ones in which an angry bull is unleashed and a bunch of nutty cowboys sit around a poker table trying not to move as it kicks their heads off. The one who remains seated the longest is the “winner.” I don't know – I'm starting to think there is something to the theory that Obama's political opponents are willing to scuttle the economy for another year in order to win next November. It's an ugly thought, but it's there. But the fault is Obama's as well – he's letting himself be lead around by the nose – by his own party, by the Republicans, by the special interests, by the power-monger of the day. He hasn't articulated a clear vision, and he hasn't communicated a way forward. And now, with over a year to go, he's already back into campaign mode. Was he ever out of it?

This is the game in the national political arena in this year 2011. Eleven years into the new millennium – where the hell is the new consciousness that is meant to be emerging? Maybe not here – in America. Not in the shopping malls, or on the internet, not in the pages of some free weekly “newspaper.”

madbob@madbob.com