Obama in Bedlam

The Emergency Room at San Francisco General Hospital is an American Bedlam. Now the only trauma center in a city that has suffered nearly 100 violent homicides in the first 10 months of 2008, ER is a snake pit boiling over nightly with gunshot and stabbing victims, those mangled in street confrontations or otherwise mowed down in traffic, damaged gangbangers, raving lunatics, drunks in the throes of the DTs, handcuffed prisoners in Guantanamo-like jumpsuits, snarling cops, and harried if heroically serene medical personal just trying to survive their shifts.

Broken men and women moan and thrash on blood-drenched gurneys so jamming the narrow hallways that treatment is reduced to triage. Some patients are lashed to their impromptu beds, the more comatose hooked up to blinking machines. Bodily fluids are sprayed and spat so rudely that the caregivers are forced to wear plastic face visors.

I arrived in this little corner of Hell courtesy of 911 after I had stopped breathing, a borderline emergency, and was shelved for 25 hours in a war zone hallway while the mayhem surged and ebbed all around me. Twice during my stay, the hospital decreed a red alert and the ER was locked down by armed deputies, a measure a retired nurse tells me is imposed when rival gangs face off in the parking lot.

The desperation was palpable. I overheard one severely wounded man threaten to murder his medic. Others were more patient. Some would not immediately respond to the questions of their caregivers. What’s your name, the nurses would demand? What month is it? Where are you? Who is the president?

“Barack Fucking Obama!” an Afro-American throat roared back down the hall and the entire Emergency Room, nurses and doctors and patients together, clapped and cheered wildly. I turned towards the wall and curled into a fetal position.

I don’t buy Barack Obama as the Messiah. I didn’t vote for him (I voted for another Afro-American) and I haven’t filed an application to join his regime. He ran a duplicitous, multi-million dollar campaign that masqueraded as a social movement and because it was a gimmick and a shuck, will thwart and demoralize the re-creation of real social movement for years to come.

The suckers packed shoulder to shoulder in Grant Park on Election Night were not a movement. 40 years ago, the Left stood in that park and were burning American flags, not waving them – although the reasons were equally specious. Back then, it was the denial of another false Messiah’s rightful place on the Democratic Party ticket. We ran a pig for president to underscore our disdain for the electoral process and when Mayor Dailey’s cops kidnapped and barbecued our candidate, we turned to yet another Afro-American who was also not the Messiah. In August 1968, the Mayor of Chicago, whose son is now Barack Obama’s most trusted political advisor, sent in the real pigs to beat us into the Grant Park grass like so many baby harp seals.

Now that was a social movement…

Eduardo Galeano does not get it. When he tells Amy Goodman that he has high hopes for El Baracko because black slaves once built the White House for which the president-elect is now measuring the drapes, he does not consider that Obama himself is a slave, a slave to Wall Street and General Motors and Big Oil and Big Ethanol, a slave to the War Machine and U.S. Imperialism and Israel, a slave to We’re Number One jingoism, avarice, and greed and the American Nightmare, a slave to the free market and free enterprise and free trade and the flimflam of corporate globalization, and most of all, a slave to the Democratic Party puppet masters who now move his strings.

Galeano doesn’t seem to recall that Afro-Americans can be mass murderers too. Condi is a killer and Barack’s big booster Colin Powell once obligated the United National Security Council to cover up a reproduction of Picasso’s “Gernika” before he could lie that contaminated body in the eye about Saddam’s make-believe WMDs and jumpstart a war that has now taken a million Iraqi lives. So far. The bloodletting has hardly abated.

We are in garbage time. The adulatory garbage being spewed about the virtues of Barrack Obama are a toxic trick on the peoples of the earth. One glaring recent example: 100,000 marched from sea to shining sea in the U.S. last weekend (Nov. 16th) in support of same sex marriage and no one had the moxie to even mention that Barack Obama does not support same sex marriage.

False Messiahs are made to be unmasked. Anyone who aspires to be the maximum capo of the world’s most homicidal on-going criminal conspiracy is just that, a criminal. Barack Obama is a war criminal-in-waiting masquerading as a peace candidate on the pretext that he will move the Yanqui troops two wars to the east to massacre civilians who did not vote for him. I am not fooled.

I am not invested in the United States of North America. I do not have an IRA or a CD or whatever they call the shekel-sucking scams that are flogged by those who just bankrupted the nation. I have no stocks or bonds or health insurance or retirement account. I don’t have a job and I don’t pay taxes. I don’t drink Coca Cola and I don’t drive or own a car. Indeed, I don’t own any property at all. I don’t know how to get to Main Street. Hell, I don’t even live in this benighted country.

Recession, depression and financial crisis are great equalizers. Bring ’em on! Those of us who live down at the bottom know how to survive. We are not going away.

On the night that Barack Obama was elected commander-in-chief, U.S. killers operating under NATO impunity, murdered at least 40 more Afghani civilians – “NATO” has now snuffed out over a thousand non-combattant lives this year in a war that Obama is pledged to escalate.

Also on Election Night, the Zionists of Israel deliberately bombed Gaza breaking a months-long truce to send the U.S, president-elect a clear and unequivocal message. 48 hours later that message was received and acknowledged and Rahm Israel Emanuel, a member of the Israeli army, was appointed Obama’s chief of staff.

The scenario is being written as we read. Before he is done, Barack Obama will bomb bomb bomb Iran. Here in our Americas, he will spit in Hugo Chavez’s eye and kick Evo Morales in the balls, prolong the Cuban blockade, and cuddle up to cold-blooded killers like Colombia’s Uribe and Mexico’s Calderon. Galeano will have many new chapters to write.

My pal Sasha Crow is just back from Amman where she is helping to pick up the pieces of the shattered lives of Iraqi refugees driven out of their homeland by an American war. Despite the evacuation of the White House by a president who wrecked their families and destroyed their livelihoods, the refugees to whom she speaks don’t think that Barack Obama is the Messiah either.

Sasha is the motor behind the Collateral Repair Project, a response by grass roots Americans to the unspeakable collateral carnage this country has inflicted upon the innocent to sustain the sort of We’re Number One domination of which Barack Obama is an enthusiastic devotee. If you want to make some change that the world can really believe in, send her some real change at www.collateralrepairproject.org.

JOHN ROSS can be reached at: johnross@igc.org or visit johnross-rebeljournalist.com

 

 

 

 

JOHN ROSS’s El Monstruo – Dread & Redemption in Mexico City is now available at your local independent bookseller. Ross is plotting a monster book tour in 2010 – readers should direct possible venues to johnross@igc.org