PEN-L message, Re: [Pen-l] Obama and the Cult of Personality

I was born during the end period of Jim Crow segregation. As a teen in the 1960's I deeply felt it inappropriate to fight over a cup of coffee, or to fight to live alone side of ones economic white counterpart. Many of folks, millions did not feel this way.

For virtually all of my life I also felt "integration" had nothing to do with freedom and emancipation. Many of folks, millions did not feel this way.

Forty years later it is easier to see, at least for me, that the long struggle for Civil Rights contained junctures. At some point the fight over a cup of coffee; not to ride on the back of the bus (which had no meaning in a city like Detroit where basically everyone on the bus was black); integrated schools and so forth, because summarized in the slogan "freedom" and "freedom now."

No one asked for a definition of "freedom" because it became self explanatory in the minds and hearts of millions.

Obama's election express the passing of a historical boundary in the life of our country.

His election does not inspire me to renounce communism or reconceptualize classes and social struggles in America; struggles rooted in the soil of our short few hundred years of history. Carved into Obama face and being are the words, "towards a more perfect union," and no one today asks, the definition of "more perfect union." The definition is living and requires no explanation because it is self evident to everyone at this passing moment of time.

The definition - the word, was made flesh in the appearance of two and a half million people making what seems to be the very first American Mecca. Obama's inauguration Mecca eclipse the "Million Man March." Is this not something to ponder? Something has in fact changed or shifted in the country's culture and minds eye.

Some may object at this "social patriotism" but everyone knows what is meant by, "towards a more perfect union."

Yes?

When Dr. King was alive, I actually felt and thought (with the infinite wisdom of a teen), that his approach to the social struggle and his posture before power, was unbecoming of a man of honor. The idea of allowing someone to spit in my face defied logic and my parents upbringing. At the time I did not know I was a tanned Yankee or "one of those Northern Negroes," living off the high end of the hog. Needless to say, many of folks, millions did not feel the way I felt or viewed the world as I did.

History has proven me wrong . . .again.

The evidence is that Dr. King turned out to be the man nobody accurately predicted or thought he was. Dr. King got himself into a lot of trouble, once he left the confines of the South and ventured amongst us Yanks, speaking of poverty and immoral wars of aggression.

Dr. King the individual expressed and represented a juncture in our history that virtually everyone use as a historical marker. Not because "that is what we are taught by the bourgeoisie," but because his personality and individual being was large enough to best expressed a moment in history. There are others like Angela Davis, who is not the person everyone may have thought her to be, but she has her own paragraph in a larger narrative.

That Obama is a juncture in American history and shall forever in our history be used as a historical marker seems the hall mark of obviousness to me.

Many of folks, millions perhaps may not feel this way.

I do not mean to be petty or condescending, but adulation for the leader is a part of the human drama.

Let us march on, til victory is won is redefined by each generation. The banner of the Third American Revolution has not yet ascended to a place in the minds and hearts of folks, where it becomes its own definition. Does any one doubt its profound proletarian essences?

Late at night one can hear the footsteps in the dark.

WL.