'The Fire Next Time': James Baldwin and American Racism

On May 25th 2020 George Floyd, African-American, was killed under the knee of police brutality and America, once again, erupted in protests confronting its original sin. This time the protests swelled with unremitting fury despite a pandemic. Awakened to the systemic racism that continues to be a blot Americans, protesting aside, turned to seek an intellectual understanding of racism and books about race relations became bestsellers. My own journey has begun with James Baldwins's (1924-87) searing essays collectively published under the title, "The fire next time".

'The fire next time' consists of two essays written in 1962 & 1963. One was a letter to his nephew. The second essay narrates Baldwin's disenchantment with the Church and his prescription of how Black America can respond to white America.

1963 was the year when Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his "letter from Birmingham jail", NAACP secretary Medgar Evers was assinated in Mississippi, Martin Luther King Jr delivered his 'I have a dream speech' and a church in Birmingham was bombed that killed four young girls.

America was, as it is now, a cauldron of racial troubles and racial violence, particularly in the South, was rampant. In this backdrop Baldwin wrote a letter to his nephew explaining the nature of the country that he was born in.

"This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you perish.....You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason....You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected make peace with mediocrity. Where you have turned, James, in your short time on this earth, you have been told where you could go and what you could do (and how you could dit) and where you could live."

Having told his nephew of the grotesque oppression he'd have to experience Baldwin then advises him to 'accept' white Americans with love. Beyond 'acceptance' Baldwin adds that Black America should 'integrate' with white America "with love" forcing "our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it".

The essay, "Down at the cross: Letter from a region in my mind" is part autobiographical explaining Baldwin's disenchantment with the Church, meeting racially radioactive preacher Elijah Muhammad and, yet again, teaching Black America not to succumb to hate.

Baldwin quotes Rudyard Kipling's racist poem, "The white man's burden" in the preface. Racial humiliation was, as it is now, a constant presence in the life of Black Americans. Baldwin recounts how, as a boy of 10, looking no older. he adds rather sarcastically, he was frisked by policemen while crossing a street and making crude jokes about his sexuality. When Baldwin told his father that he'd do everything a white man does he saw fear in his father's eyes, fear that was different from that his father had ever shown before.

Seeing how his fellow Black Americans were taken by a life of crime and drugs, driven by poverty, Baldwin sought a 'gimmick' to keep himself out of trouble and found that the Church was to be his gimmick. He says he learned "how to work on a congregation until the last dime was surrendered". He was quickly disenchanted with the Church to the extent that, seeing his congregants, he needed strength "not to curse, not to tell them to throw away their Bibles and get off their knees and go home and organize, for example a rent strike".

Disenchantment grew when he saw that while the Church taught to lover everybody it "applied only to those who believed as we did and it did not apply to white people at all". A minister told Baldwin that he should never yield a seat on a bus to a white woman because white men her rose for a Black woman. That kind of tit for tat theologically troubles Baldwin who feels that how he acts his own responsibility and not predicated by how others behave towards him. "There was no love in the church. It was a mask for hatred and self-hatred and despair".

"White people", Baldwin continues to say," were, and are astounded by the holocaust in Germany. They did not know they could act that way. But I very much doubt whether black people were astounded- at least, in the same way"."Christianity", Baldwin hammers, "has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty". Eventually he did leave the church.

In that backdrop Baldwin meets with Elijah Muhammad, known for being racially incendiary, head of the Nation of Islam, an organization for Black Muslims. While Black churches were the bedrock of Civil Rights movement there were Blacks who were disenchanted with the church as a white establishment turned to Islam. The Nation of Islam, Baldwin rather grudgingly accepts, did provide Blacks a life away from crime and drugs.

Elijah Muhammad cooked up mythology to fashion a history. "God is black. All black men belong Islam; they have been chosen. And Islam shall rule the world". "We were offered, as Nation of Islam doctrine, historical and divine proof that all white people are cursed, and are devils". Baldwin dismisses this doctrine of hate, "there is nothing new in this merciless formulation except the explicitness of its symbols and the candor of its hatred".

John Lewis, Civil Rights icon, injured grievously during the historic march from Selma to Montgomery to secure voting rights, published a posthumous oped today that, devoid of any hatred, advised a younger generation, "let the spirit of peace and the power of everlasting love be your guide".

Lewis tells us that "people on every continent have stood in your shoes". History, across continents and societies, has common features and America's racial history has a lot in common with the caste history of India. If America produced a Elijah Muhammad my hometown produced E.V. Ramaswami.  To Muhammad white Americans were devils, to Ramswami it was the Brahmins. Rejection of dominant religion was common between Blacks and the oppressed castes of India. The voice of Lewis is paralleled in the voice of Gandhi and other reformers.

Why does Baldwin, despite every justification to wallow in hatred, reject such hate? "If one is permitted treat any group of people with special disfavor because of their race or the color of their skin, there is no limit to what one will force them to ensure, and the entire race has been mysteriously indicted, no reason not to attempt to destroy it root and branch. This is precisely what the Nazis attempted". He finds it morally unacceptable to not "oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do others what has been done to them". "Whoever debases others is debasing himself".

Having eschewed violence or vendetta Baldwin defines 'love' as not the usual "infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth". "It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and event greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate."

Calling forth "conscious whites" and "conscious blacks" to not falter but to end the racial nightmare for without that, Baldwin reminds, quoting a Black spiritual song, "God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!"


References:

1. Baldwin's essay "Letter from a region in my mind" (This is the bulk of the book)

Underground Railroad: Slavery in America and Colson Whitehead's Searing Fiction

Steven Spielberg's chose to depict the Allied Army landing on D-Day for a gut wrenching and blood soaked 30 minutes only so viewers cannot but escape the gore by looking away for a minute or two. Colson Whitehead's much acclaimed 'The Underground Railroad', a fictional narrative of a slave trying to escape to freedom, is riveting and from the get go assaults the reader in unremitting prose the horrors of slavery until the last page. Whitehead pulls no punches in his depictions of the physical and moral cruelty of Slavery as an institution.

From Amazon.com

The book opens with the story of Ajarry, grandmother of the protagonist Cora. The price Ajarry was sold for in an African town to slave buyers could not be determined because she was part of a 'bulk purchase, eighty-eight human souls for sixty crates of rum and gun powder'. 'Able bodied men and children bearing women fetched more than juveniles, making an individual accounting difficult'. Whitehead is relentless in depicting the horrific fact that slaves were looked at as commodities and sometimes less respectful than furniture and sometimes valued more, especially when they disobey or worse, runaway, only so that they can learn that had they behaved no wiser than a stool they may not have suffered the unspeakable tortures or grisly death. Seen as property the slaves were subject to the vicissitudes of commodities trading. When the ship carrying Ajarry reaches America she is sold for $226 because of the "season's glut in young girls". Being sold repetitively Ajarry is taught the lesson's life by life. "She learned to quickly adjust to the new plantations, sorting the nigger breakers from the merely cruel, the layabouts from the hardworking, the informers from secret keepers". 

Ajarrys granddaughter Cora was born in a Georgia plantation and abandoned by her mother Mabel, who went in search of freedom, when Cora was just 10. We raise our children today in a cloistered environment and cannot even begin to fathom how a mother could abandon a child and go in search of her own freedom and how a child would even survive in horrendous conditions, all alone. From holocaust to civil war torn areas of today we see this time and again. Whether it is a teenage Anne Frank in Bergen-Belsen or a blood soaked and shell shocked toddler in Syria the life of Cora echoes across the ages and different horrors. In bringing that horror home Whitehead succeeds. Whitehead's book is not just about the darkest chapter of American history but a retelling of how wicked human soul can be and how the story can be taken as metaphor for current events. Elie Wiesel, survivor of Auschwitz, recalled how young sons abandoned their parents to survive. Once torn asunder each member of the Frank family then focuses on just his or her survival alone with probably wistful thinking, like Ajarry thinks of her cousins, that their other family members would've somehow survived the tragedy better.

During a party a boy spills "a single drop of wine staining the cuff of" the brother of a slave owner at the Georgia plantation. Terrence, whose cuff was stained, rains blows at the boy's head with his cane. "One drop" think Cora and rushes to defend the boy. Cora is no stranger to slaves being brutalized. "She had seen men hung from trees and left for buzzards and crows. Women carved open to the bones with cat-o'-nine tails. Bodies alive and dead roasted on pyres". The boy and Cora are flogged by Terrence. Terrence's bother James is annoyed only that his brother infringed upon his own property rights by overstepping and punishing his slaves. The slave overseer is incensed at the carelessness of the boy and the impudence of Cora. Both are stripped and flogged to their bones and washed with pepper water. 

Colson Whitehead - From www.colsonwhitehead.com

Big Anthony, a runaway slave who gets caught, is barbarically brutalized and Whitehead spares no details. Big Anthony's punishment is arranged as a spectacle and guests, other slave owners, were invited to watch. "Big Anthony was whipped for the duration of their meal and they ate slow". "Visitors sipped spiced rum as Big Anthony was doused with oil and roasted. The witnesses were spared his screams, as his manhood had been cut off on the first day, stuffed in his mouth, and sewn in". The brutal murder and disfigurement of Emmett Till, a 14 year old boy, comes to mind. Till's murder in 1955 and the open casket funeral held by his mother set off the Civil Rights struggle just a few decades ago.

Emmett Till's brutalized face. Courtesy Wikipedia

Whitehead's novel is not just a gory retelling of a past but it connects, a tad subtly but explicitly, with current events. Black Americans are too frequently stopped while driving and checked by police in today's America. Slave catching patrolmen in Whitehead's novel "stopped any niggers they saw and demanded their passes. They stopped niggers they knew to be free, for their amusement but also to remind the Africans of the forces arrayed against them, whether they were owned by a white man or not".

The Underground Railroad that existed in the ante-bellum era was a metaphorical references to a loose network of abolitionists and slaves who had escaped who took it upon themselves to help others escape. Harriet Tubman, herself an escapee, was a 'conductor' on one such railroad. Whitehead takes the metaphor and makes it a Gabriel Garcia Marquess-like realism with a fictional but physical underground railroad that snakes from Georgia to the North Eastern states. Slaves are approached by station masters who then conduct them to a train that runs underground and accessed by a trap door. The trapdoor is a multi-layered symbolism. 

Slavery was not a monolithic uniform institution but varied across the states. While Georgia and the south were drenched in blood states like the Carolinas had their own hypocrisies and brutality, albeit more refined, like sterilization of blacks by stealth. The Tuskegee syphilis experiment, the most notorious experiment in American medical history where blacks afflicted by syphilis were given placebos and studied for the effects of progression of disease, finds a mention. Till today the experiment affects how blacks perceive medical professionals in America and a chastised medical fraternity is aware of the deep distrust of African-Americans towards them. 

Cora escapes from the Georgia plantation and reaches South Carolina where a doctor gently suggests to her that she should get sterilized. One night Cora hears a woman scream that her child was stolen. She at first thinks the woman is having nightmares remembering of perhaps a child stolen from her and sold off and only later learns that having been sterilized by stealth the woman had gone mad realizing what was stolen from her. 

Slavery was justified by one too many that it was Biblically sanctioned. While Cora convalesces at a safe house in South Carolina the white lady taking care of her recites Bible verses to her and gently tells her that if God had not intended for slavery to exist they'd be free. Cora bitterly remembers the overseer at the Georgia plantation reciting those verses punctuating them by lashing the slaves with a cat-o'-nine tails. 

Cora had even heard the 'Declaration of Independence'. A slave boy, Michael, used to recite the Declaration and it was an amusement to the Whites who marveled at a slave boy narrating it. "Michael's ability never amounted to more than a parlor trick, delighting visitors before the discussion turned as it always did to the diminished faculties of niggers".

Hearing Michael's recitation of the Declaration Cora "didn't understand the words, most of them at any rate, but created equal was not lost on her. The white men who wrote it didn't understand it either, if all men did not truly mean all men. Not if they snatched away what belonged to other people, whether it was something you could hold in your hand, like dirt, or something you could not, like freedom". The jab at slave owning Thomas Jefferson is all too explicit. George Washington freed his slaves in his will but while he lived he hunted anyone who escaped from his clutches. The US constitution included what is now shamefully called one-fifths compromise whereby slaves were counted as property.

Benjamin Franklin had famously cautioned that "people who give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety  deserve neither liberty nor safety". South Carolina, not wanting to be a safe haven for slaves fleeing southern states, instituted slave patrols that would barge into homes of whites and inspect for slaves who might be harbored by abolitionists. "Cora thought that the whites would be loath to give up their freedoms even in the name of security" but was shocked to learn that those desirous of being seen as patriots "boasted of how often they'd been searched and given a clean bill". It was common for neighbors, servants and even children  to inform on those who harbored slaves. The perils of nationalism could not be more tellingly illustrated. From the slave holding south to Stalinist Russia to today's 'see something, say something' America one can hear the echoes of that. In Stalin's Russia it was common of husbands to denounce wives and children informed on their parents.  

Cora is hidden in an attic by a family in South Carolina until the maid, tempted by reward, informs on the family. Cora is dragged away by a slave catcher engaged by the Randall family in Georgia while the family that sheltered her are hung from a tree. The story of Anne Frank comes to mind. Again and again the story that Whitehead tells is not just about slavery but of how people behave in circumstances not too different. This is a story of humanity at large told with slavery as central theme but one could see the stories of Holocaust, the horrors of Stalinism, the grotesqueness of India's caste system and more.

Nothing is black and white in the story. The pun is unintended. While there are whites who inflict such brutalities there are the white abolitionists who put their lives in harms way to liberate slaves and there were slaves who cooperate with the white man. Whether it is the Judenraat, the Jewish councils, in the concentration camps or the vast hundreds of thousands of Indians who served the British Raj or the groveling communists in the Stalin era or the members of the Vichy France the stain of collaborating with the oppressor is a human history not all too unique.

Having captured Cora the slave catcher Ridgeway lectures her on the 'American imperative': I prefer the American spirit, the one that called us from the Old world to the New, to conquer and build and civilize. And destroy that what needs to be destroyed. To lift up lesser races. If not lift up, subjugate. And if not subjugate, exterminate. Our destiny by divine prescription - the American imperative.

Having indicted the 'American imperative' through the slave catcher Whitehead then gives voice through Elijah Lander, a mulatto abolitionist, about what Freedom is: Work needn't be suffering, it could unite folks...Freedom was a community laboring for something lovely and rare.

Controlling access to education from those seen as unworthy of wisdom by those who think they've a god given right to wisdom is seen across cultures with sickening regularity. From an ancient Indian treatise that forbade knowledge to those called Shudras to white plantation owners who thought "the only thing more dangerous than a nigger with a gun was a nigger with a book" it is a common thread. A slave being seen reading a pamphlet, not even a book, could suffer an agonizing death.

Colson Whitehead's book is an urgent read in a year where a racist and xenophobic demagogue is within striking distance of the American presidency. After I visited the 'Topology of terror" museum in Berlin I wrote that America too needs such a museum to teach Americans of the nation's darkest chapter. It so happens that the Smithsonian museums just opened up a museum about African-Americans in Washington DC, thanks to the ceaseless efforts of Civil Rights icon and Congressman John Lewis. It is worth noting that Lewis had to prevail over a racist congressman, Jesse Helms of North Carolina, who time and again was resolutely against such a museum. The museum fulfills an urgent need. 

Whitehead wrote a column titled "Rules for Writing" in New York Times. Reading his book one could say that Whitehead has diligently followed the rules he had set forth. His very first rule was 'Show and Tell'. He disagrees with the "Show, don't tell" school of writing and calls for 'show and tell' because "when writers put their work out into the world they're like kids bringing their broken unicorns and chewed up teddy bears into class in the sad hope that someone else will love them as much as they do". Whitehead strikes the delicate balance in 'show and tell' where the telling could degenerate into total lack of nuances or subtleties. Referring to a dead dog of a slave owner he writes "the mutt was loved by man and nigger". The subtleties are packed into the sentences.

Rule 2 is "don't go searching for a subject, let the subject find you". 16 years in the making the subject had indeed found the author.

Saul Bellow, Whitehead quotes in Rule 3, said "fiction is higher autobiography". Whitehead lays down as dictum and adheres to "write what you know". 

Rule 4 is "never use three words when one will do" and rule 11 is "revise, revise, revise". Again, Whitehead practices what he preaches. The prose is sparse and completely shorn of unnecessary ornate phrases or metaphors. 

Having told writers to 'show and tell' he cautions in rule 6 that "what isn't said is as important as what is said. In many classic short stories the real action occurs in the silences". While he gives graphic details of the physical nature of the violence inflicted upon the slaves he  only implies the lurking moral corruption. No one, neither the slave owner or the slave, escapes the moral corruption of a society plagued by such violence. When Cora becomes a woman her fellow slaves gang rape her. Nudity is no sacred secret offered as token of intimacy because Cora is whipped naked in full view of her fellow slaves and others. Musing about sex with Ceasar, who had hatched the plan  to escape, Cora thinks to the day she was whipped naked and how Ceasar had looked at her unflinchingly even when other slaves, shuddering at the prospect that one day they certainly would be in her place, avert their eyes. After Cora's mother escapes scheming slaves make the 10 year old abandoned child's life miserable. The moral corruption of a violent system is hinted at. Again, the moral corruption of Stalinism and socialism in India came to my mind. 

'Underground Railroad' deserves to be read, re-read, re-read and reflected upon. The book is about the past but it shows how the past is never truly past and the present not only is an echo but is a progeny. This is not a story of one country's dark past but the story of humankind that even today murders and pillages in the name of race.

Whitehead's 'Underground Railroad' should become required reading in schools. I wish the book gets a Pulitzer next April.

References:

1. 6 Questions for Colson Whitehead - Time Magazine interview http://time.com/4447972/colson-whitehead-the-underground-railroad/
2. The Real Underground Railroad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Railroad
3. Michiko Kakutani's review of the book in NYT http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/03/books/review-the-underground-railroad-colson-whitehead.html?action=click&contentCollection=Book%20Review&module=RelatedCoverage&region=Marginalia&pgtype=article
4. Colson Whitehead interview with NYT on writing the book http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/04/books/colson-whitehead-on-slavery-success-and-writing-the-novel-that-really-scared-him.html
5. Colson Whitehead's rules for writing in NYT http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/books/review/colson-whiteheads-rules-for-writing.html?_r=0
6. Emmett Till https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till
7. Civil Rights icon and Congressman John Lewis on the opening of Smithsonian museum about African Americans https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/john-lewis-spent-15-years-fighting-for-the-museum--now-the-dream-is-realized/2016/09/14/eeb0ca10-64bb-11e6-96c0-37533479f3f5_story.html

Obama's Failed Presidency and America's Leadership Crisis

"The glory and freshness of a dream. It is not now as it hath been of yore". The words of Wordsworth best befits the state of Obama's presidency. Barack Obama came to Washington D.C. like a triumphant Ceasar and he will leave the White House like Nero. America exulted in the election of the nation's first black president and few would've foreseen a day when his own party candidates, like St. Peter, deny any knowledge of him. The world's richest, most powerful and most innovative country is practically leaderless. What happened and why did a dream become sour?

Nothing about Barack Obama, especially his over-hyped oratorical skill, has ever impressed me or inspired trust in his ability to lead a great country. Today when Obama's approval rating hover in the low 40s I stand vindicated. A New York Times headline humiliatingly informed that "on campaign road, uneasy Democrats show Obama their tail lights". The Democratic party, another article pointed out, is now Clinton's party, not Obama's party. Dana Milbank of Washington Post headlined an article, "Conservatives are finally right: Obama is not a dictator. He's a bystander". Milbank pointed out that he had in the past called Obama as "President passerby", "hapless bystander" and charged that Obama functioned "oddly like a spectator".

The unkindest cuts came from Obama's own former cabinet members. Hillary Clinton, Secretary of state, former opponent and prospective candidate created a furore by saying that Obama's policy of 'don't do stupid stuff' is not an 'organizing principle'. Leon Panetta, former director of CIA and Secretary of defense, was withering in his memoir "Worthy fights". Panetta focused on Obama's disengaged style and lack of thinking through strategic decisions like Syria. Robert Gates, a Bush appointee as Secretary of defense and retained by Obama, was open about how Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both saw the Iraq war through only a political prism. Not even George W Bush came in for such stringent criticisms from senior members of his cabinet.

Obama came to office vowing to show that the government can be 'smart' and disprove conservative criticism that government, dysfunctional by nature, needs to be as small as possible. On this score more than anything Obama is a grand failure. Hundreds of millions of dollars were poured into the appallingly shoddy roll out of the health care web site that left many including his supporters fuming. News reports repeatedly pointed out how disengaged Obama was on the roll out of a landmark law. The department of Veterans Affairs charged with healthcare of veterans was a cesspool of incompetency where a huge cover up, across the nation, took place to cover the inordinate waiting time for veterans to receive care. The IRS was caught acting partisan. The Secret Service was caught in a web of scandals involving prostitutes and gross negligence leading to the firing of their chief. The CDC's handling of the Ebola breakout eroded faith in the one agency that Americans tended to trust more than any. The incompetence of Obama's administration makes Bush's administration look better by contrast and that says a lot. In all instances the worst part was that Obama learned about a crisis from news reports. Democratic supporters and columnists sympathetic to the administration themselves have now started saying in chorus that the dysfunction is the direct result of Obama's lack of management.

In his inaugural address Obama declared, airily, that Americans reject the 'false choice between security and values'. That Obama is the president who oversaw the worst administration that willy nilly spied on American citizens in a scope that shocked the conscience of many. He also has the dubious honor of launching punitive drone strikes where the casualties are counted in such a way, according to principles accepted by him, to undercount civilian deaths. Jill Abramson, former editor of New York Times, called Obama's administration the "most secretive administration" since Richard Nixon's administration. Susan Page of USA Today said this is the "most dangerous" administration. Obama's Department of Justice has pursued reporters with a zeal and tyrannical glee that has sent the chill down the spine of many a reporter. A Fox News reporter was even charged with being a co-conspirator for refusing to reveal source of a news. Frankly, if the President had been a republican the press would have pilloried him endlessly and mercilessly unlike the muted condemnations that are being sprinkled now. In any other administration if US senators had been spied upon by CIA the press and Congress would've erupted in volcanic rage. Obama has made Bush appear reticent when it comes to testing the limits of constitutional propriety.

Restoring US credibility in the world arena was a prime commitment of Obama after the Bush years. Spying on the leader of a nation that's a close ally is not a good way to make friends and Obama learned that lesson after the NSA was caught snooping on Angela Merkel of Germany. After declaring haughtily in a press meet that he is drawing a 'red line' in the Syrian imbroglio Obama walked back his words and declared, again haughtily, that it was the world that drew a red line. By now the world understood that the US President's bluff can be called out. Obama mocked Romney for calling Russia our enemy number 1. Thanks to Putin Romney stands vindicated. In his zeal to be defined as the 'not-Bush' persona Obama pulled out of Iraq in haste and today Iraq appears to be run over a murderous ISIS army. There is no part of the World today where Obama's words carry any weight. Other than ending wars Obama's foreign policy has been a disaster. Fresh after his Ceasar like inauguration Obama and Michelle went abroad to lobby for Chicago to be the city to host the next Olympics. Thanks to their lobbying Chicago was eliminated in the first round.

Bill Clinton is often derisively called the master of triangulation but grudgingly admired for his ability to mud wrestle with his opponents to finagle an agreement or a compromise. Obama with his airy "I shall not soil my hands" attitude and undisguised contempt for the political process is singularly devoid of any ability to be a leader. Bob Woodward recounts in his book 'Price of politics'  the vacuous leadership of Obama during the debt deal negotiations in 2012. While Woodward faulted both Democrats and Republicans for failing to resolve America's debt issue he singled out Obama for harsh criticism since as President he has  to take the blame for lack of leadership.

America faces serious challenges. Prophesying the decline of American power is a cottage industry amongst authors. The biggest challenge facing the country is the crushing debt that is driven by 'entitlement spending'. New York Times has called the Affordable Care Act, pejoratively called by many as Obamacare, a success based on the millions of previously uninsured who had enrolled. The same article also stated that a vast majority of the new enrollees are in Medicaid, the Federal program to provide insurance to low income people, and that too a majority of such enrollees receive subsidies. Essentially this is the largest wealth transfer program in US history. Romney lost the presidency for stating a fact- that nearly 47% Americans do not pay taxes. Obama, in his role as high priest of liberalism, thinks he can balance the debt on the backs of just 2% of American tax payers. Overhauling the byzantine tax code, broadening the tax base, realistic cuts to entitlements are needed urgently to ensure the fiscal health of USA.

Immigration is another very serious challenge facing America. While Democrats, especially Obama, have happily reaped votes from the Hispanic lobby promising immigration reform they have been equally happy on not doing anything to resolve the issue lest they lose a wedge issue that is advantageous to them. The GOP is being ridiculously bull headed in not just falling to resolve this but in damaging its electoral prospects when a presidential candidate suggests illegal immigrants to 'self-deport' themselves. Obama's administration deported hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants until Obama, facing an election, decided to stop the deportations. Obama repeatedly allowed politics to determine what he does or does not do about immigration. When Obama announced he was going to announce executive actions this summer Democrats facing re-election pleaded that he postpone any action until after the election. The Hispanic lobby is livid that lives are being treated like a political football. At last they too understood who Obama is.

Has Obama ascending to the White House done any good for African-Americans? In a word, no. Obama, ever eager to win re-election and political success sought to actively distance himself from even appearing to address any problems specific to Afro-American community. When supporters were invited to the White House and given talking points for re-election the Afro-American representatives found themselves with no instructions since the White House did not want to be seen as advocating any issue relating to them lest it anger the rest of the electorate. Early on during Obama's first term Shirley Sherrod, an African-American employee in the Department of Agriculture,  ran into a controversy when an edited video of her speaking appeared in a right wing online site and seemed to show that she was unwilling to help White farmers. The Obama administration and NAACP eagerly condemned her and forced her to resign. Only later did the full video surface and Sherrod was vindicated that she did not refuse help to a couple because they were white. If this had happened under a White president and that too a Republican president the entire black community would have been enraged.

Obama has single handedly encouraged the politics of envy with his rhetoric about Wall Street, corporations and the top 2% of the income demographics. The Economist magazine recently pointed out how Democrats win elections by populist promises and shrill rhetoric about the rich. Never in recent history have achievers and job creators had it so bad as in the Obama era.

Infrastructure, roads, bridges and airports, in the world's richest country is crumbling. Anyone passing through JFK or Newark International Airport and driving through Verrazano Narrows Bridge or I-95 will be appalled at the state of America's infrastructure. Obama supports infrastructure spending only as an avenue to grease the greed of construction unions. Between the greed of unions, avaricious lawyers and a run away environmental lobby it is almost impossible to build a Golden Gate bridge or a Brooklyn Bridge or a sprawling airport.

Republican party, for their share, have become the party of crazies. The Tea Party revolt yanked the GOP to a crazy far right wing corner. Pushing to the country into a debt default, ranting about abortions, ludicrous ideas on 'legitimate rape' etc have alienated the GOP from a large section of the population. Though the GOP might deliver a blow to democrats in Tuesday's mid-term elections winning the White House remains a dream. Republicans lost the popular vote in 5 out of the last 6 Presidential elections, of which 4 were lost in landslides. Mitt Romney, being no Reagan, could not become the voice of capitalism and rebuff Obama team's malicious attacks on him and the free market that made him rich. The GOP lacks an intellectual leader who can be the voice of free market against a democratic party that is fast becoming Marxist in its outlook.

All is not gloom however. American economy still remains the most resilient, the most dominant and the most innovative in the world. Facebook, iPhone, iPod, Twitter, Google, Driver less cars, Tesla and many other technical innovations of the past decade are still coming out of only America and are impossible to happen anywhere else.America still remains, by comparison, an open economy welcoming thousands of foreigners as students and workers. Much to the chagrin of many the American financial sector remains a robust component of a great economy. America, to the surprise of the world, is now a net energy exporter thanks to the fracking boom that has unleashed America's potential on energy and remade the energy landscape.

America is looking for a leader to emerge and be its voice. The list of presidential hopefuls from both parties is uninspiring. Whether it is has-beens, like Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush or scary ideological extremists like Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren or head scratching flip floppers like Rand Paul or a novice like Marco Rubio, that are spoken of as presidential contenders. In one word, uninspiring. The country needs a leader who will unleash America's innate unmatched energy to innovate, to create, to take risks and be rewarded handsomely. The country needs a leader who will speak of equal opportunities and not equal outcomes.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

                                              --- 'The Second Coming' by W.B. Yeats

Let not some candidate slouch towards 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. America needs a leader to tell her that she is still the shining city on a hill. America needs a president who will embrace the American spirit and American exceptionalism.

Is Barack Obama An Intellectual?

Barack Obama was the first black President of Harvard Law Review, the 5th black senator, the first black president of US in 275 years. He also has the dubious honor of becoming US president with the least governing experience in modern history and had mostly voted 'present' (not even 'abstaining') as state senator in Illinois legislature.

Is it even fair to ask, an Ivy league graduate and a man so many historical firsts, whether Obama is an intellectual? A legendary political strategist confided in a private conversation that "whoever becomes the US President, irrespective of the party, deserves to be there". Obama's candidacy for US presidency is a tale of ambition and strategy unparalleled even by Reagan and Clinton, both of whom were very experienced Governors who sought national office and had to fight their way to it within the party and nationwide.

Taking advantage of opportunities is a talent by itself. In the aftermath of the drubbing that GOP recieved in 2006 mid-term elections Bill Clinton is supposed to have told Hillary "unless the Democratic party nominates a felon we can win the presidency". Obama, in many ways, was like what Carlyle said, "the moment produces the man". Let us not forget that Obama started as an outlier candidate. Until his Iowa victory even within Afro-American community he was seen as sure to lose possibly gain experience now and run a better campaign at a later date. It is easy to talk of how he coasted to the Presidency from gaining popularity since his much lauded address at the 2004 Democratic convention.

It would be gross injustice to Obama's campaign to harp only on how the press treated him with kid gloves and was lost in blind adulation. Bill Clinton was the first Democrat to be re-elected since FDR. Democrats and Republicans thought Hillary was a shoo-in given that she would be supported by the political genius of Bill Clinton. Those were lonely dog days for Obama. When he romped home in Iowa (37% vote) and Hillary finished a poor third Obama became an overnight national sensation. But how he won Iowa is the question on which I intend to discuss what kind of an intellectual Obama is.

Beyond 'hope' and 'change' the only tangible thing Obama did in Iowa was pandering. He pandered to Iowa's notorious farm lobby for tarriffs against Brazil's sugarcane based ethanol. John McCain, later to become Obama's opponent, bluntly opposed the Iowa corn lobby on the tarriff against Brazil. Sugarcane based ethanol is more fuel efficient than Iowa's corn based ethanol. Economists continue to warn against using corn for ethanol in an artifical attempt to lower fuel imports. Corn diverted to brew ethanol to fuel American cars robs the world of corn based food driving up food scarcity. Pandering to sections of voters will be a recurrent pattern of the next four years.

Obama has never challenged conventional wisdom or populism. In midst of a world seething with fury against Wall street it does not take any courage to scold bankers or to call them 'fat cats'. What would have taken courage is to call for better and more capitalism. Wall Street's undoing was not capitalism but insufficient capitalism. It was Bush who, risking unpopularity and the wrath of his own party, bailed out Wall Street under terms that eventually benefiited the tax payer. It was also Bush who bailed out Detroit. Obama turned it to a reckless bailout to reward the unions and resulted in continued tax payer losses.

Withdrawing from Iraq was no brainer. The American taxpayer was exhausted, the war was controversial from the word go. What would have been intellectual was to withdraw from Afghanistan in 2009. The VP and many others counseled Obama to withdraw from Afghanistan too citing weak economy and the intractable mess the war was. Afraid of GOP backlash and with his eye on 2012 Obama tried to replicate Bush's Iraq 'surge' strategy. It is a grand failure today. If Obama had leveled with American people and refused a 'surge' for Afghanistan and vowed that pursuit of Bin Laden is still afoot that would have been a moment of leadership.

Unlike Bill Clinton's crusade in 1992 to reform health care in 2008 it was commonly agreed by all candidates and the American tax payer that the health care cost Leviathan needs to be hooked. The only contention was how to do it. Battle scarred Hillary Clinton presented a plan that included mandates. Obama cried foul and pontificated that his plan does not levy a 'tax', as he referred to mandate. Hillary and other experts disagreed that health care reform without mandate was not possible or cost effective. During Ohio primary Hillary exploded 'shame on you Barack Obama' for mischaracterizing her mandate as tax. As president Obama instituted mandate in his Affordable care act and the US Supreme Court later ruled that that was consitutional but called it a 'tax'

As President has Obama ever delivered bad news to a constituency that he depends on for re-election? Never. Not once. Standing before a gathering of hundreds of doctors Obama lobbied for his health care reform but started off with a stern message "I cannnot give you what you want" referring to doctors demand to reform malpractice lawsuits and institute caps on awards. Tort lawyers are a very influential democratic base and prodigious fund raisers too. It is easy to offend doctors than to risk offending his own fund raising base.This is not about opportunism. An intellectual articulates a difficult to swallow position and shepherds his constituency with logic and reason about a required change of course given new paradigms. Failing to do that is a signal failure of an intellectual.

America has a debt burden of $16 Trillion which is almost 100% of UD GDP. Entitlement programs are expanding exponentially beyond any fiscal sustenance. Obama's simplistic prescription is to raise taxes on millionaires and billionaires under the pretext of asking them to pay 'their fair share'. Without going into the debate of whether millionaires and billionaires are paying their fair share lets look at the 'what-if' scenario of Obama getting his wish. The revenue thus raised will pay for only 72 hours of US Government expenses. This, to be polite, is intellectually dishonest shorn of any shred of intellectual integrity. A serious problem needs a serious answer not dishonesty.

That Obama, an Afro-American, became a President is justifiably characterized as a watershed moment, even a redemption. Many black commentators wrote that seeing a black first family inspires many afro-american kids. True. But within the Afro-American community there is widespread resentment against Obama administration, despite the immense pride that is there on the surface. Seeking to be seen as "president of all America" Obama, even where he could or should, has actively distanced himself from being seen as doing something targeted for Afro-Americans.

Jodi Kantor writes in New York Times, "At the first meeting of his top campaign donors last year, some black donors were dismayed when officials handed out cards with talking points on the administration’s achievements for various groups — women, Jews, gays and lesbians — and there was no card for African-Americans". Referring to Obama's quote that he is not only "President of Black America" Afro-American activist and scholar Cornel West said that statement “makes me want to vomit. Did you say that to the business round table?” he asked rhetorically. “Do you say that to Aipac?” (referring to a pro-Israel lobbying group).

Unemployment rages at 15%, twice the national average, for Afro-Americans. Appearing before the Congressional Black Caucus that was anxious to hear what President Obama can do. Obama borrowed a much revered Civil Rights era slogan and lectured "put on your marching shoes". That implied, for astute observers, that Afro-American community was sitting idle and not doing enough to lift itself. That was not Obama's intention. It was a speech delivered without much thought or sensitivity. Black Congresswoman Maxine Waters erupted "who was he talking to, we are hurting already". 

Even more shameful was the Shirley Sherrod episode. Shirley Sherrod, an Afro-American State Director of Rural Agriculture in Georgia, was falsely accused of being racist in refusing to help a white farmer. The whole incident was based on dishonest editing of a portion of her speech at a NAACP function. Conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart broke that story. White House went into panic mode and was instrumental in making Shirley Sherrod resign. Sherrod is blistering in her recently released memoirs of how betrayed she felt that this happened in an Afro-American Presidency. Sherrod, as the full speech showed, had actually went out of her way to help the white farmer retain his land. When the full truth emerged the administration still did not offer her old job back, they only offered an 'equivalent'  position. Obama later called her and spoke telling her that he understands her and has written about her kind of experiences in his book. Sherrod simply told him that he could not have had her experiences. Sherrod grew up in racially charged in Georgia unlike Obama. Obama promised her to visit Georgia. Sherrod notes Obama is yet to keep his promise. If Bush had treated Shirley Sherrod like that the GOP would be called 'racist'.

In the aftermath of a rash of shootings that included hurting a congresswoman much was written about America's fetish for guns and the second amendment. The GOP, beholden as it is to the gun lobby, was shamefully, but understandably, silent on talking about gun controls. The acute disappointment was Obama's silence. The last President to sign a ban on assault weapons, A.K. 47's, was Bill Clinton. That ban lapsed in Bush's period and was not renewed. Obama, keen to be re-elected, completely ignored the gun control issue. This was a moment for a supposedly intellectual president to seize the issue and shape public opinion. Instead we only got more soaring rhetoric.

Obama is undoubtedly a very intelligent and very talented politician. But the more and more one looks at his record we only realise that this President is interested in only one thing, his political ambitions and success.

Eisenhower defined an intellectual as "one who takes more words than necessary to say more than what he knows". On that score Barack Obama is the most intellectual to ever occupy the Oval Office.