there is perhaps no more perfect example of the President’s function as mediator of the logic of state interest and the common emotion than expressed near the end of this clip of President Obama:

Ultimately when I make a decision, it’s going to be based on the over-arching view of U.S. national security, but, I think I’d be making poor decisions if I didn’t have to look into the eyes of a family member who had lost a loved one and tell them how… grateful we are as a nation. That… that… moment insures that I’m making the best possible decisions, going forward.

It is a sort of magical power, psychologically speaking if not in reality, that the President has, to render a death of value – particularly in a time where the aims of every war have become obscure. In the absence of anything resembling victory, only the President’s special charisma stands between a noble sacrifice and a tragic waste.

The fascinating thing in this for me is the idea that the president in that “moment” of emotional authenticity with a grieving family in reality bridges the gap between sane human values and the “over-arching” needs of national security. It’s a remarkable enough accomplishment if indeed those security needs are both as stated and served by the strategies being employed by the state, but verges toward the truly miraculous as this ideal state degrades toward reality.

The first degradation occurs in the step from official aims and actual aims. That is: the official aim of preventing Al-Qaeda from having a save haven within which to train is quite flimsy, given both the other lawless lands (e.g. Somalia) and (more importantly) the fact that in an age of terrorism, such safe havens are unnecessary. Indeed, the alleged 9/11 hijackers trained to fly in the US. So, it’s not difficult to imagine that these official aims are ideas for public consumption (as, similarly, the invasion of Iraq was sold on the basis of WMD’s, as this was reckoned to be the easiest sell), and that the real aims are something else.

At the first level of degradation of the ideal, the security aims of America, if not what they are supposed to be, are nonetheless genuinely conceived with the common good in mind. Securing a pipeline across Afghanistan for the removal of oil and gas from the various former-Soviet-stans might, for example, be conceived of as in the genuine security interest of the United States, even though this is not the public reason given for continuing the war. In this situation, though the President is involved in some duplicity, he might still authentically participate in the sacred ‘moment’ that binds national security with familial sacrifice.

The real difficulty arises as these covert aims diverge from the genuine common good and instead serve the private good of the various industries involved. Such divergence has been, you might say, the history of the CIA, and the ‘black’ government in general. So what amazes me about Obama is the idea that he’s mediating between those covert interests who have long acted under the over-arching rubric of national security and familial emotion. It’s as if he’s mediating between wolves and sheep.

And of course in ecological terms, wolves and sheep form a dynamic whole – or rather take part within a dynamic whole. There’s nothing inherently wrong with mediating such opposites. The question really is whether or not it can be done. Is the dynamic, as a whole, ecological?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at 4:44 am and is filed under Politics, Psychology, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.