Nowtopian

Now that I can get up and down and out and about, pushing and prodding the limits of my prepositional life, I’m SOOO glad it’s our semi-usual February summer. I actually made the walk to the top of Bernal Heights with Adriana a couple of days ago, and have been bicycling around town a lot, though quite slowly as befits an old (recently incapacitated) man… The plum and cherry trees are in spectacular bloom. Here’s the plum tree outside my window, followed by a cherry tree we found on Bernal…

Taking advantage of our city’s beauty, walking around my neighborhood and the nearby hill (more photos of this recent walk at the bottom), but it’s all in a much larger context of a decaying society and its current political life. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how ardently people are embracing the Obama campaign, what it means. I’m obviously unmoved by it, and find myself scratching my head in my quadrennial puzzlement at the urgency of people’s beliefs, their willingness to swallow all this vague rhetoric spooned up by a guy who is bought and paid for by the likes of Goldman Sachs and the Illinois coal industry. A guy who won’t rule out nuclear power! and yet is treated as the embodiment of major change… and to be sure, he is a highly symbolic form of change on the surface at least. If everyone’s secret wishes come true, he’ll actually be a pwogwessive once in office, sweeping aside the neocons in favor of a New Green Deal… it’ll still be capitalism, still dominated by corporations, but maybe, just maybe, a bit more humane, a partially restored social fabric and safety net, a creative approach to intractible problems like climate change, carmeggedon, drug wars, imperialism…

Oh, sorry! I got carried away. I think Goldman Sachs and Zbigniew Brzenzski and the many other major backers and advisers from the ruling class who are rallying around Obama may be the wing of capital who see the need for some real reform, after two terms of brazen looting and a foreign policy that has sent the U.S. plummeting over the cliff. The financial system is unravelling, the world market is in for a period of retrenchment, renewed nationalistic protectionism, and probably some kind of global rules on investment and capital flows… or at least, one might presume that’s what Obama promises the monied interests behind his blandly passionate and vaguely populist words…

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