BY Jackson Burnside III

“I can’t see anything,” he thought. “If I see nothing, that means I’m stupid! Or, worse, incompetent!” If the Prime Minister admitted that he didn’t see anything, he would be discharged from his office.
Hans Christian Anderson

First I must thank both Nicolette Bethel and Ward Minnis for the opportunity to participate at this level in the ongoing debate about A Day of Absence. For some time now I have been following these two scholars on their blogs, on Facebook, and in e-mail discussing a variety of issues particularly important to the culture, arts and heritage of our country. Ward has been in several places including Canada and Eleuthera, and Nicolette has been at the Ministry of Culture and the College of The Bahamas and Shakespeare in Paradise. What is fascinating today is they could be anywhere and still be here, getting in the business of “Who we are and What we are all about”.

Both of these Artists have managed to draw me, and many others, into their musings on the state of Art and Culture in our Bahamas, and they have managed to maintain a mature level of discussion while throwing the kind of blows intellectually that would have knocked out the toughest head-fellas back in the days of the Cinema on East Street. Now you must understand that all this is happening on the Internet which opens up The Bahamas to expose ourselves to the world, to give and to receive, consciously and subconsciously. We seem helpless to control the volume of the information we are exposed to, and we seem to accept and wait for our opinions of ourselves and our worldview to come to us from those outside to whom we have given the authority to define us.

We did not always have the Internet, obviously. Less than twenty years before Independence in 1973, we thought that television was the limit of technological innovation and we accepted the intelligence came from Ed Sullivan and Walter Cronkite. Before television we were connected to the radio. Even before electricity was inside the house, we turned on battery charged radios on schedule to listen to the BBC and ZNS to hear the news and special stories.

We have always been fascinated by stories. Before the modern broadcast technologies, stories were in books or were ole-stories in the minds or in the traditions of families and communities. The stories that were repeated were those stories that served a purpose to entertain and to pass down survival skills to the younger generations to adapt to these flat, barren, narrow rocks that we only saw as wasteland. These stories, written, spoken, and performed, formed an important part of our rich heritage.

Before the radio, when the stories came to us on the boat, we made every new story a part of our “ole-story”. We made this “conch salad” or peas soup” with everything from the Bible stories to the Royal Reader to the Oxendale and the Bellas Hess catalogues, (before the Sears and Roebuck catalogue). Families built the fire on the three rocks and roast corn, and told Bookie and Brer Rabbie stories, and speerit stories to scare the children to sleep and teach them how to survive in hazardous environments. Programs and Recitations in church halls and Lodge Halls throughout the land guaranteed that folk lore and traditions were repeated and impressed into the minds and hearts of the communities. Our people travelled and returned, and others visited and stayed, all bringing influences which we added to this mix-right-up concoction we call our Bahamaland.

Reading stories from books and reciting from memory were important to who we were and what we were about. We looked forward to our teachers and story time.  I can hear Naomi Blatch now reading from Hans Christian Anderson one of my favourite stories, The Emperor’s New Clothes. This was the tale of the vain Emperor who loved to dress in fancy clothing, who “get swing” by two swindling tailors who were full of self praise.

These scoundrels told the Emperor they were great “Artists” and claimed they invented a fabric so light and fine that it appeared invisible. In fact, they said if anyone could not appreciate its quality, this cloth would be invisible to them because they were too stupid and incompetent to see its beauty. The Emperor, his Prime Minister, and all of his Ministers were fooled by these scoundrels, and the Emperor provided a loom, silk and gold threads, and large bags of gold from the public treasury to sponsor the work of the scoundrels. In addition to getting new clothes, the Emperor and members of government would soon learn which of the people were stupid and incompetent.

Well you all know how the story went. The Emperor and his men were too embarrassed to admit they did not see the cloth and the clothes. They marveled at the beauty of the cloth and the design of the costumes, and because the Emperor and his court were so obviously impressed all of the spectators in the streets praised the work of the two crooked tailors as the Emperor strutted proudly on parade.

A child, however who had nothing to gain from the Ministers and the Emperor could only see things as his eyes showed them to him.”The Emperor is naked”, he cried. “Fool” his Mother screamed. “Don’t talk nonsense!” she shouted as she grabbed his arm and led him away. But the damage had been done, and the sip-sip spread all through the crowds.

This story continued to play in my mind as I read the exchange between Nicolette and Ward. Both Scholars agree that, at times, the Emperor is naked. The swindling tailors, like many who call themselves “Artists” in our country are simply foolin’ most of the people most of the time, and their invisible product is expected to be appreciated by the majority of the people. These so-called “artists” are amongst us in every aspect of our lives, the Government, the Church, the Teachers, the Unions, and indeed the Arts, asking us to see what is not there.

The most important role in the old fable is given to the child. The young boy is the first to see what he’s lookin’ at, providing that badly needed critique of the work of the Artists. Ward reminds me of that critic, who seems to say that the clothes of the Emperor were full of holes even before he met these so called artists. He says the cloth is badly woven, and the design of the garments is not elegant. Ward says, “We artists in this country have not only had days of absence but we have had years, even decades, of absence”. While I cannot agree fully that Art has been so absent, I support the spirit of his statement.

Ward’s role as the “Critic” is a badly missing character in our national story. Without “the children” courageous enough to criticize the “elders” in strong but respectful and honest critique, we will never have the consistent production of Art at the standard of world class. We like to say “We are the Best in The World”, yet we turn around and want to be like heroes from someplace else.

Like us, Hans Christian Anderson took stories from other cultures and adapted them to his own.   Anderson’s story is an old Arab and Jewish story from North Africa that found its way to Spain, then Germany, and Anderson learned it in Denmark and used it to create his classic. So you will excuse me if I act as if this story, from someplace else, is my own. This works for me because I see the creativity of the Emperors cloth and the design of his fashions as ART, which is the expression of the people’s spirit. I see the behavior of the Emperor, his Ministers and the people as CULTURE. Culture, for me is simply “What” we do, “How” we do, and “Why” we do all the things we do. Heritage, then, is the “Story” of the people and their place, expressed in tangible and intangible forms.

To tell you the truth, I too was confused when Nicolette invited Artists to make themselves present in “A Day of Absence”. I agree with Ward when, in praise of his former professor, he says,

I still believe that the Bahamian Community is in need of something like this though, and if we begin a dialogue on what we really lack, maybe we can eventually get at what it is we really need.

Is the Emperor naked? Is Art really absent? Nicolette makes it abundantly clear that,

We Bahamians have cultivated the habit of supporting certain cultural endeavours simply because they are produced by Bahamians, regardless of quality. We have suppressed our critical faculties. We have come to expect sub-standard work from Bahamians, so much so that the very adjective “Bahamian” stands for mediocrity.

While this sad case of affairs is undeniable, it is also true that there is an abundance of individuals and organizations that, in spite of the culture of the “Emperor and his court”, produce diverse expressions of the highest standards.

This is a blow that Nico strikes on the defensive in her “Second Response” to Ward’s stinging critique. She asks two questions, how good are we? And, how do we get better? She also argues that most of us choose to present the culture of mediocrity to make the argument that we are not that good. She turns that argument on itself and begs us to focus on the positive. There is no argument from any of us that for a country of our size we have produced an enormous volume of excellent Artwork of all kinds.

Ward argues, however, that when we think of “the world of Art”, we are thinking mostly of artist generally from outside our borders. This is a very important issue, in his mind, because he says,

The reality is that most, if not all of the images and products that filter our way from great foreign cultural creators, such as the United States, have been produced by professionals who have already been paid. To ask the right question therefore, is to ask, what would the Bahamas be without Bahamian Art?

I agree with Ward that the metaphor of absence must be questioned. Ward says. “We do not need any more absence. We need to make our presence felt”. We particularly need to make our presence felt to ourselves, so that we, Bahamians, would not automatically conclude that to get quality creative production or design, we need to look outside of ourselves.

Clearly, Nicolette agrees with Ward also when she says, “The Day of Absence is not about withdrawal, about begging, about making money or getting jobs: it is about respect”. Ward questions, “Are all Bahamian Artists worthy of respect?”, and says, “The simple answer is no”. He asks, “Are we (the artists) really trying to reach the people, or have we been aiming at something else?” I believe this searching interrogation underscores the need for more dialogue and institutions in our nation to place Art and Culture in the centre of the public discussion and the national social and economic debate.

If “culture” is everything that we do, can you imagine “a day where the undesirable and underdeveloped aspects of our culture are absent? Can you imagine “a day without tiefin, a day without schemin’, a day without liein’, A day without killin’”?  The “Emperor and his Ministers”, as well as the people in the public square seem satisfied with this status quo. Less than a generation ago, we declared, in our ignorance, that we have no culture. Then, we began to say that regatta, or junkanoo, or the Dundas, or the orchestra was our “culture”. We were confused then and continue to be confused now, about what culture is, what Art is, or who Artists are. We hate to admit our ignorance, or say “we do not know”. But it is this very confession of ignorance that is the essence and the beginning of learning. Admitting our ignorance is at the foundation of the institutions that ask the questions that lead to new solutions and give our nation guidance to go forward.

Can you imagine a Bahamian environment where quality of life is paramount? Imagine if you will that everywhere you turned in The Bahamas there was proof that Fashion, and Film, Fine Art and Craft, Monuments and Museums, Music and Dance, Literature and Theatre, Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Homecomings and Festivals, Public Transportation and Open Space were all of the highest quality. Imagine if there was evidence of Bahamian Art and Cultural excellence all around you and the quality of the design environment was given the highest priority in our nation.

In her Curator’s Note of Volume 6 of the NAGB Newsletter, Dr. Erica James states:

More and more I have come to accept this recession as a rite of passage for The Bahamas, an indication that the nation’s extended childhood is over. Is it possible to seek vision in difficult times?  Will these trying days host the moment when we are forced to learn the presence and value of our culture, accept the complexities of our identity and take ownership of our lives, our communities, our societies, and harness the ability to write our own stories?… Can we accept the fact of our limits, yet embrace the limitlessness of our imagination and determine nevertheless to insist on the excellence we are fully capable of?

Unless we are confident enough like Nicolette Bethel to offer new solutions, and courageous enough like Ward Minnis to question the obvious, we will continue to wallow in our ignorance believing that artistic expressions alone make up culture, crippled by our fear to speak truth to power. Art hopefully places a mirror in the face of culture, and causes us to see what we lookin’ at when we look at ourselves. This is particularly critical in our economy, where our only public focus appears to be “winning on Bay Street”, or on the pretty scenic post card, and the well trained smiling servant faces, and on making money.  We hide the ills, the pains, and the social and intellectual poverty of our society for fear that we might offend or upset our almighty tourist trade and dollars.

So, we continue to hold “the parades”, in all aspects of our social and economic life, where the Emperor is naked, and we are satisfied when the children’s illustrations from somewhere else show that the Emperor at least has on underwear.  We look at what the Emperor is wearing on Bay Street and we marvel, because we do not want anyone to think we are incompetent or stupid and we go back over-the-hill, out East, out West, and to the Deep South, and we holler “Dey rob us!”

A Comprehensive Critique of Nicolette Bethel’s 2009 Day of Absence.

Out of absence let the new day be born. — Helen Klonaris

The response to Dr. Nicolette Bethel’s Day of Absence held for the first time on February 11, 2009, was nothing short of amazing. I had almost lost faith in the desire of Bahamians to band together for a cause, and yet here they were banding. Nicolette deserves to be commended because she did something — she threw an idea into the void and the response to that idea proves conclusively that we, as an emerging art community, need something like this to rally around.

Nicolette Bethel and I have been friends since she taught me English 120 at the College of the Bahamas in 2001. When I was in Nassau this past January gathering research for my Masters thesis she suggested that we get together and share a coffee. We eventually met at the Starbucks across the road from the College of the Bahamas. At the time I had only briefly heard about her Day of Absence, I had skimmed over the press release cum manifesto and I thought then, much as I do now, that the idea had potential. Over lattes and tea we talked about her upcoming day, the need for art in society, the inescapable nature of design in every aspect of our lives, and the fact that a place like the café in which we sat, was what it was, in large part because of the art.

The warm and fuzzy feelings left me once I read what had been written about the Day of Absence more carefully. The more contemplated the ideas as presented, the more I was bothered by the incongruities in the project. This essay is thus my odd way of congratulating Nicolette on a job well done while taking her to task for ideas that are at best half-baked. Her Day of Absence clouds over and conflates many different and unrelated ideas while advancing an awkward historical agenda and a cumbersome theory of cultural development. It is political and apolitical, about something and about nothing, clear and blurry, all at the same time. I still believe that the Bahamian art community is in need of something like this though, and if we can begin a dialogue on what we really lack, maybe we can eventually get at what it is we really need.

A World Without Art

I’m asking us all to stop — for a day, for a moment even, and imagine our country, our world, if we woke up one day and all the artists and cultural workers had disappeared. — Nicolette Bethel

This Day of Absence requires us to think about a world without art. Can we imagine our world without artists? The around-the-world-ness of Nicolette’s opening plea is, admittedly, quite compelling and gives her proposal a certain new-age sexiness. Everyone can agree that without art the world would be a pretty dull place. Unfortunately this broad net also makes the fundamental argument meaningless. Yes, it is true that everything we touch, even a mug at Starbucks, has been designed by someone. However, this generalization covers over a very important issue for Bahamian artists. (I think it is important to underline the word to remind us who we are really talking about here.) The reality is that most, if not all, of the images and products that filter our way from the great foreign cultural creators, such as the United States, have been produced by professionals who have already been compensated.

I do not feel the need to conduct a sit-in for American movie directors; or Swedish industrial designers; or the graphic designers from some ad agency. The street graffiti artist working feverishly under the bridge in some foreign city is another story, but we never see her work here. Most of the art that the Day of Absence invites us to imagine our world without has a price on it, and that price has already been paid. And if you really boil it down, our money has gone, and is going, to pay that price. Let’s not even touch the issue of the cultural imperialism that these anonymous artists from abroad are perhaps unwittingly promoting.

Once we recognize that the artists for whom we were demonstrating have already been paid, with some of our money no less, and we ask again, “how about a Day of Absence?” the underlying absurdity becomes plainly evident — we are asking the wrong question. To ask the right question is to ask what the Bahamas would be like without BAHAMIAN artists, and this is a lot like asking what 100 Jamz would sound like without BAHAMIAN music. You know the answer to that question don’t you? We artists in this country have not only had days of absence but we have had years, even decades, of absence. The Bahamian public is already aware of what their life would look like without Bahamian artists; it is the life they now lead.

Bahamian poet, Maelynn Seymour-Major, expressed the situation to me like this:

I think the public gets the absence. We [the artists] are absent to them. We exist in the abstract. Even Ronnie Butler and KB and John Cox. Those of us who have no names aren’t even abstract. We are ether.

This is the doubtless the reason that Nicolette never articulates a true Day of Absence. She instead describes it as

a symbolic day, … where artists can come together in person or in cyberspace, and blog, email, sing, act, perform, speak, or whatever they want to do, in honour of art and artists themselves.

I will say it plainly: it is necessary for Bahamian artists to come out and do something on the Day of Absence because if they stayed home one day, or even a whole week, no one would notice.

The metaphor of absence is in error. We do not need any more absence. We need to make our presence felt. The dissonance at the centre of the proposal leads to more explaining than is necessary, and the point gets lost. Most important, the metaphor misses the problem that we, as an artistic community, have. Ours is not simply an issue of being taken for granted; the roots go far deeper than that. A day of hand-holding isn’t going to get us where we need to go.

On February 11, 2009, the first Day of Absence was observed in the Bahamas with the above tag-line. This event was the brain child of Nicolette Bethel, prominent Bahamian anthropologist, scholar and playwright. With a demonstration at the College of the Bahamas and numerous blog posts, interviews and radio appearances, the Day of Absence captured the imagination of the Bahamian arts community.

On December 31, 2009, Bahamian writer and artist Ward Minnis, (me, a.k.a. mainslave) will release a comprehensive critique of the Day of Absence on this website, and also an abridged version at Bahama Pundit.com. In the essay I question many of assumptions upon which the Day of Absence was based, and while I agree that it filled a need, I argue that it should not continue in its present form.

On January 12, 2010, at the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas at 6:30pm, the merits of both the Day of Absence and its critique will be debated between Nicolette Bethel, myself and the Bahamian art community at large.

What is the role of the artist in Bahamian society? What part, if any, should the government play in the arts? Have Bahamian artists been absent from the wider society?

What do you think?

Way back in 2003, I presented my views on Bahamian national identity at a wonderful little conference held at The College of The Bahamas. In my presentation I used the metaphor of the “Bahamian-detector” to describe the process we go through to determine what is true true Bahamian and what isn’t. My problem, then and now, is that we are slowly wiping ourselves out of existence.

See, national identities are contrary and complex things. They are imaginary entities that exist in our heads that have tangible real world effects. If I had to define what it is, I would say that national identity is the sum of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. In the process of figuring out what tales are to be told, both the teller and the audience are brought into being. Of course, this also means that the stories are constantly changing, that there is eternal conflict over which story should be told and when, and the audience isn’t sure, from one minute to the next, if any of it is meant for them.

The Bahamian national story, and the concept of self embedded within it, has gone through some dramatic rewrites in the last fifty years. Before 1967, the rulers were the minority white population and they defined us as British-not-American and not-West Indian. After 1967 we were told that we were Black-and-British-but-not-American and-not-West-Indian. After independence it turned to Black-and-kinda-British (maybe we’ll just keep ‘em for their awards) not-American and not-West-Indian and sure-as-hell-not-Haitian.

We have had to figure out who we are on the fly while the ground was shifting beneath our feet. All while we felt under siege, first by Buckra, then by Britain. Once we wrote them out of the story, we felt under cultural attack by America and then by immigrants. And we have had to deal with all this while always having a tale or two to give to tourists who were looking for an authentic holiday experience. The end result of all that bombardment is the story we now have; a story that is more about what it isn’t than what is. This, in a nutshell, is the problem.

What’s wrong with the current national story, and the Bahamian that exists within it, is its narrowness. That story’s only Bahamian is charcoal black, male, aggressively heterosexual and he lives over-the-hill. He is a bush medicine expert who talks endlessly about going back to the island while eating scorched conch and fish after church on Sunday. He spends most of his time in the Junkanoo shack and on the walls of his clap-board home you will find post-card paintings of Poincianas…

That story is completely out of touch with reality.

Is there room in the national narrative for a Bahamian who grew up middle-class-affluent in the suburbs? Or can a white Bahamian find themselves represented there as anything other than a tourist? Can Bahamians with Haitian blood even exist in that tale without becoming a cuss word?

The problem here does not lie with those Bahamians who are excluded; the problem is the story itself. We need to see that the conception of self that that story perpetuates is slowly strangling us to death. Bahamians are black, white, gay, straight, Haitian, Jamaican, American, Jungless, upper-lower-middle class and everything else in between. We are not one thing, we are many, many interesting, contradictory, beautiful things. We can’t keep denying parts of ourselves, hating our own face, our own skin, our own lives and expect to go anywhere worth a damn.

In short, it’s high time for a new story.

Cheney criticized Obama on his National security policy, his desire to close Guantanamo and his reluctance to use the Bush administration’s “enhanced interrogation progam.”

And to call this a program of torture is to libel the dedicated professionals who have saved American lives and to cast terrorists and murderers as innocent victims. What’s more, to completely rule out enhanced interrogation in the future is unwise in the extreme. It is recklessness cloaked in righteousness and would make the American people less safe.
— Former Vice President Dick Cheney

This is simply breath-taking. How can he seriously defend torture? How can he defend the indefensible? It defies reason.

First to label the Bush administrations techniques, such as waterboarding “enhanced interrogation” implies that they work better than regular interrogation. There is no evidence that they do. In fact they produce lots of bogus information because the person being, yes I’ll say it, tortured, will say anything to make the pain stop. This is very well documented and should not even be up for debate.

Second, many of the inmates at Guantanamo, like most of the people who were thrown into detention in Iraq at places like Abu Ghraib, those who have been labeled as terrorists, have never even been charged with a crime, much less tried and convicted for anything and have limited or no access to legal counsel. So to say that these people are “terrorists and murderers” denies them the whole “innocent until proven guilty” thing. Have you heard of it Mr. Cheney? And to throw that out you also throw out due process, habeas corpus and most of the basis of western law. Yes Mr. Cheney, they are “innocent victims” until you can actually prove that they did something.

Third, how any of this enhanced torture makes Americans more safe is completely beyond me. It most likely does the opposite. A new study by Jim Walsh and Jim Piazza from the University of North Carolina indicates “that governments that abuse rights actually experience more terrorism.”

Cheney’s position perhaps also assumes that torture is the only morally dubious thing that the United States has done recently. Wish it were so.

Then there is Obama. Yes. It is a good thing that he is trying to close down Gitmo. Unfortunately the so-called Democratic congress might not let him meet his year-end deadline. And yes, he has banned enhanced torture. These are good things. But what else did we learn from his speech?

Well we learned that he also supports indefinite detention of some prisoners without trial. Huh?

In our constitutional system, prolonged detention should not be the decision of any one man. If and when we determine that the United States must hold individuals to keep them from carrying out an act of war, we will do so within a system that involves judicial and congressional oversight. And so going forward, my Administration will work with Congress to develop an appropriate legal regime so that our efforts are consistent with our values and our Constitution.
— President Barack Obama.

So, let’s get this straight. There are people there that can’t be tried because of bad evidence (perhaps obtained through torture) or even no evidence but despite the lack of evidence you’re just going to keep ‘em locked up. Forever. Just in case.

And since there is no framework for indefinite incarceration you are going to invent one. And since more people are going to be involved this time around that makes it right?

How can you invent an appropriate legal regime for something that is, by the standard of your own laws, illegal? How can you expect to maintain your laws by finding legal ways to break them?

Simply breath-taking.

But what troubles me most about the double whammy of speeches from what is supposed to be the left and the right is what was not included.

We are confronting some of the most complicated questions that a democracy can face. But I have no interest in spending our time re-litigating the policies of the last eight years. I want to solve these problems, and I want to solve them together as Americans.
— President Obama.

I find it amazing that both speakers have such large blind spots. Blind spots big enough to cover the rest of the world. “The policies of the last eight years” includes not only Americans, but also wars in two other countries with Obama opening up a war in a third. “The policies of the last eight years” include wars that were by international law illegal, wars that have killed hundreds of thousands of people. How can that only be about Americans?

It is the arrogance so plainly on display that is perhaps most indefensible of all.

Stephen Marche of the Weekend Post got off on the wrong foot apparently. He’s pissed at Greg Gutfeld’s remarks about Canada on a late night Fox TV show. You can watch the offending video above.

In a nutshell Gutfeld essentially calls the Canadian army “soft” in response to the announcement that the Canuck troops are “at the limit” and need to take a year off “to restore [their] full fighting capability.”

But does Mr. Marche go a bit too far in macho protestations?

Canadians are one of the rudest peoples on Earth. Outsiders simply don’t understand that “sorry” means “go screw yourself.”

Well. I have to really rethink my entire five years in this country now. All this time I felt when someone bumped into me by accident on the bus, and they turned and said “sorry” they actually meant “sorry.” Here it was they were really telling me to “go screw myself.” I’ll have to keep that in mind and wear a nice scowl on my face when I hear it again, cause now I know what they really mean.

Although, the converse to that is also true, cause when I accidentally bump into a Canadian, I will really enjoy saying “sorry” now. Ha ha. Nice to finally figure out the language. Thanks Mr. Marche.

But wait. There’s more.

If you took the Canadians out of American comedy, it would be like taking African-Americans out of the NBA: still the same game but you wouldn’t recognize it and you wouldn’t want to watch it.

There is a lot of lunacy in that statement. Yes, Canadians have produced a lot of great comedians. Jim Carrey, ironically now a US citizen, comes to mind. But he ignores the point that like the NBA, American comedy is also dominated by blacks. What would happen if you took all of the black people out of American comedy Mr. Marche? Would you like to watch that? No Bill Cosby, Sinbad, Eddie Murphy, Bernie Mac, Chris Rock, Katt Williams et al?

The crowning nut on the fruit cake though has to be the equation of Canadian comics, all of the ones he names are white, to black athletes. Maybe Mr. Marche really has bought into Canadian multiculturalism and is so color blind that he doesn’t see the inappropriateness of his own comparisons.

Even if you put that aside, he’s still off. Yeah, I’ll say it, Canadians are not as important to American comedy as black athletes are to the NBA. Bad analogy.

What amazes me though is how Canada gets its knickers in a collective twist whenever its ‘macho-ness’ is called into question. Look here Canada (and you too Mr. Marche). You can’t have it both ways; you can’t be perceived as the nice guy on the block, Mr. Humanitarian, Mr. International Do-gooder, and be the macho Terminator at the same time. It just doesn’t work like that.

Sorry.

With that in mind, enjoy the following:

Memo from Canada to the third world: This way please.

Just one catch…

Do you think we can we get rid of this one in 2009?

I thought I would share with you some of the best commentary on the election and the impending Presidency that I had read around the net.

This article / interview from CNN is quite interesting. Dr. Alvin Poussaint, a one-time script analyst on the Cosby show, looks at the impact of Obama as a symbol for young black children:

We’re going to have a generation of children — if he’s in there for eight years — being born in 2009, looking at television and images, hearing before they can talk, absorbing it in their brain and being wired to see the visual images of a black man being president of the United States and understanding very early that that’s the highest position in the United States.
– Dr. Alvin Poussaint

This comes in video form from my new BFF’s at the Real News Network. It’s a commentary by Pepe Escobar entitled “The shock of new: the popular president-elect meets the all-time unpopular president at the White House.”

When Barack stepped inside the Oval Office for the first time, he had to be thinking, “How on earth am I going to undo this legacy?”—crimes against the Constitution, crimes against human rights, crimes against US and international law, war crimes, shock and awe, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, extraordinary rendition, torture, Arabs as terrorists, the separation of powers thrown down the toilet, a US police and surveillance state, a monster financial crisis caused by excessive deregulation.

Quite so.

Again from the Real News Network a video interview of 2008 Presidential candidate Ralph Nader speaking on an Obama presidency. They filmed this as the results of November 4th were coming in. A tad ironic, but as always Nader is spot on with his analysis:

NADER: That’s the first tip that you get: you see who he surrounds himself with.

The interview is in three parts, so collect them all!

Using the Nader quote as a segue, I’ll move onto this piece from Democracy Now. Please watch this lively debate between Jeremy Scahill, Democracy Now correspondent and David Corn from Mother Jones Magazine. They called the melee “Agents of Change or Hawks, Clintonites and Neocons? A Discussion about Barack Obama’s Advisers and Transition Team”

Exhibit A: Yes there is Change.

So, while, you know, we can argue and scream—and I’m not a fan of the possible Hillary Clinton appointment to the State Department—you know, the transition team does include people who are genuine policy advocates, who, if they get a chance to have any authority, could indeed be agents of change. – David Corn

Exhibit B: Um. Look again.

I think, you know, you have Obama, the orator, and you have Obama’s rhetoric. And then you have what I think is more important, which is who is he surrounding himself with and what are his actual foreign policies.
– Jeremy Scahill

Very interesting stuff.

We will know soon enough what an Obama Presidency will bring, but in the meantime, I agree with Scahill and Nader that the best way to see the future is to examine closely the pasts of the people Obama puts in key positions of authority.

Scahill has more detail in his article here. And David Corn’s view from the other side of the fence is here.

And although it seems heaven sent
We ain’t ready, to see a black President
– Tupac Shakur

They might be ready now.

In a few hours, assuming there isn’t a repeat of the drama of 2000, it should be clear whether or not the United States will elect a black man as President for the first time in its history. Judging from the polls and from all that I have heard it seems likely that Barack Obama will indeed win.

But I’m not here to talk to Americans about their own business. I’m not an American citizen so I can’t even cast a vote. However, as the United States is presently the most powerful and the most wealthy nation on the face of the earth, their election result will have an effect on the rest of the world. This is what I want to discuss.

Michael Parenti, in his book Democracy for the Few, describes the US election process as “the greatest show on Earth.” This time, however, they really have outdone themselves. This show has gone on for years. From the early speculation about who would run for the Democratic nomination to the long battle between Obama and Hillary Clinton, and the last minute wild-card insertion of Sarah Palin, there has been no shortage of drama. However the lesson Parenti wants you to draw from all the political pyrotechnics is that it’s all a diversion.

Did you ever wonder how a country as massive as the United States can only have two parties? That in a country with 305 million people there are only two choices? Well unbeknownst to the majority of Americans, they do have more choices. Have you heard about the Green Party presidential candidate, a black woman named Cynthia McKinney? What about Libertarian presidential nominee Bob Barr, and Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader? Yes. I’m not making this up, they are all running for President of the United States today along with Obama and McCain. Why haven’t you heard about these people? Simply put, they have been made invisible by design.

To paraphrase Noam Chomsky, the Democrats and Republicans are essentially factions of the same party; The Business Party. The two parties collude to maintain a monopoly on the American political system. Take the debate process for example, did you know that the Obama and McCain campaigns have negotiated a contract that determines who participates in the debates and even what the topics raised will be?

So, what is the debate structure that they agreed upon? What topics are off-limits? George Farah of Open Debates, a non-profit organization with a self-explanatory name, says

“We don’t know the extent of the rules, because, precisely because, the Obama and McCain campaigns have absolutely refused to release the detailed contract that dictates the terms of [the] debate.”

In other words, it’s a secret contract. The game isn’t so scary when you can make all the rules. One of those rules though is obviously the exclusion of third parties voices.

But isn’t the United States a democracy? Perhaps “Plutocracy” is a better word for their system. Parenti says that “the two-party [American] electoral system performs the essential function of helping to legitimate the existing social order.” To boil it down even further, Americans don’t even have two choices.

This is not to say that there is no difference between the Republicans and the Democrats, because there is. It’s just not so wide a difference as is commonly thought. Instead of night and day, think of the difference between raspberry and strawberry ice-cream. If Obama wins, a few extra dollars of the budget will go to social projects and poor people, while the billions that fund their enormous war machine will continue essentially unchanged.

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What is important is not so much what men say when they are anxious for power but what they actually do once that power is conferred on them.
– Robert M. Spector

Barack Obama is a phenomenon. His speeches have inspired people to a degree that I have never seen before. If I didn’t know better I would think that every black person on the planet will be voting with their hearts today. Take a look at this website, it was set up by a Nigerian friend of mine showing Obama posing as myriad fictional and historical heroes. I have a Bahamian friend who has compared Obama to Mother Theresa and Martin Luther King Jr. He nearly went as far as to compare Obama to Jesus Christ.

With catchy slogans like “Change we can believe in,” “Yes, we can,” the operative word being “believe,” Obama has developed and nourished something that is akin to a global cult following. Delusions of Obama as the world’s messiah are fair to no one, least of all to him.

He may well turn out to be a “great [US] president”, but we, in the rest of the world, need to remember that US presidents don’t work for us. They have their own country’s national interests, however they define them, to look after. We need to remember that the foreign policy of the United States is not something that is about to change. Remember that if Obama was really about changing the status quo, he would never have made it this far.

Which brings me to one of the few reasons I appreciate Bush. He has really done well exposing US foreign policy for what it really is: the maintenance of Empire. The war of aggression in Iraq is not some aberration, this has been going on internationally since 1898, and if you ask the Indians and the Mexicans, they would tell you it started a long time before that.

When charismatic presidents take office, Bill Clinton for example, it’s easy to forget that their eloquent words and high sounding rhetoric are a veneer that can mask truly horrific deeds. Whoever becomes the next president will be no different. The Empire must be maintained.

To quote Tupac one last time: “And still I see no changes.”