America and Obama's Resentment Rainbow
19 September 2016
By Amir Taheri
While all attention is focused on what will happen at the forthcoming
presidential election in the United States, the real question may well be:
what will happen after the new tenant enters the White House?
The question is not fanciful. For two centuries the US has enjoyed a consensus
under which the loser in every election accepts the results and offers to work
with the winner for the public good. All those involved in American public
life agreed, at least implicitly, that democracy cannot function without
compromises that at times may even be humiliating for some.
This time things look different. The Republican nominee Donald Trump has
circulated the rumour that unknown hands are at work to rig the election in
favour of his Democrat rival Hillary Clinton, hinting that if that did happen
his supporters might have recourse to violence.
For her part, Mrs. Clinton's camp has fed its rumours into the machine,
including the claim that Russian President Vladimir Putin may hack US
electoral computers to ensure Trump's victory.
Since the earliest days, all American presidential elections have generated a
great deal of verbal violence and bitterness. However, the US has seldom been
divided salami-style in accordance with ethnic, religious and ideological
''identities.''
Salami-style politics started with Barack Obama in 2008 as he built his
''rainbow coalition of minorities''. Eight years later that ''rainbow
coalition'' isn't what it was in its heyday. Yet, it has managed to inject
long lasting resentment and bitterness into American politics. It has made
chagrin and victim hood not only acceptable as political tools but even
profitable.Today, you could enter the public arena with a chip on your
shoulder and demand retribution for real or imagined wrongs done to your
distant ancestors.
The Obama family have done more than their bit to promote the culture of what
the French call ''ressentiment'' (deep seated resentment). Barack himself has
toured the world to portray the US as a big bad wolf and to apologise to real
or imagined victims.
The First Lady Michelle Obama has brought her own pails of water to the mill.
In her address to the Democrat Party Convention, she offered a top notch
performance of ''ressentiment''. She said every morning she wakes up in the
White House she remembers that the building was built by black slaves.
She conveniently forgets that Barack is only half black and that his black
half had no history of being slaves in the US because they were not Americans
in the first place. She also forgets that the original White House, built in
eight years and first used by President John Adams in 1800, had been the work
of the Irish architect James Hoban and his gang of Irish ''navvies''. There
may have been some blacks among the workers who built the original edifice.
But there is no evidence they were Hoban's slaves.
In any case, the building in which Michelle wakes to nurse her ''ressentiment''
isn't quite the one completed in 1800. The British burned the White House in
1814 while setting Washington on fire. Once restored, the White House
underwent several transformations in 1901, 1927 and 1946, long after slavery
had been abolished in the United States. In 1948, under President Harry S
Truman, the building was remodelled again, keeping only the outer walls.
Had Mrs. Obama not been so full of hatred for the US she might have said that
every morning as she wakes up in the White House, she celebrates American
democracy that gave her, a descendant of slaves, the opportunity to marry a
mixed-race free man who became President of the United States.
The Obamas do not have a monopoly on ''ressentiment''. Earlier this month a
certain Colin Kaepernick said to be a star in a San Francisco football (not be
mistaken with soccer) team, refused to stand up during the performance of the
American National Anthem known as the Star Spangled Banner.
When he explained why, this is what he said: ''I am not going to stand up to
show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of
colour.'' He was, of course, referring to the shooting by policemen of a
number of blacks under dubious circumstances.
The incident triggered an avalanche of home-made Hate-America sentiments. Four
lines from the end of the third verse of the song were cited as ''proof'' that
the US deserves demonization. The lines are:
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
What the retailers of ''ressentiment'' ignore is that Francis Scott Key wrote
Star Spangled Banner in 1814 as a war song after the British invasion force
had bombarded Fort McHenry in Baltimore. By that time, the British had beaten
back a US attempt at seizing territory in Canada, driven right down to
Washington where, as already noted, they burned the White House.
The British who had invaded with around 20,000 troops could not have sustained
their war effort without reinforcement on the ground. They did by recruiting,
and in some cases, press-ganging, black slaves who ran away from the fields
where they worked for white masters, hence the song's reference to ''slave.''
The British also recruited mercenaries in Europe hence the song's reference to
''hireling''. At one point the British created a unit called ''Colonial
Marines'' made of black slaves, European mercenaries and white American
defectors.
In the end the Brits failed to destroy the newly-indpendent United States or
to ''dethrone Mr. Madison'', as the British commander called the then US
President James Madison. Over 6000 Black Americans who had fought alongside
the Brits left with them to be resettled in Canada and Jamaica.
The song that has caused so much ''ressentiments'' castigates those, slave or
free, who sided with the enemy at war. The merchants of ''ressentiments'' are
not to be found in Obama's ''rainbow'' coalition. One could also find them in
Trump's camp which has attracted adepts of other types of ''ressentiments''.
But that has to wait for another column!
Amir Taheri was born in Ahvaz, southwest Iran, and educated in Tehran,
London and Paris. He was Executive Editor-in-Chief of the daily Kayhan in Iran
(1972-79). In 1980-84, he was Middle East Editor for the Sunday Times. In
1984-92, he served as member of the Executive Board of the International Press
Institute (IPI). Between 1980 and 2004, he was a contributor to the
International Herald Tribune. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, the
New York Post, the New York Times, the London Times, the French magazine
Politique Internationale, and the German weekly Focus. Between 1989 and 2005,
he was editorial writer for the German daily Die Welt. Taheri has published 11
books, some of which have been translated into 20 languages. He has been a
columnist for Asharq Alawsat since 1987. Taheri's latest book "The Persian
Night" is published by Encounter Books in London and New York.
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