Between Barack and the GOP Hard Place in 2013
This country operates like a
capricious Narcissus behemoth, seducing itself continuously with its distorted
image of grandeur and righteousness. We demand that other nations observe human
rights and due process of law while the government advocates for torture with the Guantanamo camp still in operation, jails people
deemed enemy combatants at will, and imprisons an astounding 7% of its population through an ever-growing prison industry. All in the name of F R E E D O M.
In a 2012 summer series, the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper counted the state of Louisiana as the biggest incarcerator of people in the United States, with
rates of imprisonment that overshadow China. The series was titled "Louisiana Incarcerated".
It’s tragic. It’s a country gone mad, a sci-fi farce
that we could have never dreamed of
We are at a crossroads for its
soul, and the new leader at the helm of the Union, the “one” like Uno in the
Matrix, the handsome dark knight of a multiracial complexity that we so readily
embraced as exemplary of a Utopian futuristic post-racial America who promised
so much C H A N G E and H O P E with bold capital letters, the one who we
wanted to believe because he articulated the truths we wanted so desperately to
hear has been an even bigger disappointment because he has lacked the courage
and cojones
to carry out his promises, and he has been seduced by the power of the
captain’s chair.
He has moved towards the dark
side while killing us softly with his words.
I find Obama an even greater
tragic figure because he exemplified heroic potential, a new millennium FDR for
the people and the universe. We wanted to believe that he would be an
exceptional new leader, and we drank the Kool-Aid of his campaign
promises. We asked for more sugar
water because we were parched, beaten, and literally “Bushwacked” by Boy
George’s mob. I could not stand to hear Bush speak because all I heard was the
“class dummy” from a wealthy family, whose stolen presidency gave him power to
bend us over and exact his revenge on us for calling him out for his many
misspellings and misdeeds, for his “presidenting” and his “You are with us or
against us” Yosemite Sam threats.
Now, I find myself between Barack
and a GOP hard place.
In the fall of 2008, during the
“Yes, we can!” autumn, I was one of the many millions rooting for the
messianic-like figure with a multiracial heritage, the poet’s tongue, and the
alluring qualities of intelligence and heart to do the right thing and re-steer
the post-Bush calamity called America. Hope was the word, and candidate Obama
seemed to embody the greatest possibility of our future aspirations for an
American Dream that had become critically elusive for many.
I was not yet a United States
citizen and could not vote for the first ever hybrid candidate of color, but it
did not keep me from advocating for his ascension to the country’s highest
office. My citizenship application was mired in bureaucracy, but I had hoped to
have it in place to vote for Barack that November.
After 40 years of being
categorized as a “permanent resident alien” in these United States, I wanted
the right to be able to vote. My application for naturalization was submitted
in May of 2007, but I was not naturalized until April 2009. It took nearly two
years for me to transition from an “alien” to a citizen.
In 2007 and through 2008, the government was flooded with thousands of applications from long time legal residents wanting to become citizens, and many of them were Latinos wanting to finally have the right to vote.
Maybe it was the zeitgeist, the
sprit of the times, the collective awareness that residents’ rights were being
reduced, and the growing vilification of Latino immigrants across the country
drove us to finally apply for citizenship. For many of us, the United States is
our adopted country, and it is more casa,
home, than the romantic Latin America of our births.
I am an immigrant from Ecuador,
and having arrived at the age of seven, I finally became a citizen at the age
of 49. It was inspiring to consider voting for candidate Obama, who was the son
of an African immigrant.
I did not get a chance to cast a
vote for Obama, but like millions nationally and across the global village, I was in a post-Civil Rights nirvana watching the
inauguration of President Barack Hussein Obama on television that fateful
January of 2009. It had all the appearances of a mythic struggle coming to a
glorious fruition, and the long legacy of exclusion of many people of color and
the experiment called the United States was evolving into another epoch, an era
of American hybrids and perhaps of greater tolerance for the “other.”
The freshly minted new executive
chief made many promises on his campaign trail and invigorated us on that day
to rescue the great empire in critical condition, but since, many of those
promises have been broken. The outgoing Bush left an eight-year nightmare in
the making. “Dubya” left quite a legacy; an Iraq War built on lies, the
condoning of torture and a base for it in Guantanamo, Cuba, an economical
disaster that keeps on giving and as deep as the Great Depression, an
environmental nightmare with his oil buddies plundering the land at will, and a
racial divide with many Civil Rights progressions being repealed.
Under Bush, Cheney, and the Karl
Rove spin machine, language was terrorized and Orwellian doublespeak was the
norm: “Freedom” became “war.”
“Justice” became “torture.”
“Patriotism” became “silence.”
In retrospect, like in a
Hollywood movie script, we expected the dark knight in the well-pressed suit to
cure a country with ills that were much too severe to undo in less than four
years. I understand that, but Guantanamo has not been closed. It remains a
dreaded prison encampment that stains any proclamation that the United States
is a country based on freedoms and due process. It is an international
embarrassment, and many innocents have been tortured and made to languish
there. Ironically enough, on the Cuban soil of the longtime despised and
demonized communist dictator Fidel Castro, who is a fragile and invisible
figure these days.
It is more than shameful. It is
an epicenter of human rights violations, but then again we celebrate China for
its embracement of capitalism while it remains an oppressive regime. I have always believed that if Cheney
could have had it his way, as the Darth Vader specter persona he projected, he
would have enjoyed transforming us into China with unfettered capitalism and
brutal repression of the populace as the norm, with Civil Rights diminished as
an antiquated notion.
But like his predecessor, Obama
has embraced the war machine, and the escalation of war in Afghanistan broke my
heart. I wanted to believe that Obama was not another man of war. While we hear
of the so-called “successes” of that war on terrorists and the Taliban, it is
hard to justify what now seems like a premature awarding of the Noble Peace Prize to a politician who blankly/coldly made a case for more war as a means to
end war in his address to the nation in December of 2009, practically a year
later from having become the new president elect. He escalated the war two
months after being awarded the prestigious Nobel.
None of us could have ever
expected this gut punch decision back when Obama appeared to be the candidate
of the people, the one who would end useless bloodshed of others, especially of
people of color. Again, we obviously projected more, and he strategically let
himself be a blank canvas for our repressed dreams and heroic fantasies.
He is a masterful politician. He
is a skillful chameleon. He can speak with a poet’s tongue, but leads us to a
similar path of hopelessness.
How do I feel now that I actually
voted for President Obama? Like
other Latinos: We found ourselves between Barack and the GOP hard place of
anti-immigrant legislation. Since Arizona Governor Brewer passed her odious
anti-immigrant law SB 1070 in 2010, other Republican Governors in Alabama,
Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina, and Utah have joined her in passing similar
bills in 2011.
But I had no other choice, even
with Mr. Obama’s record of immigrant deportations that have numbered in the
three hundred thousand plus per year, a figure that his administration has
boasted about in the crackdown of “illegal aliens.” Instead of advocating for
the humane immigration reform as promised and considering the support of the
Dream Act, Mr. Obama’s immigration policy is a nightmare none of us could have
ever imagined.
I never expected to be in such a
dilemma, but the Democratic President, who promised Latinos immigration reform
in his first year, has deported millions of undocumented immigrants. He is more
“hopeless” than “hope,” but we were so beaten we believed his self-championing
rhetoric as the candidate of our greatest esperanzas.
His summer 2012 half-dream
reprieve called the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) to slow-down
the deportation of young immigrants with strong educational tracks and no
criminal records was a clear cosmetic political move, which according to a 2012 ProPublica article has not done much to assist teens who could be best served
by the full measure of the stalled Dream Act.
Obama has starved Latino voters
on immigration reform that any crumbs he throws our way that will seemingly reduce
his deportation on steroids program has most yelling Ave Maria! According to Homeland Security Secretary Janet
Napolitano, this new process will still be handled on a “case-by-case” review
of qualifying teens, and it is unknown as to how many will actually be helped
to remain in the country.
Watch Maria Hinojosa's insightful Frontline documentary Lost in Detention, and it will break your heart with the harsh reality of immigrants snared in the prison industry and rapes of women detainees.
Watch Maria Hinojosa's insightful Frontline documentary Lost in Detention, and it will break your heart with the harsh reality of immigrants snared in the prison industry and rapes of women detainees.
If I choose not to vote, what is
the alternative? We would have handed a De facto vote to Romney and his GOP
Party that blatantly attacks our immigrant brothers and sisters. Romney has pandered to the Latino community
by saying his father was born in Mexico, but remained utterly mute about the
six Republican Governors that have signed anti-immigrant laws.
Even now as the GOP trip all over
themselves to court Latino voters, I remain simply astonished that not one
Latino journalist dared to ask Romney what he thought about the most infamous
of those Governors, Jan Brewer, whose SB 1070 was awarded a recent victory by
the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the “papers please” provision that gives
police authority to inquire about the immigration status of anyone they stop. I
don’t imagine the notorious Phoenix Sheriff Arpaio stopping the blonde
quarterback of the Arizona Sun Devils’ college football team for looking
suspect.
Latinos know this gives credence
to police who will stop us for simply looking suspect, as in brown, as in
“illegal.” I am a brown Ecuadorian Mestizo
male, and when I travel to the Florida Beaches from my home in New Orleans,
Louisiana, I have to take my passport to traverse Alabama and Georgia, where
some of the most draconian anti-immigrant measures are in place.
Conceptually speaking, I would
have asked Romney if he was is in bed with Jan Brewer on her politics of
anti-immigrant legislation. That would have been a fair question to ask. Is he in the same camp/bed as the other
five Republicans Governors that have joined her? I cannot believe that not one Latino journalist or even
mainstream media reporter ever dared to ask him this straightforward question,
one that would have hopefully revealed more of his stance on immigration,
rather than his idiotic self-deportation platform. Does the rest of the GOP
camp sleep with Brewer on this hot topic?
If they are serious about
courting Latinos voters, let’s begin the Immigration Reform conversation by
repealing all six anti-immigrant laws, and let the GOP declare that Governor
Jan Brewer is not part of their new kindler, gentler makeover.
Frankly, I felt like a Latino
Hamlet: to vote or not to vote.
I knew I could not afford to
abstain and neither could other Latinos. Considering the margin of the popular
vote was a tight four million, we would have thrown ourselves into the GOP fire
and brimstone cauldron of immigrant haters, and they would be dancing on our
graves.
This was not what I had hoped for in my first exercise to realize the right to vote in a national election. On November 6, 2012, I voted for Obama because I had no other choice, but I literally held my nose as my performative act to exemplify how I found myself between Barack and the GOP hard place.
This was not what I had hoped for in my first exercise to realize the right to vote in a national election. On November 6, 2012, I voted for Obama because I had no other choice, but I literally held my nose as my performative act to exemplify how I found myself between Barack and the GOP hard place.
For this upcoming inauguration, I
will not be glued to the TV in a nirvana-like glaze. I won’t even be watching
because President Obama and his secret drone war is more of the same, proving that we
are a war apparatus.
Our cherished freedoms and inalienable rights in these United States are based on the unquestioned power the imperial storm troopers and its “Death Star” exercise at will across the known universe.
Our cherished freedoms and inalienable rights in these United States are based on the unquestioned power the imperial storm troopers and its “Death Star” exercise at will across the known universe.
Both parties push for war. Obama
is more of the same. What we need to C H A N G E is a flawed two-party system
where we are forced to choose the lesser of the two evils.
--> This country has been at war with
some foreign nation of “evildoers” since I first traversed its soil in 1968,
and I wish I could tell you that things are different now. I wish I could proclaim that the U.S. is
an instrument of peace and progressive change for the betterment of all
humankind. I am grateful that I
have been able to cultivate my artistic voice here, but it pains me to not
progress towards the ideals that others often project upon what America loves to
pretend to be.
To face the reality of the
crimes perpetrated in the name of freedom makes us all accomplices if we dare
not speak. Like the AIDS slogan states, silence equals death.
Make art that matters!
José Torres-Tama
ArteFuturo Productions
www.torrestama.com
