This Week: A Remedy for Obama Disappointment

"Quote" of the Week

Disappointed in Obama? Betrayed? Try This Remedy.

The Latest on the Book

 

Greetings,

Nygaard Notes is back! Cast your mind to September last when I said I was taking a hiatus in order to put together a book. Recall that I said the hiatus would last between two and four months. That was about five months ago. Sorry! I underestimated the time it would take to do the book. Speaking of which, there is a brief report on the book in this issue. It's still not done, but it's getting close. The next phase of the project is the one where I look for a publisher. If you have any ideas on that, let me know.

Part of the reason that this return to publishing has been so long in coming is the size of the backlog. I have struggled mightily trying to decide where to start. I finally decided to start with a piece on Obama, since everyone seems interested in that subject. I'm sure I'll write many pieces about Obama, but the one this week is about the disappointment that many people seem to be feeling, or will soon be feeling. I have a remedy for it!

The other reason for the delay in returning to publishing is that I was out of practice. Really! I sort of forgot how to do this newsletter thing. It's a lot different than a book, I'll tell you that. I think it'll come back to me. Here's the first piece of the second ten years, anyhow.

I can't even begin to list the things that I hope to write about in the coming months—let alone the coming years!—so I won't even try. We'll just have to see.

I'm very glad to be back. I love doing the Notes, and I hope you find it useful and interesting, and occasionally funny, too. I think we'll learn a lot of new things in the post-Bush era. So let's get to it.

Still here, and still writing,

Nygaard

"Quote" of the Week:

Here are some words from the New York Times, in an article about one of the perceived enemies of the United States, Venezuela. In the leadup to a national referendum on the Venezuelan constitution on February 15th, the Times tells us that:

"[President Hugo] Chávez's policies for dealing with [protesting] students are growing more repressive, with officials claiming some student protests turned violent or were about to do so. In recent days, the secret intelligence police have begun searching the homes of student leaders."

Hmm, that sounds familiar. Let's see... Oh, yeah! It was about five months ago that the U.S. Republican National Convention was held just ten minutes away from Nygaard Notes World Headquarters here in Minnesota. Just before the Convention, police not only searched the homes of protest leaders but, well, here's a report from the St. Paul Pioneer Press from August 30, 2008:

"On Friday [August 28th, 2008] and Saturday [August 29th], raids in St. Paul and Minneapolis on alleged anarchist leaders' homes and a center used by the RNC Welcoming Committee, a self-described anarchist group, raised more scrutiny about whether police were pre-empting free speech." During the raids, "Several dozen [innocent people] were ordered to the ground, handcuffed, searched, photographed, asked to show identification and questioned by police and sheriff's officials."

Somehow (unlike in the story of similar behavior supposedly committed by Venezuelan authorities), in the reports on police raids in St. Paul, the media never used the word "repressive." I guess that's a term used only for our enemies.

Disappointed in Obama? Betrayed? Try This Remedy.

Like many people, I was tremendously moved to see that the country of my birth was able to elect a man with dark skin to the highest office in the land. And it was also exciting to see the positive energy that was generated by the Obama campaign in communities around the country.

It's a bit early to judge the performance of the new President, yet we are already seeing numerous reports of the disappointment—betrayal, even—felt by many who worked to elect Barack Obama.

The Economist of London declared on January 22nd that "For the left, the list of Mr Obama's betrayals—real or anticipated—is getting longer." They mentioned Guantanamo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza, the War On Terror, and more. A plaintive February 9th letter to the editor of the Arizona Republic from a "strong supporter of the Obama campaign" said that "we still had hope that even people like us, middle-class small-business owners struggling in this disastrous economy, would have our voices heeded. Now we feel betrayed." Also on February 9th, the Associated Press reported that "the Obama administration's foreclosure prevention plan could disappoint consumer advocates." And ‘way back in December the prominent liberal David Corn wrote in the Washington Post "looking at President-elect Barack Obama's top appointments, it's easy to wonder whether convention has triumphed over change—and centrists over progressives."

All of this makes me recall a short series I wrote back in 2004, when many of the same people were discouraged and depressed by the prospect—and then the fact—of the re-election of Mr. Bush. That series I referred to as the "How Not To Get Depressed Series." It started in Nygaard Notes #266, and you can go back and read it if you like. But it occurs to me that I could run it again now, with a new title: "The How Not To Feel Betrayed Series." Instead of that, I'll just give a few highlights that I think might be useful in the 2009 context. Here's the one-sentence summary of the trick to use to avoid disappointment: Use a Systems Approach, Think Dialectically, Take Action, and Have Faith. I'll summarize each of those four parts below.

How Not To Feel Betrayed

USE A SYSTEMS APPROACH. When we see the world as a series of interrelated systems, we see that there are no simple answers about why things happen the way they do. So, when it comes to the election of Presidents, a systems thinker is unlikely to be a victim of unrealistic expectations. A systems approach tells us that a President does not and cannot do everything he or she really wants to do (even if we could know what he or she really wants to do, which we can't know for sure). What a president can accomplish is dictated by a complex interaction of things, including the cultural context in which a presidency occurs. By that I mean the possibilities that are opened up or closed down in our public discussion by the forces that make certain ideas acceptable and others unthinkable. The working of these forces is what I call capital-P Propaganda, and influencing the culture in this way is a big part of why Nygaard Notes and other independent media exist.

Taking a systems approach helps us to keep an even keel during the mania of "election cycles." We know that, whoever wins, we will continue to work all the time on the things that make it easier for a president to do some things—or harder to get away with some things. And we know that our work will make a difference, although we may not know exactly how or when.

THINK DIALECTICALLY. When we succeed in thinking dialectically we see that change doesn't happen suddenly. What we see is that things change little by little, until they change so much that they become something else (and that last part can seem pretty sudden!). So, when a President is elected, dialectical thinkers see a culmination of many years of building up to this moment, which has given us this certain person in the White House. When George W. was elected, for instance, I didn't see that everything had suddenly changed in this country. Instead, I saw the culmination of a lot of work by this country's reactionary leadership that began after the humiliating defeat of Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election. The Goldwater folks had a vision of a future Goldwater (Reagan, Bush, whomever) for decades, and they worked for decades to make it happen. And they got it, just as other people, with decades of work, can get Barack Obama or—imagine it!—someone much better than Barack Obama, better because she will have a movement behind her that will make real change possible. George W. Bush was not the end of the process. There is no end. That's why, no matter what happens, we...


TAKE ACTION. The third secret to avoid feeling let down by "our man" in the White House—or any house—is to keep working. I don't think anyone can fail to see the tremendous excitement that surrounded the election of Barack Obama. I think that after the election many people had the right to say (and did say) that "We did it!" I'm guessing that those who stopped there, who saw the election as "it," instead of just a building block upon which to base our ongoing actions, are the ones most likely to now feel betrayed and disappointed. Instead of "We did it" some of us prefer to say "We're doing it!" Just like we were doing it before Obama and will be doing it after he has left the scene.

We know that the work that others did over the past forty years or more made Obama's election possible. And we know that, however large a gap we see between the symbol of Obama's election and the substance of his policies, the work we do today will help to narrow that gap. And, even better, we know that our work—yours and mine, today and tomorrow—will make possible much more and better things down the road, if we work strategically and not just respond to events in the moment. Now we're talking Hope and Change! It's not unrelated to Obama, but neither is it dependent on him.

HAVE FAITH. I'm talking about faith in the power of positive action. If John McCain had been elected I would have no less of this type of faith than I do right now. That's because my faith is not a faith in the Great Man—or Woman—whether it is Obama, McCain, or John Freakin' Doe. My faith is in the inevitability of change, and in our ability to participate in it as active, creative, moral beings.

Now I'll quote myself—forgive me!—from Nygaard Notes #279, just after the 2004 election: "My faith tells me that, as more and more people come to question prevailing policies—really, as more come to be able to imagine a different system entirely—we will get closer to the next ‘tipping point' of transformation, the kind that we've seen again and again throughout history." I can't prove that, but I believe it. That's why it's called faith.

So, if you're feeling a bit disappointed in the reality of the system in the United States of Empire, and discouraged either about Obama's willingness or his ability to bring about the change that seemed to be the promise of his campaign, try the Nygaard Notes Home Remedy for the treatment of Disappointment, Betrayal, Discouragement, and Related Problems:

Use a Systems Approach. Think Dialectically. Take Action. Have Faith.

It doesn't work every time, but you might want to give it a try and see what it does for you.

The Latest on the Book

The last issue of Nygaard Notes appeared on November 13th, and much progress has been made on the book since then. (For those who inexplicably don't know, I have been spending the past few months trying to assemble a book from writings that have appeared in Nygaard Notes over the past ten years.) A very brief summary follows. If you would like to know more, feel free to contact me, and I'll tell you more.

The Main Point: I think I'm in the home stretch on the project. Maybe 80 percent done with the manuscript. When I say "done," I mean that I have read through, edited, updated, re-arranged, or otherwise prepared the essays I'm planning to use. I've arranged them in a narrative structure that I think makes sense, I've also done some of the footnoting (which is very time-consuming, I'm learning).

The arrangement of the book has changed somewhat. It used to be arranged in three sections. Now it's in four. I think they'll go something like this:

Part One: What is Propaganda? Here's where I lay out my unorthodox ideas about the nature of the phenomenon.

Part Two: How Does Propaganda Work? I get down to the nitty-gritty with some hints on how "the system" works these days.

Part Three: What The Propagandized Mind Is Supposed to Think I expose some of the key ideas that I think are dominant in the modern U.S. propaganda system.

Part Four: Moving Beyond Propaganda: New Ways of Thinking. Here's where I talk about the need to work not only on what we think, but also on how we think. I attempt to show a way to effectively deal with modern Propaganda and move toward a more life-affirming way of formulating our ideas and acting on our values.

Yes, I know it sounds ambitious.

The title for the book? I don't know if I'll stick with it, but the working title I've been using lately is "21st Century Propaganda: Deciding What to Believe in the Age of (Too Much) Information." Some people love it, some seem to hate it.

At the moment, the whole thing looks to be about 175 pages long, which does not include the introduction, any appendices, index, or the footnotes. I've edited and arranged more than 150 of those pages, and some wonderful volunteer editors (Thank you so terribly much!) have read and commented on the first couple of sections. There could be a lot of footnotes. My original target of a total of 200-300 pages seems to be about right. I'm hoping to stay closer to 200.

I'm encouraged to find that all of the major points that I have made over the years were based on facts that are still true—sometimes even more true—than they were when I first cited them. So when I update my facts, I haven't needed to revise any of my main points. Still, all the facts have to be checked and re-verified, and that is time-consuming.

Very shortly I expect to finish the manuscript, and then I begin the process of preparing a proposal to submit to publishers. Actually, I've already started that process, again with help from folks who have volunteered their time and knowledge to guide me.

Finally, I am new at this book business, and it seems to me that my process is slow. Yet, people who have written and published books tell me that it is going fairly fast. Be that as it may, I still expect to have something out in book form in the year 2009, one way or another.

The challenge now is to balance the production of Nygaard Notes while continuing to progress on the book. What if my brain explodes?

That's enough on the book. I hope to say nothing more about it until I announce its publication. Unless you write to me and ask.