Walking the Black Line: The N Thing and Obama

Walking the Black Line: That N thing and Obama

In the movie Blazing Saddles Mel Brooks lays the racist arguments right on the line. The Black sheriff is riding into save a town that is being threatened by outlaws. The people are excited and then they find the “The Sheriff is a N…” Bells ring and no one can hear it. When he finally does arrive, they want to shoot him! Though it appears he is the only one who can save the town, they are more concerned that he is a, N… .

The NY Times recently wrote of Obama’s debating style as, “Cool, detached, and intellectual.” After eight years of a president who can barely speak a cogent sentence; an articulate and intelligent person should be a welcome change, but this is America in 2008: The sound byte reigns supreme, and the Republican convention, like the Nuremberg rally, is filled with obeisant patriotic chants, in this case, USA, USA. As Einstein said about blind patriotism, any one who marches in a parade denies the necessity of the development of the cerebral cortex. In this election, it is imperative, though unlikely; we will get to a substantive debate about the future of the USA. In the meantime, Russian warships are challenging the Monroe doctrine, and the US like Rome in the late 2nd century is watching its world power shrink. Welcome to the 21st Century.

People are primitive pools of emotions, passions, and tribalism. Most of humanity’s march over some 4 million years since we bid farewell to our primate first cousins, has been a brutal struggle for survival, us versus them, tribe against tribe. Despite some rudimentary signs of progress, humans have not really evolved in the fundamental way that will ensure long term survival. Wars, tribalism, us versus them, ideologically driven… Nigger, spic, honkie, redneck, fascist, and so on. We define: other and like us: Friend or foe.

Barrack Obama blows the conventional paradigms out of the water and yet through the lens of red, white, and blue – and too many, we are stuck on the N thing. Yes, the sheriff may be black, but the question is: Does he have the energy, commitment, the intelligence, integrity, and character to lead the nation? The answer is yes. If we can get past the subtext about race and look at the man, we will not see a color blind or white washed version; we will see the full spectrum of the man. A man who is white, black, African, mid western, urban, grew up poor and middle-class, earned his way through college, who forsook a very lucrative law career to be a community organizer, and though he didn’t fight in the trenches, he fought in a more dangerous place, the Illinois Statehouse.

Yes, the Sheriff may be black, but he’s our only choice.