Black Obama to Striped Obama

                

This is the picture of Obama that keeps coming to my mind as I hear of this or that of his deed in domestic or foreign policy spheres, and I think this picture will go down in history as the defining character of Obama`s presidency and his role in the world.

This picture was taken and officially released as perhaps the only picture of the War Room during America`s raid in Pakistan to assassinate Osama bin Laden. What does it show? There are the Defense Department , State Department, and CIA Chiefs, one or two Generals, some very senior Standees at the back – and almost as an afterthought the President of USA sitting on the side perhaps on  a low stool hastily brought in at the last minute. 

What does this picture – an official release by the US Govt, and shown to billions of people in the world hundreds of time in the aftermath -- say about  Obama? That he is Informal and Cool? One of the boys ? Or that he is and remains a peripheral nigger in the WASP sanctum sanctorum of the biggest Imperial  power the planet has ever seen?

My guess is that the operation – ignorantly named Geronimo, not fiendishly cunningly – would have been definitely planned and discussed in deepest detail with Obama for knowledge and sanction. But his having a fine legal mind and perhaps also for protocol detail it was not on the cards to provide for His chair during the actual execution of the raid. And as it was going down as they say, he wanted to be present for the thrills. Hence the last minute stool on the side.

But this picture randomly thrown up by history as it was happening will become an emblem, a code, a signifier of the Obama Story. His niggerhood , his tenacity, his success, his clever negotiation of the whitey jungle, his contrived aplomb, his peripheral position grudgingly conceded by the establishment, his lawyerly smallness . All this the picture has captured for the later students of history and biography, all the comedy and tragedy of Obama.

Chancing upon the first Great Crash of markets in the 21^st century he makes grand statements of Rooseveltian New Deal but ends with some sleazy backroom deals with bankers and asset funds. Visits Egypt with a major speech to turn around America`s antipathy with the muslim world but goes on to make covert interventions in Egypt, Libya, and Syria , and latest, tries to block Palestine`s UN membership. Makes lofty bytes on Medicare but ends up being upstaged by the industry. Bush at least follows the often fake American tradition of rule of law by bringing Saddam Hussein to a kangaroo court, but Obama illegally sends his forces at night across a foreign nation`s border for a secret murder and and burial of Osama bin Laden. He vows to bring American troops back home but signs secret orders to increase US military involvement abroad—oh so cleverly by saying that no American soldier has set a foot on Libya`s soil, for example. 

Oh, he is clever, too clever by half. Not a FDR, but a Nixon. Michael Jackson opted to surgically change the colour of his skin in order to be accepted ; Obama has tried the more ambitious route of thinking like the firangis; both have failed in face of  bigotry of their societies.

He has spent a lifetime of hard striving against a hostile social setting fuelled by a hollow loquacity, and sadly he will also be felled by it.

Watch the picture, and wait and see.