The Anti-Patriarch Dream

Watching the “debate” between Clinton and Obama last night, I had the growing sense of witnessing a historical breakthrough in the collective consciousness of our bushwhacked, neo-conned republic. As if by magic, the two erstwhile combatants appeared suddenly transformed into a dream team Democratic ticket. Apparently all that was needed was the withdrawal of the third serious contender, John Edwards, to create the “frame” through which we saw them last night. And what we saw was a political epiphany of sorts. A cosmic “duh!” Of course! Unless I was hallucinating, it seemed to me that this epiphany was hitting the two contenders at the same time it was hitting me, Wolf Blitzer, and just about everybody in the studio audience--judging from the reaction to Blitzer’s sudden proposal, as if from out of nowhere, that they were indeed a “dream team.”

Why are they a dream team? The two obvious reasons: one is a woman, the other an African American. But beneath that façade of gender and race lies a more profound reason: in Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama we see two leaders who are almost divinely equipped to end the stultifying patriarchy that has had America in its grip since the ascension if Ronald Reagan--a reign of tyranny against working people that Bill Clinton and his centrist administration was able to briefly tame, but not quell. In the last seven years, however, the full reality of Republican philosophy, vis-à-vis working people, has come glaringly into view. The Republicans, in fact, are almost Soviet in their belief in two types of people: the professional-managerial-capitalist class, and everybody else--the mass of workers who the Soviets call the Proletariat. For Republicans and their Corporate bedfellows, just as for the old Soviets, workers are commodities first, and only human beings when an attentive media is doing its job. But since Republican patriarchs have come to own so much of the media, we almost seemed in danger of losing even that safeguard.

But I digress. IMHO, Obama and Clinton are much closer to one another than their campaign squabbles ever indicated. I believe that each one of them wants passionately to be president. But I think we saw last night that each of them would also be open to a higher calling: the redemption of this country through a unity that they themselves would embody magnificently as the Dream Team of the century. Frankly, their differences are piddling, when viewed against the backdrop of Republican tyranny. Pray for their well being, brothers and sisters. They are the anti-patriarchs.