State of the Union: A true dose of reality
Between the Lines
Watching a President of the United States give a State of the Union address is often like watching a peacock strut, its head jutting forward with each step, and its splayed feathers shouting, “Look at me. I’m tall. I’m beautiful. I have it all. I did it all.”
The president usually lists an embellished log of accomplishments and forecasts a list of unreasonable—if not unachievable—expectations. Then Congress comes back and peacocks what it has done. The president and Congress, like the peacocks, claim they can do everything but fly.
In fact, the peacock struts because it can’t fly.
Well, this week, the president flew as Congress attempted to strut. President Barack Obama laid out the reality of our nation and his accomplishments despite obstruction in front of Congress and the nation. He did it in real time, in virtual reality, in jaw-dropping fashion.
The 2012 State of the Union address offered a vast contrast to the picture of the nation the Republican candidates running in the GOP primaries have painted. The president offered a different picture of the nation’s political and social realities than what the Congress has held up.
The American people don’t know what to think about the state of the nation and the mental state of its leaders, because they get a different spin from all directions.
Nothing is good enough. Nothing is right. The other party is always wrong. Reality is never real. And, as the nation witnessed in 2011, the Congress is delusional.
However, this week the nation got a true dose of reality. Now, I’m not saying that I agreed with everything the president laid out, particularly on Iran. I believe he’s being walked into a trap on that tip . . . .
But I do believe he is trying to construct a virtual reality for the type of government we currently have and the limitations it poses when you have ideologues and millionaires running the government who have distorted realities about the socioeconomic conditions in which most people live in our nation.
The president held up a mirror to Congress this week. Hopefully, it was as ugly to them as it has been to the rest of us. Congress has painted itself into a corner, largely because the ideologues don’t understand the role of government beyond their own self-interested motives and rhetorical retraction.
Rhetorical retraction simply means they think they have to move backwards to take the nation forward. We know it’s empty rhetoric. They know it’s empty rhetoric and the president showed it as empty rhetoric.
The politics of political gamesmanship was really the subject of the State of the Union. That is the state of the union, virtually.
In a very literal sense, the president laid out what has been, what is, and what could have been had Congress not played with the lives of the American people. He asked Congress what reality they were looking at and what reality they actually saw? Is it the same reality the American people see, or is it a contrived reality for the privileged and the socially impolitic?
Both, of course, represent what the GOP is presenting as their best options to Obama in Romney and Gingrich. The president called for Congress to be fair to the American people. The GOP want to just be fair to the rich. What they are calling “class warfare,” as the president noted, the rest of the nation calls “common sense.”
For most us, common sense is virtual reality—what is in the here and now—not a contrived reality. What Americans need, here and now, is a more responsive government to address problems specific to the needs of its citizens.
Hopefully, the nation heard the president and will return to its virtual senses and a common reality for all of us. Not just a few of us.
Anthony Asadullah Samad, Ph.D., is a national columnist, managing director of the Urban Issues Forum (www.urbanissuesforum.com) and author of the upcoming book, REAL EYEZ: Race, Reality and Politics in 21st Century Popular Culture. He can be reached at www.AnthonySamad.com, at www.facebook.com/Dr-Anthony-Samad/, or on Twitter at @dranthonysamad.
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