Buku: Obama Paradiso
The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad
Tariq Ali
$16.95
In the preface to his new book, The Obama Syndrome, Tariq Ali makes a curious disclaimer about the thematic scope of his most recent work. “This is a preliminary report on the first 1,000 days of the Obama administration,” Ali writes. “Nothing more.”
The transparently self-effacing description is both accurate and misleading. Ali’s work is indeed preliminary, but, by definition, so is any Obama-themed book published between now and the end of the Obama presidency. Written right before the midterm elections in the US, Ali’s book has a minimal shelf life, and one that, by now, may have even expired.
Nevertheless, the temporal parameters of the book allow Ali to structure his narrative around a unique moment in recent political history. On the eve of impending political change, the author looks back on the nascent presidency of a man who rode into the White House on a message of change, and a list of promises that, according to Ali, he never meant to fulfill.
True to Ali’s disclaimer, The Obama Syndrome is loosely structured like a “report.” Like any good reporter, the author aggregates facts and quotations, and uses them, in tandem, to construct his own analysis of recent presidential history. But in Ali’s skilled hands, facts and citations mingle freely with metaphor and hyperbole, creating a hybrid form of poetic argumentation that’s enjoyable to consume, but sometimes difficult to digest. There’s plenty of reporting to be sure, but there’s also plenty of textual frivolity. And whenever Ali favors the latter over the former, his rationality flirts with sensationalism, and his poetry soon devolves into punditry.
Given the book’s abbreviated scope and temporal limitations, it’s more appropriate to think of The Obama Syndrome not as an investigative report or expository essay, but as an extended trailer for an upcoming film. It titillates and teases with strangely pleasurable relentlessness. It consistently invites the audience to take a look behind the curtain, to meditate on a particular argument or camera angle, before hurriedly cutting to the next scene. Ali’s tactics are tantalizing, but far from satisfying.
Then again, The Obama Syndrome isn’t really intended to “satisfy.” Its aim is to enlighten, to excavate, and to intrigue—all of which it does, but to a disappointingly limited extent.
Ali’s brief work is divided into three parts. The first chapter attempts to contextualize Obama’s election in light of America’s intertwining racial and political histories. The second addresses the president’s foreign policy agenda, with particular attention paid to both Afghanistan and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And the third, titled “Surrender at Home,” zeroes in on Obama’s domestic shortcomings—namely, those related to healthcare and financial reforms.
In each act, Ali adds more factual weight to his claim that Obama is, as he says, nothing more than “the Empire’s most inventive apparition of itself.” According to Ali, America’s 44 president has firmly committed himself to pursuing the same, neo-liberal economic agenda that spawned the financial crisis, and the same, misguided foreign policy agenda that Ronald Reagan planted, and George W. Bush took to terrifying extremes. At home, he’s blatantly pandered to corporate interests, while slyly casting himself as an idealist who’s just trying to do the “right thing” amidst a cruel sea of political reality.
The thesis, at its core, is robust, and its supporting arguments are largely cogent. On more than one occasion, however, the author’s pen seems to run too far ahead of the reader, leaving unexplained claims in its wake.
Ali may spend several pages laying the foundation for a single argument, only to glide over seemingly important details and implicitly declare them as absolute givens. This habit is particularly egregious in the second chapter, when the author makes a series of declarative statements on the mechanisms underpinning diplomatic chess in the Middle East, without offering sorely needed support.
Fortunately, Ali’s prose is commanding enough to distract the reader from his occasional oversight, and organically rhythmic enough to keep the narrative moving forward. But this powerful prose can also backfire, and bloat intrinsically sobering arguments with superfluous, and sometimes self-contradictory fluff.
Ali repeatedly chastises Obama for delivering remarkably eloquent, and stunningly vacuous speeches. Yet, he could easily apply the very same critique to his own writing. Case in point: “As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan showed few signs of subsiding, the Orwellian mediasphere continued to proclaim ‘peace is war’ and ‘war is peace.’” Pot, meet kettle.
Meanwhile, the author’s use of metaphor ranges from the clumsy (“Sadly, no political drug has been developed to cure the cancerous corruptions of US politicians”) to the downright absurd (“Proximity to power has an unsurprising ability to mutate a politician’s spinal chord into bright yellow jelly.”). At other moments, his fiery rhetoric comes across as grouchy, and unnecessarily vindictive. At the end of the first chapter, for instance, he brutally excoriates Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity campaign for no real reason, whatsoever.
It’s the kind of attention-grabbing, quote-manufacturing language that dilutes an otherwise well-reasoned book. But it’s also the perfect lexicon for a compelling movie trailer—one that skims the surface, stimulates the senses, and piques the imagination. And, as with every great movie trailer, The Obama Syndrome only leaves the reader wanting more.
Published: Thursday 27 January 2011 Updated: Friday 28 January 2011
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