Undressing Obama’s State of the Union address

By Tommi Avicolli Mecca

January 26, 2011

A lot of what President Obama said during last eve’s State of the Union address was predictable: the economy is in recovery, the wars are almost over, and every Joe or Jane can still realize their dreams. Tell that to the millions out of work or living on the streets.

There are concerns.  The deficit will require sacrifices and cuts (but not the ending of the wars); the overblown threat of global terror is still alive and well, and our educational system needs a jump-start to catch up to other countries. It’s not as if we haven’t heard all of that before.

There were also, of course, feel-good moments, such as the story of roofers who helped repair the Pentagon after 9/11 and who are now producing solar panels, and a call for eliminating tax breaks for oil companies. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but they’re doing just fine on their own,” Obama joked. Good luck selling that to the Republicans and conservative Blue Dog Democrats in Congress.

But there was also the zinger, and it was a big one. Boasting of the fact that gays and lesbians (but not transgender folks) can now join the military and kill people overseas, thanks to the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT).  Obama urged “our college campuses to open their doors to our military recruiters and the ROTC. It is time to leave behind the divisive battles of the past. It is time to move forward as one nation,” he said.

The battles on campuses to eliminate JROTC and ROTC were not just about DADT. They were about keeping academic institutions free of military recruiters needing to fill quotas. The repeal of DADT doesn’t change anything other than the fact that gays and lesbians won’t be discriminated against in the armed forces.

DADT was not the reason I or millions of others got involved in the anti-war movement in the late 60s. Those “divisive battles of the past” were about human lives being sacrificed in a senseless war in Vietnam. They were about opposition to a military industrial complex that still sacrifices young poor and working-class individuals to further the profits of companies such as Halliburton, Bechtel, etc. America’s latest wars were declared against two countries that never attacked us, and did not, contrary to the assertion George W. Bush, have weapons of mass destruction aimed at our shores.

If “moving forward as one nation” means supporting ROTC at colleges or JROTC in high schools, then we are one nation minus one.

Of course, we are not, nor have we ever been, one nation. We have always been divided along class, race, gender and other lines.

Obama’s opening remark that “we share common hopes and a common creed” is absolute gibberish to this queer radical native son. It is the rhetoric of a man who desperately wants to sound like the great healer and mediator and who wants to be loved by everyone, something that is not uncommon in politicians.

I don’t share “common hopes” with the tea party crowd and their queen Sarah Palin, and, as an atheist, I certainly don’t share “a common creed” with the Christian majority, especially the fundamentalists and evangelicals who truly believe that the biblical mandate to execute queers should be the law of the land.

Ultimately, Obama’s wants all of us to buy into an agenda that, while it promotes healthcare reform, albeit a weak one, and more money to put people back to work, also includes continued warfare in two countries (to the cost of millions per day), out of control defense and military spending (59 percent of our nation’s annual budget), and recruitment of young people into a horrific war machine.

FCJ Editor

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