- The Emergency Room at San Francisco General Hospital
is an American Bedlam. Now the only trauma center in a city that has suffered
nearly 100 violent homicides in the first 10 months of 2008, ER is a snake
pit boiling over nightly with gunshot and stabbing victims, those mangled
in street confrontations or otherwise mowed down in traffic, damaged gangbangers,
raving lunatics, drunks in the throes of the DTs, handcuffed prisoners
in Guantanamo-like jumpsuits, snarling cops, and harried if heroically
serene medical personal just trying to survive their shifts.
-
- Broken men and women moan and thrash on blood-drenched
gurneys so jamming the narrow hallways that treatment is reduced to triage.
Some patients are lashed to their impromptu beds, the more comatose hooked
up to blinking machines. Bodily fluids are sprayed and spat so rudely that
the caregivers are forced to wear plastic face visors.
-
- I arrived in this little corner of Hell courtesy of 911
after I had stopped breathing, a borderline emergency, and was shelved
for 25 hours in a war zone hallway while the mayhem surged and ebbed all
around me. Twice during my stay, the hospital decreed a red alert and the
ER was locked down by armed deputies, a measure a retired nurse tells me
is imposed when rival gangs face off in the parking lot.
-
- The desperation was palpable. I overheard one severely
wounded man threaten to murder his medic. Others were more patient. Some
would not immediately respond to the questions of their caregivers. What's
your name, the nurses would demand? What month is it? Where are you? Who
is the president?
-
- "Barack Fucking Obama!" an Afro-American throat
roared back down the hall and the entire Emergency Room, nurses and doctors
and patients together, clapped and cheered wildly. I turned towards the
wall and curled into a fetal position.
-
- I don't buy Barack Obama as the Messiah. I didn't vote
for him (I voted for another Afro-American) and I haven't filed an application
to join his regime. He ran a duplicitous, multi-million dollar campaign
that masqueraded as a social movement and because it was a gimmick and
a shuck, will thwart and demoralize the re-creation of real social movement
for years to come.
-
- The suckers packed shoulder to shoulder in Grant Park
on Election Night were not a movement. 40 years ago, the Left stood in
that park and were burning American flags, not waving them - although the
reasons were equally specious. Back then, it was the denial of another
false Messiah's rightful place on the Democratic Party ticket. We ran a
pig for president to underscore our disdain for the electoral process and
when Mayor Dailey's cops kidnapped and barbecued our candidate, we turned
to yet another Afro-American who was also not the Messiah. In August 1968,
the Mayor of Chicago, whose son is now Barack Obama's most trusted political
advisor, sent in the real pigs to beat us into the Grant Park grass like
so many baby harp seals.
-
- Now that was a social movement
-
- Eduardo Galeano does not get it. When he tells Amy Goodman
that he has high hopes for El Baracko because black slaves once built the
White House for which the president-elect is now measuring the drapes,
he does not consider that Obama himself is a slave, a slave to Wall Street
and General Motors and Big Oil and Big Ethanol, a slave to the War Machine
and U.S. Imperialism and Israel, a slave to We're Number One jingoism,
avarice, and greed and the American Nightmare, a slave to the free market
and free enterprise and free trade and the flimflam of corporate globalization,
and most of all, a slave to the Democratic Party puppet masters who now
move his strings.
-
- Galeano doesn't seem to recall that Afro-Americans can
be mass murderers too. Condi is a killer and Barack's big booster Colin
Powell once obligated the United National Security Council to cover up
a reproduction of Picasso's "Gernika" before he could lie that
contaminated body in the eye about Saddam's make-believe WMDs and jumpstart
a war that has now taken a million Iraqi lives. So far. The bloodletting
has hardly abated.
-
- We are in garbage time. The adulatory garbage being spewed
about the virtues of Barrack Obama are a toxic trick on the peoples of
the earth. One glaring recent example: 100,000 marched from sea to shining
sea in the U.S. last weekend (Nov. 16th) in support of same sex marriage
and no one had the moxie to even mention that Barack Obama does not support
same sex marriage.
-
- False Messiahs are made to be unmasked. Anyone who aspires
to be the maximum capo of the world's most homicidal on-going criminal
conspiracy is just that, a criminal. Barack Obama is a war criminal-in-waiting
masquerading as a peace candidate on the pretext that he will move the
Yanqui troops two wars to the east to massacre civilians who did not vote
for him. I am not fooled.
-
- I am not invested in the United States of North America.
I do not have an IRA or a CD or whatever they call the shekel-sucking scams
that are flogged by those who just bankrupted the nation. I have no stocks
or bonds or health insurance or retirement account. I don't have a job
and I don't pay taxes. I don't drink Coca Cola and I don't drive or own
a car. Indeed, I don't own any property at all. I don't know how to get
to Main Street. Hell, I don't even live in this benighted country.
-
- Recession, depression and financial crisis are great
equalizers. Bring 'em on! Those of us who live down at the bottom know
how to survive. We are not going away.
-
- On the night that Barack Obama was elected commander-in-chief,
U.S. killers operating under NATO impunity, murdered at least 40 more Afghani
civilians - "NATO" has now snuffed out over a thousand non-combattant
lives this year in a war that Obama is pledged to escalate.
-
- Also on Election Night, the Zionists of Israel deliberately
bombed Gaza breaking a months-long truce to send the U.S, president-elect
a clear and unequivocal message. 48 hours later that message was received
and acknowledged and Rahm Israel Emanuel, a member of the Israeli army,
was appointed Obama's chief of staff.
-
- The scenario is being written as we read. Before he is
done, Barack Obama will bomb bomb bomb Iran. Here in our Americas, he will
spit in Hugo Chavez's eye and kick Evo Morales in the balls, prolong the
Cuban blockade, and cuddle up to cold-blooded killers like Colombia's Uribe
and Mexico's Calderon. Galeano will have many new chapters to write.
-
- My pal Sasha Crow is just back from Amman where she is
helping to pick up the pieces of the shattered lives of Iraqi refugees
driven out of their homeland by an American war. Despite the evacuation
of the White House by a president who wrecked their families and destroyed
their livelihoods, the refugees to whom she speaks don't think that Barack
Obama is the Messiah either.
-
- Sasha is the motor behind the Collateral Repair Project,
a response by grass roots Americans to the unspeakable collateral carnage
this country has inflicted upon the innocent to sustain the sort of We're
Number One domination of which Barack Obama is an enthusiastic devotee.
If you want to make some change that the world can really believe in, send
her some real change at www.collateralrepairproject.org.
-
- John Ross can be reached at: johnross@igc.org or
visit johnross-rebeljournalist.com
-
- http://www.counterpunch.org/ross11252008.html
|