Where Late the Sweet Obamas Sang

When the Obamas appear at one of their many lucrative speaking gigs and tell other rich people that their new goal in life is to fill the whole world with "hundreds or thousands or millions" of Baracks and Michelles, please don't worry. They're not going for a kinder, gentler, neoliberal version of The Boys From Brazil. They don't actually want to replicate themselves as robotic pod people.

They don't want to literally clone themselves, for heaven's sake -- even though this method would probably be a lot cheaper than training vast new generations of wannabe Baracks and Michelles at their planned $500 million library in Chicago, and burning hundreds or thousands or millions of gallons of polluting jet fuel as they travel the world to inspire paying customers to murmur the right platitudes. Better for the rich to talk optimistically and nicely about the downtrodden than to insult them. It sure beats sharing the actual wealth with them. The very thought of redistribution makes offshore tax havens cringe.

  If Barack Obama knows how to train people in anything, it's in the properly mellifluous use of platitudes. He crooned to a Tokyo audience that he wants to teach young people how to "run in the relay race that is human progress." That's a nice way of saying that it's a dog-eat-dog world out there, and competition - not empathy - is the key to success and happiness. On the other hand, the cult of the individual must always be tempered by "civil discourse" so as to give proper cover to predatory capitalists. Nice guy that he is, Obama even euphemized these predators and their unprosecuted crimes against humanity as "problems caused by old men."

As the glowing corporate media coverage of his post-presidency always interprets it, isn't Obama just so wonderfully discreet and even-tempered whenever he takes a jab at Donald J. Trump?

Now, to be fair, Obama also told the audience that if it turns out he's unable to create new legions of virtual Baracks and Michelles to save the world, he will at least inspire imitations: "or, the next group of people who could take that baton in that relay race that is human progress.”

(It's the Think System of the 21st century, as originally devised by that lovable old scammer himself, Professor Harold Hill the Music Man.)

But forget the feel-good musical comedy. We've got big trouble here in River City  The late Kate Wilhelm warned in her classic work of post-apocalyptic fiction, "Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang," that while the rich might think they're special, keeping their dynasties alive and thriving while the rest of the world starves and burns might have a few drawbacks. From Wikipedia's plot summary:

The collapse of civilization around the worlds resulted from massive environmental changes and global disease, which was attributed to large-scale pollution. With a range of members privileged by virtue of education and monetary resources, one large family founds an isolated community in an attempt to survive the still developing global disasters. As the death toll rises, mainly to disease and nuclear warfare, they discover that the human population left on earth is universally infertile. From cloning experiments conducted through the study of mice, the scientists in the small community theorize that the infertility might be reversed after multiple generations of cloning, and the family begins cloning themselves in an effort to survive.

If you think that scenario is far-fetched, you can always turn to nonfiction. Naomi Klein writes in The Intercept of a small group of Ayn Randian plutocrats - Puertopians - aiming to re-colonize the storm-ravaged Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and turn it into a jumbo gated community and multi-trillion dollar closed market economy:  

As a breed, the Puertopians, in their flip-flops and surfer shorts, are a sort of slacker cousin to the Seasteaders, a movement of wealthy libertarians who have been plotting for years to escape the government’s grip by starting their own city-states on artificial islands. Anybody who doesn’t like being taxed or regulated will simply be able to, as the Seasteading manifesto states, “vote with your boat.

”For those harboring these Randian secessionist fantasies, Puerto Rico is a much lighter lift. When it comes to taxing and regulating the wealthy, its current government has surrendered with unmatched enthusiasm. And there’s no need to go to the trouble of building your own islands on elaborate floating platforms — as one Puerto Crypto session put it, Puerto Rico is poised to be transformed into a “crypto-island.”

Sure, unlike the empty city-states Seasteaders fantasize about, real-world Puerto Rico is densely habited with living, breathing Puerto Ricans. But FEMA and the governor’s office have been doing their best to take care of that too. Though there has been no reliable effort to track migration flows since Hurricane Maria, some 200,000 people have reportedly left the island, many of them with federal help.

Of course, this makes Barack and Michelle's million-clone neoliberal army seem downright beneficent. They sure beat a bunch of creepy wrinkled old Ayn Rand pod people.

Forget about Michelle Obama running against Trump in 2020, though. Unlike her hubby's rather narcissistic goal of millions of Obamas, she herself modestly aims for only "thousands of Mes" to do the hard work of market-based identity politics. As reported by Business Insider,

The former first lady has been meeting many younger leaders through her work with the Obama Foundation. She says it has given her a lot of optimism about their approach to leading the country.
"They're tired of watching us do the same old thing and expect different results," Obama, 54, said at Klick Health's Muse event in New York on Tuesday. "So I'm optimistic about the future. There are some bright young people out there doing some amazing things."
Those interactions have helped to solidify her plans, which aren't likely to involve running for office. "This is why I'm not going to run for president," she said. "Because I think it's a better investment to invest in creating thousands of mes."

The article doesn't state whether The Real Michelle was paid her reported customary fee of $200,000 for inspiring Klick Health, a consulting and marketing agency whose stated task is to help the world's top medical and pharmaceutical industries burnish their images and increase their profits through the use of Big Data, as well as to inspire patients to manage their own health care needs more "efficiently."

Something just klicked in my brain, and not in a pleasant way. But never mind all that. Back to Mrs. Obama.

While she apparently allows media coverage of certain carefully selected muse-ical corporate events such as Klick Fest, this was apparently not the case in Miami Beach last week, when a Pulitzer-winning Washington Post reporter was booted from an exclusive BET event headlining Michelle Obama. It seems that the "intimate" conference for wealthy African-American women was implicitly off the record, yet panelist Robin Givhan still had the nerve to write a rather fawning blog-post about Obama's appearance for her newspaper. 

A BET rep insisted Givhan was “invited as a guest (not working press) to moderate a fashion panel,” and her travel and hotel were paid for by BET.

“She was made aware that it was an intimate conversation in a sacred space of sisterhood and fellowship.”

After a prolonged ethics kerfuffle largely played out over Twitter, the National Association of Black Journalists has come out in support of Givhan:

The rules of journalism are clear: any decision to make an event off-the-record must be stated clearly upfront, and not after-the-fact. If an individual or entity desires to have a conversation that is off-the-record, that has to be made public. It can’t be assumed or hinted. BET’s statement of the event being ‘an intimate conversation in a sacred space of sisterhood and fellowship’ does not hold water in any newsroom. If the off-the-record declaration is not made, that means everything is on-the-record and available to be reported.

Here's my take on the controversy. Michelle Obama's scripted BET conversation with BFF Valerie Jarrett probably derives from a chapter in her upcoming memoir, Becoming Michelle Obama. It was also probably a dress rehearsal for the world-wide book tour. The publisher's hype is that this volume will be so thrillingly "intimate" and mesmerizing that its sales are expected to skyrocket into even more millions of copies than there will be Obama clones.  Since intimacy "as told by" the rich and famous is such a valuable commodity, Robin Givhan probably leaked a whole hunk of the book without even realizing it. 

But at least the sour note ended on a very sweet note. Journalism in the public, rather than the private, interest really does prevail sometimes. Not every reporter is a stenographer and celebrity-worshiper. It's enough to make you sing for joy.