When a fresh faced Obama was elected in 2008, the first black president, the world appeared to sigh in collective relief. The Nobel Foundation awarded Obama a preemptive peace prize only eight and a half months into his presidency, a gesture of good will after eight destructive years of Bush and his preemptive wars built on what many scientists would say was a false flag operation on 9/11. In my naïveté I believed that it could be that moment in time when an FDR or Kennedy would manifest and alter the consciousness of a world gasping for peace and justice and civility.
Eight years and over 100,000 bombs later, 26,171 in his last year alone including civilian casualty estimates as high as 3398, Obama was rumored to say to top aides, “Turns out I’m really good at killing people.”
It’s easy to mythologize Obama now, like presidents before him, some elevated to god-like status like Washington, who in contrast to the cherry tree myth was in reality a mediocre battle tactician at best, a social climber who slept with his best friend’s wife and married for money, ruthless in business and who advocated for the brutal whipping of his slaves, even pursuing the slaves freed by the British during the Revolutionary War with pathological vengeance. Obama’s presidential portrait has now entered into that pantheon of the cult of presidential personalities, many of whom were rapists, slave owners and genocidal killers in their own right, especially now that his successor may go down in history as one of the most psychopathic, virulently racist, toxically misogynistic personalities to have ever not won the popular vote.
Drone strikes have increased more than 50% and civilian deaths 215% under Trump. Nazis march the streets. Children in cages. Nuclear wars threatened via Twitter. The Republic, if not fatally wounded with the inability of Eisenhower to curb the power of the military industrial complex and with the murder of Kennedy, is certainly dead now. Not by a bullet to the brain but by a thousand cuts.
We have now officially entered our age of Caligula.