When John McCain referred to Barack Obama as “that one”was not a simple gaff, but a deeply rooted racial prejudice and a deeply rooted blockage in his understanding. One could guess that when Barack Obama says “John doesn’t get it”, the meaning of his indictment may be wider than perhaps Obama himself intended. And if we look harder, we may find out that McCain’s gaff and Obama’s indictment are logically connected with another McCain memorable formula: Obama wants to socialize wealth instead of creating wealth.
Most of McCain’s formulaic attacks on Obama are extremely superficial and obviously addressed to a sector of potential Republican voters who are more concerned with the baseball championship underway in the early Fall or the beginning of the basketball and football seasons, than in who would be elected President of the United States and what may be the future consequences. Well, let’s say that the nonsensical and empty formulae accumulated by McCain and his campaign team are, yes, addressed to “Joe the Plumber.”
Besides Joe the Plumber, any Republican of consciousness would realize that the socialization of wealth implies creation of wealth. Would you believe that Obama is planning to stop creating wealth and just distribute whatever there is now? What McCain really means is not “socialization”vs. “creation”but “socialization”vs. “accumulation”, and for sure he knows that accumulation means to “privatize gains and socialize losses”as has been said already many times in general, but in particular about Wall Street’s suicidal wealth creation.
Now, if you look for the connecting lines between the social formula and the personal-racial gaff (“that one”) and if you go back and rewind what happened in the last debate between the two presidential candidates, you may see what I saw. It was obvious in that debate that Obama has been cornering McCain in each of the debates. But I only saw it in the last one. What I saw in the last debate was not only the already known and accepted brilliancy and intelligence of Obama (face to face to a supposedly “nice guy”and supposedly sharp politician), but that Obama’s strength (which also explains his calm and relax performance) is that Obama knows something that McCain doesn’t know. It is in this respect that Obama’s indictment “McCain doesn’t get it”may have a meaning that Obama did not intended. Or, perhaps he did.
The point here is that when referring to Obama as “that one”, McCain made obvious to the rest of the world that he only knows the Reason of the Master. While Obama, calm and relaxed, knows both the Reason of the Master (in front of him) and the Reason of the Enslaved (the legacies of enslaved Africans in the history of the United States).
In academic lingo I would say that Obama dwells, inhabits “double consciousness”as it was existentially described and argued by Afro-American sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963), from 1904 (more or less the same year that Max Weber was defining the “spirit of capitalism”) until the end of his life. “Double Consciousness”is an experience common to a large part of the US population (as well as of the world population). Chicana intellectual and activist, Gloria Anzaldúa (1942-2004), inhabited “new mestiza consciousness”, a parallel existential experience among Chicanas and Chicanos. In the Caribbean, the same kind of existential feeling was conceived through the dialogues between Prospero and Caliban—Prospero only knows the reason of the Master while Caliban knows both, the reason of the Master and the Reason of the Enslaved. Caliban dwells, inhabits a world, a memory, alien to Prospero. That is the reason why Prospero could refer to Caliban as “that one”and, in that same reason, to think that “creation of wealth”is Humanity’s destiny. Prospero understand only his world. He dwells (like Joe the Plumber), inhabits a “Mono-Consciousness”he assumes is Uni-versal.
While McCain invokes Joe the Plumber, promising more and more football, basketball and baseball games, Obama intends to wake up both the double consciousness of people of color as well as the consciousness of millions of white men and women who may have been unaware of people in this country inhabiting a double consciousness and being invisible, but now reaching a social status that was not supposed to be ear-marked for the white population, but only for people of color. In between the two ideal demographic groups, there is the awakening of the younger generation, those born in the 1970s and after who are aware of the radical transformation of subjectivity (that is, consciousness) that “That one”is bringing.
“Creating wealth” is a formula that attempts to maintain the cosmology associated with capitalist economy. But indeed, it is a formula for maintaining the “socialization of capitalist cosmological consciousness” that is, the enchantment of enslaved consumers at the service of Master creating wealth. “Socializing wealth” doesn’t mean, in this context, bring Marx back. There are many working class whites supporting McCain. Ohio is the hub. It means rather “socializing double consciousness” not only among “those ones” like Obama, but mainly among “those ones” like McCain and the experts of Wall Street and “those ones” in main stream media. “Socializing double consciousness”means that a de-colonial future begins to take hold in the United States, that has been lately encouraged by the financial crisis of Wall Street and the dubious subjectivity that neo-liberal economic policy and media enthusiasm, engendered during and after the glorious Ronald Reagan years.