At same time, the military systems of the West are unable to defeat or contain terrorism. The sense of impotence is expressed by a frightening rise in white supremacism, melded with frustrated supre-machism: ‘Make America Great Again’.
In this first part of the book, I retrace the philosophical genealogy of the present depression of the Western mind: after reading Schopenhauer and Heidegger from the point of view of white male decline, I try to situate the narrative imagination of Houellebecq in the same framework.
And finally, I try to elaborate on the senescence of the Western population, in which the energy-centred style of modernity is replaced by impotence and a sense of inadequacy.
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
T.S. Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’
The Exorcism That Failed
I had trusted Obama. At the end of the summer of 2008, when the order of the world was shaking – the Bush wars were turning to catastrophe, and the big banks were collapsing – I thought that the new American president was heralding the emergence of a new possibility, a new future. I’m not so naïve as to believe in fairy tales, and I knew the cultural background of Barack Obama as that of a reasonable neoliberal who belongs to the privileged elite. But as I compared him with the ignorant, cynical clan of warmongers who had been in power before him, I thought that his ideas and his agenda were poised to open the way for a new age of peace and social justice.
The world had come to be acquainted with the young Obama in 2004, when he dared to say no to the Iraq War. His face, his nonchalant look, his alien beauty, his elegant multiracial lineaments made me think of a post-political leader, of an American intellectual announcing the post-national era, in which ethnic identities melt and give birth to a culturally global humanity.
Yes, a black president was a sign from above for someone who grew up in the ’60s like me. In the past century we, the good communists (yes, there are good communists; I met a lot of them), had tried to emancipate the world from violence, war, exploitation. Certainly, we did not succeed. The bad communists were unmistakably more influential than us.
We had not succeeded, this is true. The socialist way has been trashed by totalitarian Bolsheviks and by subservient social-democrats.
Now was it the turn for someone like Obama? Maybe so, I told myself.
The force of events seemed to be ripe; the first black president was in the right situation to be led to do what people like me have failed to do in the twentieth century.
War has proven to be a horrible thing that generates more horrors, a defeat for everybody. And Obama was fully accredited to say so, after saying no to the invasion of Iraq conceived by the Bush regime, unlike his opponent in the 2008 Democratic primaries, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who did not dare to reject the patriotic call. He seemed, therefore, in the position to prevent future wars.
The collapse of Lehman Brothers and the crisis of subprime mortgages, in my expectation, set the conditions for changing the regime of financial capitalism.
He came to the fore with the slogan ‘Yes We Can’, and this was not irrelevant. Why should a politician say that, ‘Yes We Can’? Is not America already the most powerful country in the world? Is not the president of the United States already the most powerful man on Earth? Is not politics the dimension in which power is exerted?
So why would he need to remind us that ‘Yes We Can’?
Those three words were not an obvious declaration at all. That was a very strong statement, evidence that the man was smart and had zeroed in on the true problem. Obama knew that Americans wanted to be reassured on this point: we can. We have power therefore we can. Despite everything, we can: we can come out of the spiral of war, we can close Guantanamo, we can cancel the barbaric legacy of the Bush years, we can thwart the invading power of finance, we can end the history of racism and violence of the American police.
Nowadays, as I write these lines, eight years have passed from the pledge that was as much an exorcism as a promise.
The exorcism has failed, the promise has not been kept.
‘By any objective measurement, his presidency has been perhaps the most consequential since Franklin Roosevelt’s time,’ wrote Timothy Egan.1
‘To be fair’, wrote Paul Krugman,
Some widely predicted consequences of Obama’s re-election didn’t happen. Gasoline prices didn’t soar. Stocks didn’t plunge. The economy didn’t collapse, in fact the US economy has now added more than twice as many private-sector jobs under Obama that it did over the same period of George Bush administration, and the unemployment rate is a full point lower that the rate Mitt Romney promised to achieve by the end of 2016.2
Undeniably Obama has been the most consequential president of the United States for a long time. Nevertheless, war is scaling again, more dangerous and demented than ever. Guantanamo is still there, more shameful than ever. Weapons are still on sale in every American town, despite the rampages at Columbine, Newton, Aurora, and who knows how many more. Rates of polluting emissions are growing while climate change is far from receding and Americans do not seem prone to reduce energy consumption. And the American people are more intolerant than ever, more quick to hate. The American unconscious is raucously reacting to the scandal of a black president, and an obtuse, violent form of racism is spreading, while the number of black people killed by police has clearly shown that black lives do not matter so much. White middle-aged workers are swamped by unemployment and hyper-exploitation, by depression and by loneliness. Heroin is raging in rural areas and overdoses are killing more than ever.
After the rescue of the banking system, notwithstanding the rise in taxes on high incomes and the remarkable results in the creation of jobs, workers are still paid less and less in America, as they are everywhere in the Western world.
Every second day someone speaks of recovery and of job creation. The truth is unemployment is on the rise all over the world except in America, but in America labour is more and more precarious, less and less rewarded.
During the Obama presidency a new social movement emerged in America which peacefully occupied public spaces such as Zuccotti Park, in close proximity to the New York Stock Exchange, where they named themselves Occupy Wall Street. And there was no happy ending. Just one year after the occupation of Zuccotti Park, Hurricane Sandy whipped through Manhattan and devastated its poor residents and those of its neighbouring boroughs. Some Occupy Wall Street activists created Occupy Sandy, an effort to provide