A whole lot of people were outraged at Donald Trump's latest offense against civility, his posting of a video which included an image of Barack and Michelle Obama's faces superimposed on apes. The outrage seems to have died down a little, as Fox News has gratefully seized on the kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie to occupy program time, and CNN on the Winter Olympics, but it's still active outside corporate media. I started this post right away, but got sidetracked by personal commitments and general laziness. It was easy, though, because I wasn't outraged. Of course Donald Trump is a pig, but this sort of activity is typical of him; it's dog bites man.
First, the video didn't do the Obamas any harm. They're rich, they have Secret Service protection, they're safely insulated from any features of American life they don't want to know about. Barry is rubbing elbows with billionaires superannuated rock stars, posting his playlists and favorite books, they have their various mansions. Michelle has her podcast and other projects. Every so often they stick their heads out to attend presidential funerals or make annoying statements about, like, stuff.
I agree that public displays of gutter racism will bother and upset young people of color who don't have the Obamas' advantages, but there are far more immediate displays of gutter racism that also bother them: raids of their schools by masked goons, racist campaigns about immigrants supposedly eating pets, and the familiar grinding effects of poverty. I'm reminded of right-wing concern trolling in the 90s about how Bill Clinton's sex scandal would upset innocent children who were probably more worried about the effects of war and other political violence.
Second, when it comes to repugnant Presidential attempts at humor, Obama yields nothing to Trump. Obama joked - in public, on camera - about killing the Jonas Brothers with predator drones if they looked askance at his daughters. "You won't even see it coming. You think I'm joking?" It wouldn't have been funny even if Obama hadn't killed plenty of people with predator drones: American teenagers, wedding parties, hospital patients. No big deal, all American presidents and their flunkies are blood-soaked butchers; nobody but the Professional Left cared, then or now. ("Professional Left" was the Obama administration's version of Trump's "paid protesters," come to think of it.)
Obama also found it amusing that people in Latin America should care about US violence there, whether directly or merely funding, training, and protecting its perpetrators. Early in his tenure he flailed inelegantly when asked about Israel-Palestine: "The Middle East is obviously an issue that has plagued the region for centuries, and it's an issue that elicits a lot of passions as you have heard." I mean, he couldn't possibly have foreseen that a college student would ask him such a question; obviously the student was a Professional Leftist. A few years later, he was better prepared. Asked a hostile but not unreasonable question (which he didn't understand, since it was in Hebrew), Obama mocked the questioner, an Arab-Israeli student from Haifa University, joking, "I have to say we actually arranged for that because it made me feel at home ... I wouldn't feel comfortable if I didn't have at least one heckler." Remarks like these are, if not anticipations of Trump, at least retreads of Ronald Reagan, the Master from whom Obama learned how to make pithy quips.
Confronted with such performances, Obama's fans may ask me where I was when Obama was president, they bet I liked him then. No, I didn't. This blog has too many of my attacks on him from the period to link here. The best they have to offer is that he was a disappointment sometimes. Yeah, I know that one too. I did find it really depressing when the radical writer Marge Piercy, whose work I love and respect, posted the D-word about Obama ("a bit of a disappointment" was how she put it) while expressing her outrage on Facebook over Trump's video post.
So yeah, I take due notice of Trump's latest crime against propriety, good manners, presidential norms. But I won't join in outrage with people who'd be watching football, having brunch, or just having a nice nap if only Trump would disappear.
