Obama and the return of the real

"It is now the beginning, the beginning of post-George Bush America, and fact-tempered hope rather than joy must be the keynote," writes Jonathan Schell in this week's The Nation. "In this context, [the inauguration of Barack Obama] is like a candle that has been lit in a dark and gusty room. How high its light will blaze is anything but clear. For the election of this unreasonably talented and appealing man occurred together with a remarkable array of crises." 

He writes that the overwhelming economic crisis is "attended by, or embedded in, at least four others of even larger scope."  Along with the climate crisis, the shortage of natural resources and the overreaching of American power, Schell counts "the spread of nuclear arms and other weapons of mass destruction."

He writes of the "groupthink" that intertwined and led to all of these crises, "of basic facts relegated to footnotes; of wishes tweaked into facts; of deepening secrecy; of complex models, mathematical or ideological, used to supplant, not illuminate, reality; of new offices created to draw false new conclusions from old facts; of threat inflation."  President Obama must "figure out what's wrong with America and the world, honestly and directly communicate his findings to the public, do his best to fix things and then let the results speak for themselves. It's a simple prescription — but lightyears away from anything that has been tried in the U.S. for a very long time."

Ploughshares Fund supports Jonathan Schell's writing and speaking as a Nation Institute Peace Fellow. Read the full article here.