As I tried to tolerate the wait between the arrival of my plane from Australia and boarding for my connecting flight to Washington, I wandered into a Barns & Noble. Nothing much penetrates the mush of my mind after a flight of 16 hours, but some books were so startling that my brain was jolted into something resembling consciousness.
It was 2011, and I had not been to the US since well before Obama had become president, and knew nothing of the vitriol that his election had brewed. On the best-sellers’ display were titles including ‘Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies’, ‘Obama Zombies: How the Liberal Machine Brainwashed My Generation’, and ‘Where’s the Birth Certificate? The Case that Barack Obama is not eligible to be President’. I was astonished. Best sellers based on contempt for the President of the United States of America!
Australian political commentators can be pretty poisonous, but I had never before seen tabloid trash transformed into titles of best-seller books. The one that most dumbfounded me was ‘Catastrophe: How Obama, Congress, and the Special Interests are Transforming–A Slump Into A Crash, Freedom Into Socialism, and A Disaster Into A Catastrophe–and How to Fight Back’. The title converted what the rest of the world knew as the Global Financial Crisis into a ‘slump’.
I went back to Australia and didn’t think much more about it – these sorts of stories don’t travel.
Many Americans are still of the opinion that anyone can make it here, and that government support for those who haven’t ‘made it’ merely encourages them not to try. Such services are therefore contemptible. ‘Obama’ has become a short-hand way to show this contempt.
Whether President Obama or his administration has had anything at all to do with the service in question does not matter. Take, for example, the ‘Obamaphone’. If anything, it should be called the ‘Reaganphone’ or at least the ‘Clintonphone’. It is a government- funded emergency phone service which began in 1984, and in 1996, the service was extended to include cell phones. Nevertheless, is has been dubbed Obamaphone, implying that Obama was its author, and that recipients receive an actual phone.
And, of course, there is ‘Obamacare’, regularly said with disgust. It has been a success, so much so that the states that refused to fully sign up to the Affordable Care Act (yes, that’s its actual name) are now endorsing it, but it still has a long way to go before it is no longer said with a sneer.
Nayano in America 