Especially when "hope" is represented as the conglomeration of an entire political platform. That is, it is a lie to promote hope without an accomplishment to preach from. Hope is a political lie. Or, as Pablo Neruda puts it, "Latin America is very fond of the word 'hope.' We like to be called the 'continent of hope.' Candidates for deputy, senator, president, call themselves 'candidates of hope.' This hope is really something like a promise of heaven, an IOU whose payment is always being put off. It is put off until the next legislative campaign, until next year, until the next century."
And when the aspirations of your hope don't materialize any further than a mist of starry-eyed platitudes ("hope means that you entertain illusions" -- Henry Miller), the political party you bet on will feed you a line akin to Leonid Brezhnev's: "now the Soviet Union is marching onward. The Soviet Union is moving towards communism." At the time he spoke these words, the USSR was 50 years old and well on its way to revealing what an ideological failure it would prove to be -- to put it lightly. What he was saying was though you've never had it so bad, all this time you only had yourself to blame, but we're well on our way to paradise now.
This is a pathological lie. And those that are contented with Brezhnev-esque diversionary rhetoric prove H.L. Mencken correct: "hope is a pathological belief in the occurrence of the impossible."
But, if hope has gripped you like a violent thirst and you won't be satisfied until you've had your fill, then it is in Iraq that an oasis lies.
This past Sunday, Dexter Filkins filed a report from Baghdad for The New York Times that painted a picture that has set a precedence for hope like none I've seen since 9/11.
Filkins writes, "when I left Baghdad two years ago, the nation's social fabric seemed too shredded to ever come together again. ... To return now is to be jarred in the oddest way possible: by the normal, by the pleasant, even by hope."
In 2006, Barack Obama delivered a speech with this line in it: "all the troops in the world won't be able to force Shia, Sunni, and Kurd to sit down at a table, resolve their differences, and forge a lasting peace."
And yet Filkins describes how Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Iraq's national security advisor and a Shiite, was walking down the street holding the hand of Brig. Gen. Murdi Moshhen al-Dulaimi, "the Iraqi Army officer taking control of the (Anbar) province" and a Sunni. This, in the wake of the Sunni Awakening -- empowered by the surge.
The Iraqi people would still be living in the "shuttered, shattered, broken and dead ... grim, spooky, deserted place ... the dying city that Baghdad had become" -- if Obama's judgment had made policy. Obama may be the one he has been waiting for, but the Iraqi people could do without.
These quotes on hope are all cynical because they exclude the beauty of hope: the human proclivity to set eyes on high, dream and desire better for themselves and others. But these quotes are still correct in the context of secular hope. Reginald Heber writes: "Thus heavenly hope is all serene, / But earthly hope, how bright soe'er, / Still fluctuates o'er this changing scene, / As false and fleeting as 't is fair."
Politics is a secular ("earthly") endeavor, so I call out Obama as an ideological liar. In all his learning -- which he substitutes for worldly experience -- he should have come to appreciate the vacuity of such sentiments as "hope" wafting about undefined.
Yes, I am angry. I am furious that Obama has capitalized on a weakness of youth as a piper using a transcendent melody to seduce the musically deprived. What else do the young have but hope? Their lives are just beginning; their future is rising in the distance; desires are as intangible as the morning mist across the Drillfield. Hope is all that the young have to hang their hoodies on.
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