The Beatles, Obama and Real Change...

I was at a young peoples' party the other night (late 20s, early 30s). The Beatles were playing pretty much the whole time -- still fresh, after all these years. It got me thinking about experts, specialists, the elite classes that now pretty much run our country, the "brightest and best," for instance President Obama (Harvard) or Yale (Bush), or Princeton, whatever -- Larry Summers, Geithner, Greenspan. What have these "brightest and best" delivered to us, as opposed to, say, the Beatles who delivered something quite new (maybe birthed is a better word)? And the "fab four" weren't elite at all. They made that very clear. They were just normal guys who joked and played around like the rest of us. After all, they'd come from Liverpool (a third rate city in a lesser part of England), but they delivered real change.

Change would be good about now.

For instance some real reform on a profoundly corrupt Wall Street (it ain't gonna happen), even as those gentleman (and a few ladies) drain the U.S. Treasury thanks to a docile Congress, President and Federal Reserve. (And it also ain't gonna happen that the Federal Reserve is going to be taken to task for it's massive blunders -- or crimes -- of the last fifty years.) And then there's health care (thank you, pharmaceuticals, you've taken a page from Wall Street; your CEOs, managers and lobbyists are going to make out like bandits.) Then there's Afghanistan, Iraq, even Iran flickers, not to mention Pakistan. And let's see if Guantanamo Bay ever closes after all the fancy talk.

Yeah, change would have been good, but it ain't gonna happen despite the Obama hope still shining in so many of my progressive friends' eyes. Real change would have had to hit the ground running during the Honeymoon period. It would have had to have happened like the Beatles first songs hit us. It would have had to have been brash and maybe a bit humorous, but with a working class toughness as underpinning, a real melody with a driving beat, not just words.

It had to have happened even before Obama with his majority of Democrats took office, dogging the hell out of Bush right after their landslide victory which was supposed to have been all about change, not about embracing Bush's cohorts who had constructed the nightmare that our country was becoming.

And frankly real change would have needed a deeply wounding recession that collapsed General Motors and Chrysler, swept away the Goldman-Sachs-black-widow-bullies, the AIGs jokesters, the banks that were rotten. It should have exposed the Federal Reserve for the devious, cruel and thieving cancer that now makes the Teapot scandal look like a teapot.

But it ain't gonna happen. And for what it's worth what do we think is going to happen now? Seriously. What do we think's going to happen with two wars still cooking in the middle east, with gas over three dollars a gallon and climbing, with 6 million new people (not counting those that have given up) out of work, with California sinking and not even the Terminator being able to salvage it, with a blind New York governor replacing one of the only guys who had tried to blow the whistle on this mess (funny how Eliot Spitzer got knocked just off when he did, poor horny bastard -- only we're the poorer for of it and the fat cats are a hell of a lot richer.)

What's going to happen when half a million more jobs are lost every quarter for the foreseeable future and the media continues to crow about things getting better because it's not six hundred thousand? (And of course things do feel better at the higher reaches of our nation - those guys at the top are getting trillions of government cash; they're all on a high-end-welfare-ride with no consequences. But ask those half a million people every quarter and counting how they feel, how their families feel. Ask them as their health care continues to suck as the Pharmaceutical CEOs continue to take home millions in bonuses like their buddies on Wall Street.

And what's going to happen when those once again wildly happy Wall Street fellas finally hit another wall and there's no more money in the treasury to bail them out and we finally have to admit to stuff like global warming? What happens then?

It ain't gonna be good.

And then somebody around here had better have one hell of a tune with a great melody, which I believe will happen (after some really nasty bumps), but I believe those melodies will in no way come from the guys (and few gals) at the Harvards or Yales. I believe they will be coming from places more like Liverpool.

Follow Stephen Gyllenhaal on Twitter: www.twitter.com/stephgyllenhaal

Comments

[fairleft]

You're right, Obama never felt right to me, and your analogy captures it perfectly (in a great little essay). I think those who think Obama felt and still feels right are also basing it largely on style: he has that upper-middle-class charm that Kennedy had. Class bias or Beatles forever, that probably is the question.

[pfc1369]

Takes a real tin ear to type, "the brightest and the best," instead of "the best and the brightest.­"

And Liverpool is in no way "a third rate city."

It is second rate all the way.

[tenzindorje]

Perhaps... but Bush was a C student. And if we want a non-expert from an American Liverpool, why not Sarah Palin? (just kidding) What we really need is Franklin Roosevelt (Harvard).

[unitron]

Too bad Bush & Co. didn't finish the job of destroying the economy before the 2008 election.

Then Obama could have come into office with a bulletproof majority in both houses and not had to waste time on the Republicans.

Oh well, trust George to bungle even the job of bungling.

[audadvnc]

Rather, Obama's sellout to Wall Street & the insurance companies, reneging on change is similar to the Beatles' umpteenth repackaging of 40+ year old material for profit. I can see the parallels quite clearly...

"Imagine there's no money - it isn't hard to do!"

[overd0g1]

Good analogy. Equating the last gasp exploitation of the Beatles catalog prior to copyright expiration, is in some ways the same as selling 1930s "new deal" economics as "change".

[Lochmon]

Baby's in black, and I'm feelin' blue...

[arnray]

More like The Clash to throw a sonic handgrenade into the mix.

[ProgressiveVoice]

What's going to happen?

No one will ever ask the victims what they think, as 2M jobs are lost each year. The Dow will go up. MSM will declare a recovery when corporate profits go up, even as more jobs are lost.

Oh sure, the WSJ, CNN, all the MSM will have all kinds of "reports" about the "new poor" or "new homeless". None of them will actually talk to any poor or homeless or whoever they are profiling. The MSM will interview and profile (wealthy) experts and pundits about them.

Eventually, there will be either a bloody revolution or the wealthy will finally abandon America, leaving the rest of us, hopefully, to rebuild and return to the social-progressive values that built America

[overd0g1]

Yeah right. When the wealthy leave, the government collapses because they pay all the taxes.

[standard]

You refer to, "President Obama (Harvard) or Yale (Bush), or Princeton, whatever -- Larry Summers, Geithner, Greenspan.­" and kybo88 to "the Ivy Leagues". Let's get the facts and terminology straight:

Obama was an undergraduate at Columbia, to which he transferred from Occidental; only his law degree is from Harvard. Bush was an undergraduate at Yale; Larry Summers, at M.I.T.; Geithner, at Dartmouth; and Greenspan, at NYU.

By long-standing convention, the college you attended as an undergraduate determines if you're an Ivy Leaguer. Summers and Greenspan don't qualify. The others do, as do those with bachelor's degrees from Brown, Cornell, Harvard, Penn, or Princeton. Gore is an Ivy Leaguer because he's a Harvard man; Obama, because he's a Columbia man; and Bill Clinton, a product of Georgetown, isn't an Ivy Leaguer, despite his law degree from Yale.

What most people mean by "Ivy Leaguer" is dated: someone who attended Harvard, Yale or Princeton when most of their undergraduates came from high society Eastern male prep schools, which hasn't been true since the 60's. And when the press identifies someone as Ivy League they now usually only mean that he or she has some connection with Harvard: neither convention nor the rest of the Ivies seem to count.

[GardenerNorCal]

Does it really matter how Ivy League is defined? What does matter is they are all so out of touch with the average person how can we expect them to protect our interests. I wouldn't be surprised if they spend some of their leisure making fun of the rest of us.

It's time instead of electing celebrities we started focussing on the character of those we elect and more on their practical life experience and less on what is deemed to be established qualifications such as degrees and business/political connections.

There's a real disconnect when they can compare health insurance to car insurance. I lost a lot of respect for Obama when he bought into that one. Most high school seniors having taken a basic logic course could see major flaws in that reasoning.

[Kristopher Wright]

You sound like you want a President you can have a beer with. Personally, no thanks. I'll take the community organizer with education credentials.

[standard]

"Does it really matter how Ivy League is defined?"

Words matter, even proper nouns. That makes defining them correctly important .

"[T]hey are all so out of touch with the average person how can we expect them to protect our interests [?]"

I think the Adams, Roosevelt and Kennedy families (just to draw on Harvard names) have served the people of this country rather well--if not as dramatically well as Washington or Lincoln (not Ivy Leaguers).

"I wouldn't be surprised if they spend some of their leisure making fun of the rest of us."

I would be. In the decades since I graduated from one of those schools not one conversation to which I've been party has involved belittling non-Ivy Leaguers as a group. However, within my circles, making fun of Princeton is commonplace--and a sport you don't need an Ivy League diploma to play. I've heard any number of things said against George W. Bush, a Yalie, while my favorite President--and that of many of my schoolmates--is Harry S Truman (not an Ivy Leaguer).

I've encountered a great deal of hostility towards and stereotyping of Ivy Leaguers, however--most recently, by you.

[pfc1369]

The Ivy League is an actual sports league, and THAT is not dated.

The Ivy League schools are:

Dartmouth, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Cornell, Columbia, And the University of Pennsylvania.

Period.

Ivy League doesn't mean "elite school" (though of course these schools are, but that's beside the point).

It certainly has never remotely meant "some connection to Harvard."

Amazing how many just don't know what the Ivy League is.

[standard]

That's not entirely right:

The Ivy League is an NCAA athletic conference created in 1954. That's true, but it's not the whole story. The term "Ivy League" predates the formal creation of that conference by about two decades and isn't just the name (proper noun) that conference adopted. It's also an adjective: Merriam-Webster classifies it as such and so, includes no reference to the athletic conference in its definitions.

Prior to 1954 the name was sometimes understood not to include one or more of the final members of the League and often, to include West Point and Annapolis.

In recent decades I've observed that the news media--except in sports coverage--use the term primarily when referring just to Harvard, Yale and Princeton (and not all the schools in the conference) and trot it out most often when linking someone to some division of Harvard (any division). That 's technically incorrect of them (and more than a little insulting to Dartmouth and Columbia), but they do it all the same. The phrase "Ivy League" is also used (like it or not) as a figure of speech to mean elite American universities, in general.

Just sayin'.

[Nommo]

Geez, The Beatles? I don't think so. We need a different kind of groove here, something like the magic of that other quartet of the sixties, Coltrane, Tyner, Garrison and Jones.

[GardenerNorCal]

It was Dylan we sang at protest rallies not the Beatles until much later in the process.

[pkafin]

Failing that, I'll take the quintet of Miles, Herbie, Tony, Wayne, and Ron.

[Nommo]

Right there with ya!

[kybo88]

The Beatles, Wall Street, Barack Obama, the Ivy Leagues, Liverpool, the federal reserve, etc... Somewhere in here, it's about change, and about how Obama should play in a Rock N Roll band.