PrintSeptember 12, 2008
Putting Lipstick on the Community Organizing Pig
No matter how much lipstick, finery and linguistic switcheroo Obama employs, his gig as a community organizer is still just a fancy-dancy way of explaining the role of a paid people's agitator.
Lipstick doesn't change a thing.
And it most certainly does not make agitating for taxpayer money, money, money a charitable enterprise.
Since when did training panhandlers to be organized and angry rise to the level of social service?
In the immortal words of Obama's political mentor, Saul Alinsky, an organizer's job is to "rub raw the sores of discontent" and mount a socialist revolution. In the 1930s and 40s, Alinsky called his revolutionary forces "People's Organizations," but once the word "people" became so tainted by the brutalities of communist "people's republics," he changed the code word to "community," hoping to make it sound more American and neighborly.
But make no mistake. From Alinsky's initial Back of the Yards labor movement, to his Industrial Areas Foundation, where Obama first learned his own "community organizing" tactics, the goal was always revolution.
Agitate and aggravate. Those are the responsibilities of the paid "community organizer."
Prepare the people for the trials of the revolution. The people, according to Alinsky, "must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future" of change, change, change.
As Alinsky said quite clearly in his revolutionary manifesto, Reveille for Radicals:
"A People's Organization is not a philanthropic plaything or a social service's ameliorative gesture. It is a deep, hard-driving social force, striking and cutting at the very roots of all the evils which beset the people. It recognizes the existence of the vicious cycle in which most human beings are caught, and strives viciously to break this circle. It thinks and acts in terms of social surgery and not cosmetic cover-ups.""A People's Organization is dedicated to an eternal war...A war is not an intellectual debate, and in the war against social evils there are no rules of fair play."
In claiming some sort of altruistic motivation for his community organizing years, Barack Obama has not only applied lipstick to this pig of a dirty job, he's adorned it in enough gaudy finery to pass it off as a drag queen.
Obama's claiming professional rabblerousing is a public service does not make it so.
Personally ameliorating a single ill ain't in the organizer's job description.
Which might explain why Barack Obama was not required to actually fix anything to become so highly regarded as a successful community organizer in the Alinsky tradition.
This community-organizing shtick that Obama says was the "best education" he ever had, was the brainchild of Saul Alinsky, who defined success as nothing more than to persistently and tenaciously "fan the latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression."
The job of the organizer is nothing more than to prepare the people to accept the necessity of the thing they most fear, according to Alinsky.
And what did Alinsky say people feared most?
Change.
And precisely how did Alinsky teach his organizers to get people to yearn for the thing they most fear?
Alinsky taught the art of psychological manipulation.
"Just as the functional relationship between an individual and his social situation can be manipulated to get the individual to join the organization, it can be utilized not only to affect the behavior of individuals by also to change the community situation itself."
And what was the desired "change" in the community situation? Simply to persuade people that every one of their problems emanated, not from any personal failings or even any community-centered failings, but from a dastardly group of "Haves," the ones with all the power and all the money.
No wonder the job of a community organizer is such an enigma to do-it-yourselfers like John McCain and Sarah Palin.
When Governor Sarah Palin gently mocked Senator Obama's "community organizer" creds, and defined the difference between that job and hers as a small-town mayor in the realm of having "actual responsibilities," she was being bulls-eye accurate.
She might as well have employed a rhetorical shotgun scope at one of her opponent's vital organs.
Governor Palin brought to public attention the very crux of community organizing. To be successful at the job, one need not produce a single, positive result. One need not perform a single objective task for the community at large. One need not produce one shred of real change or reform, nor a single act of charity. In fact, the only thing one need do to proclaim success, is to leave people more angry and demanding of a government fix-it-all than they were before the organizer arrived in the midst of their community.
Four years on Chicago's south side, getting paid to learn the sacred art of professional complaining, making the lives of others seem more miserable than they could have ever imagined and then teach them to lay every ounce of the blame at government's feet, does help to explain candidate Obama's tendency to whine, wallow and excessively complain.
In this, Obama perfectly exemplifies the definition of socialism, coined by Ludwig Von Mises in the 1930s:
Socialism is the grandiose rationalization of petty resentments.
"The grandiose rationalization of petty resentments."
Now, that's at least one thing about which there remains little doubt. Barack Obama seems to have that act down pat.
Kyle-Anne Shiver is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. She blogs as often as she can at kyleanneshiver.com.
