Barack Obama & Afghanistan

 

                       "...the law of love is involved in all approximations of justice…”

                                                                                                           Reinhold Neibuhr

Barrack Obama stuns his interviewer--

his fascination with the 20s-60s theologian, social thinker,

vigorous critic of Henry Ford:

documents inhumane assembly conditions,

allows union organizers his Detroit pulpit.

Icon of colleges’ philosophy departments

 

Barack Obama, reader of any number of Neibuhr books:

“Moral Man and Immoral Society”

“Faith and History”

“Christianity and Power Politics”

“The Irony of American History”

 

Neibuhr’s work’ says  one scholar,

“devoted to reconciling the concept of perfect love

with a world in constant violent conflict.”

Philosopher of “just war.”

Yes, destroy the Nazis, a “just war.”

Not wars for oil, for spheres of influence--

Afghanistan--Iraq

 

Barack Obama, man with intellectual enthusiasm

Barack Obama, man with passion for humanity

Barack Obama, like a leader prophesized to be our

President of the United States

·         

March 18, 2008

Constitution Hall, Philadelphia

He tells his story:

Mother--American, Scot-English descent

Father,--Kenyan, Luo Tribe.

“It’s a story,” the presidential candidate confides

“that has seared into my genetic makeup

the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts

– that out of many, we are truly one.”

 

Language of an Abraham Lincoln!

Think of combinations of words like that of the president

who loved the diction of Shakespeare--The Bible

coming to the American people in White House addresses

 

October 29, 2009

Dover Air Force Base, Delaware,

President Obama’s Gettysburg obeisance:

pre-dawn, standing at attention on the tarmac

his salute practiced and precise.

Eighteen killed a single week in Afghanistan.

Their caskets, carefully, caringly, covered with the American flag

borne  slowly from gray C-17 cargo plane by khaki uniformed  military

 

The President’s presence—Hope!

No more a 19-year-old soldier who loved the Philadelphia Phillies

No more a 22-year old Marine “goal-oriented, career-oriented”

No more brothers, 43-41, soldiers proud of their Navajo ancestry

In Iraq--Afghanistan

reduced into corpses conveyed home in catacombs of military transports

 

December 1, 2009

The United States Military Academy at West Point

Citadel: America’s Might and Valor

“The Long Gray Line:”

Swift--Grant—Lee--Pershing

Bradley—Patton--MacArthur—Eisenhower

Here, Commander-in-Chief George W. Bush

brings his Doctrine of Preemptive Strike

Here, Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama

brings to the American people his “War of Necessity”

· 

   Maxwell Corydon Wheat, Jr.

·   First Poet Laureate

·    Nassau County, New York

·     2007-09

 

Permission given to use poem, “Barack Obama—Afghanistan, “ by Maxwell Corydon Wheat, Jr., with author credit