The Case for Pitying Obama
by YDLM
You’ve thought it, you’ll think it again, and in the coming year you are likely to hear it peeped through the conservative media regarding our president.
“I almost feel bad for the guy….”
Surely after this occurs to you, you’ll recognize the mistake:
“Wait, no. Screw him, I feel bad for us.”
So here’s the question: Is it cruel to hire or promote someone to a job they could never conceivably be qualified for? I haven’t taken a poll, but I will make a guess that a businessman who has to make hires and promotions would answer: Of course.
Say Doug applied for a job at Chevron to be a maintenance foreman on a Gulf rig (before the Green Jobs Era saved such people from having to have jobs). Doug has no work experience outside of, say, academe and political activism. Now Jerry, a big wheel at Chevron, hires Doug to the position, mostly because Doug is black and Jerry has never had an opportunity to hire a black man to a job of this stature.
Doug takes over the rig team, and in the space of a few short months puts in place a slew of inept, ill-considered and contradictory new plans (confounding and even terrifying the men who now work under him).
Soon, rig output has ground to crawl. Doug, who has no way of knowing what to do about this, continues operating along the same principles he has been.
More months pass, and the rig explodes. 25 people die.
Who is at fault?
Doug applied for the job, with an (obvious) misunderstanding of what it would require and (at best) a mis-inventory of the skills he possessed to meet those requirements. Importantly, however, it was not his responsibility to perceive this.
It was Jerry’s.
The lives destroyed are on Doug’s hands, of course, at least on grounds of pure hubris. Doug contributed to the deaths of 25 people by refusing to acknowledge his own incompetence.
Later, in court, conjecture will fly as to whether Doug’s political background and dyed-in-the-wool contempt for domestic energy production didn’t lead him to sabotage the operation in some way and so, indirectly, murder his associates.
For his part, Jerry is quick to unyoke Doug from a lot of this blame. Jerry hired Doug. Jerry not only feels wretched on account of the deaths, he also feels pangs of sympathy for Doug, who is now making his way through the court system and toward abjectitude: having every belief about his own intelligence, competence and unique calling ground to dust beneath the undeniable.
There’s no question whether Jerry is at fault, least of all to Jerry. Jerry will be fired and then extensively sued, if not prosecuted.
Hop back into the real world–
Jerry is us, or if you like, our culture. In a representative democracy, who we choose to elect represents who we are, on average or in sum–and what we are willing to acknowledge.
Obama made no real secret about what he was, because that wouldn’t have been possible. Supposedly many voters believed shrug-offs like, “That’s not the foul-mouthed, Jew-bating America-basher I knew–a long-time mentor who married Michelle and me and baptized our daughters(!!)”.
Enough Americans, anyway, were willing to believe this. And voted on that execrable basis.
Like everybody, I feel bad for our country for what Barrack is doing to it. And I feel a certain shame as the citizen of a great nation which did the unspeakable to itself.
I don’t feel bad for Barack, though I can’t deny what he represents.
For all the things you can blame on the President, you can’t blame him for reflecting our own corruption.
“Jerry,” in the above, experiences a true moral collapse when he makes a racist vote (in his case, naturally, there’s only one voter) in support of a demonstrably unsuitable candidate. “Doug” accepts a job with a high level of responsibility he’ll never be able to bear. Now he’s failing, and he’s hurting us.
What’s done is done. And Jerry, we, the backstop, failed.
Yes, Dear Leader, More! 
[…] here’s the question: Is it cruel to hire or promote someone to a job they could never conceivably be qualified […]
Hi. My name is Tom, and I am a peer of Jerry’s at Chevron.
At the time when Jerry made the decision to hire Doug, I told him over coffee that he was making a very bad mistake, ignoring a number of red flags and going with a gut instinct that told him the rig needed an infusion of hope and change to improve morale following the termination of the previous manager. Jerry didn’t listen to a word I said, and in fact called me a few rather nasty names at the time. I did what I could, but it wasn’t enough.
Even so, I’ll be damned if I’ll let you rope me into some sort of collective guilt over the subsequent tragedies. You can blame yourself for all your failures as a “backstop,” but I did everything I could to raise the warning, and my conscience is clear.
You’re forgetting the employment agency that vouched for Doug’s credentials. They said that they had gone over them and that he was obviously qualified for the position. Jerry should have pressed harder to view the paperwork but he trusted them.
So do you continue to use them and trust their judgment as to qualifications?
“Doug” feels no responsibility whatsoever for his own incompetence. He feels that important jobs are prizes, not burdens. He feels he deserved the position as compensation for the wrongs done to him in the past. In his view, the disaster was either a run of bad luck, or some form of sabotage. It would never cross his mind that he should have been able to prevent it.
One form of sabotage would be if all his white subordinates didn’t effectively do his job for him (while still letting him dictate policy goals, of course). In his world, real work is something somebody else does. He would naturally assume that white people in important jobs are figureheads like himself, and somebody else does the real work for them. It wouldn’t occur to him to wonder where the buck actually stops in a system where everybody’s letting somebody else do his job (the reality of such a system is a hopeless corrupt shambles like Egypt, not the USA) — because he’s not reflective, and even though he was raised by his very successful, accomplished white grandparents, the bourgeois world of accountability and accomplishment has somehow remained mysterious to him.
Maybe he thinks large organizations just naturally, instinctively, automatically run well. If this one fails on his watch, that must mean that the organization deliberately refused to run well, just to spite him.
To Doug, the disaster would have one real victim: Himself.
Bingo, for your last line. A psychopath, or at least an overweening narcissist. But he’s also been bought off by the Street, and the oligarchs, but, in his view, he’s worthy of their attention.
The only other candidate for the job was a grouchy, borderline creepy guy who had worked for the company for 30+ years and did his best to be as nice as Doug but just didn’t have it in him. He was way more competent and could have done the job, albeit less efficiently than someone truly qualified for the job. The explosion probably would have happened anyway because he subscribed to many of the same misguided principles as Doug, but there probably would only have been 17 people killed.