Who's watching the Watchmen? Who cares! Who's watching Wall Street!

I saw the Watchmen movie last week-end. I loved it if you really want to know. I seemed to be one of the few that did.

I have to applaud a superhero movie that finally did not forget to be a movie too. I loved the interplay of time, music and visual American icons, I loved the stylized fights, I loved the different textures that could be rendered on the screen from gritty polar noir to slick 80's rock video designs. I really love the syncretism of different moments in American history that created a surreal portrait of what it could mean to be an American in such times and how do one dealt with the anxiety of living in an empire gone mad. With masks and self-defeating prophecies or harrowing auto-fictions, seemed to suggest Moore and the directors. And love, love, love, of course... Girls, put your f*ck me leather boots on!

I was surprised to found out that Zack "We are Sparta" Snyder was responsible for such a coherent, successful, sharp-eyed adaptation of Alan Moore's comic. It was far from perfect, mind you. Xena look-a-like Silk Spectre, played by actress Malin Ackerman, was gorgeous and could deliver a kick but her acting was a bit as thin as her costume, unfortunately, with no second degree. Compare it to the three-names-guys, Jackie Earle Haley or especially Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who's somehow channeling a very, very mean Robert Downey jr, and it's clear that Spectre was not in the same league.

Nixon, Kissinger and all the other crazy boys of "How I learned to stop worrying and love the Bomb..." make an appearance and the only one missing was Peter Sellers. But every single frame is charged with a sense of hopeless irony and absurdist folly that Sellers himself would probably have recognize. Of course, if you like your movies quick and empty, this one is not for you. It's fast and furious enough but catching a bad guy and beating him to a pulp is not the whole point here. In this story, the villain is within. And catching him makes for a bitter harvest, indeed.

But I digress...

While we're watching the Watchmen, who's watching Wall Street? In fact, who's watching the government guys who are supposed to watch Wall Street?

We're in a freaking deep mess that is itself in a deeper mess. in literature, we call this "une mise en abyme" - or to be put into an abyss. Harry Shearer from HuffPost just discovered that in New Orleans (remember them?) just as much was spend in administrative cost than on building affordable housing units there. We're talking 40 to 50 millions for the pencil pushers and another 40 to 50 for the contractors/landlords to fix their units. Results? A little more than a 1000 units in two years. And the money keeps on coming...

I hope you see there is a big problem here.

Henry "Hank" Paulson worked at Goldman Sachs, he headed the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and repealed the "net capital rule" that required brokerage firm to hold reserve capital that limited their investments and could offset their risks. He championed "voluntary regulation"(!!). In a way, he was one of the Wall Street elite, to use a word the Repugs love to hurl around, and he was ask to cuddle their way out of a mess he helped create. And somehow his decisions were made non-reviewable or unchallengeable by law.

I hope you see there is a problem here.

So not wanting to alarm the Rush Limbaugh of this world, we cannot talk of temporary nationalization as we should, so we can't clean house, we can't move in and react quickly enough to stop the crisis from getting worse. Obama is caught trying to be all thing to all people, unable to believe that we put him in power so he could tell a major "Fuck you" to the Wall Street Frat boys and their Bush Dynasty crew. He is stuck in pleasuring the masses mode warming up to the crooks and forgetting his main plan: getting Main Street it's due after years of numbskulls rulers.

So, Obama, you are either FDR or a sitting duck. Your choice. Emergency Banking Act, a restructuration of the SEC, a bonification of Unemployment benefits, Homeowner Loan's Corp. II and jobs, jobs, jobs…

Or be ready to start licking Limbaugh's feet like the rest of the yellow livered Dems BNO.

But incredibly, I still believe you can...

All That and World Hunger Too!

So we gave Obama a paper clip, a light flare, some light bulbs, a couple of loaded dice and are now expecting him to solves all the world's problems and then some!

Some are touting the end of white guilt - because they do not see how everyday African Americans still have to fight regularly for minimum respect under the threat of the prison goulag and permanent civil disfranchisement. Some other just killed racism in its sleep, so sure they are that a black president represent the possibilities of all African Americans - while they easily ignore negative cultural environment, bad schools, lowered job prospects, higher costs for basic services at lower pay because of discrimination, etc...

I admit that I am excited by a new era in black culture where the leftover toxicity of the Reagan years can finally wear off and we will not compulsively define and limits our people by our errors - that are solely human and shared by all other culture on this earth despite their assurance of the contrary - but by our heroes and and our positive contribution to the world. We are not dogs, bitches, hoes, somebody's baby mamas, somebody else's nigga and our world, our realities are not stopped by the frontiers of some ghetto. Everything everywhere is also ours. We can change all of it and some have been changing some of it, not only by sport, music and attitude but by exploring their talent in so many other fields.

I traveled a lot and I have seen how hip hop was adopted everywhere as a communication tool by all culture to defy the established order of their country. I was proud of this but at the same time I wished they also knew of our pioneers in medicine, science, the arts. All of them had to fight, as Obama did, the character assassination attempt that is racism and the contempt of lowered expectation, that hypocritical double edge-sword.

For like the new President-Elect, those brave souls had also to constantly prove their right to exist, by being not only good, but close to perfect. They had to exceed, surpass, fly higher, faster. And they had to be ready for the ritual stoning at their slightest mistake.

Because this too shall come: Obama will face some serious backlash when people will see him not as a saviour anymore but as a human being. Racism has two simple faces: positive where everything that a culture, or an individual from that culture, does is taken to be superior and close to perfection. Or negative, and we all know what that is, Palin and McCain were so counting on it to get elected.

Being a human being is define by one color for a lot of people. Obama will show them how untrue that is and some of them are really not ready for the shock. He's not MacGyver, he's not MLK, he's not FDR not even LBJ. He's our new President and he will trace he's own path of triumphs and errors.