Obama and the future

Mel Vapour, of the East Bay Media Center, interviewed Black/Red View columnist John Alan on Nov. 17, 2008. A video of the interview will be available at the EBMC's website, http://www.eastbaymediacenter.com --Editors.

Mel: We're here to talk with John Alan, African-American filmmaker and writer, commentator for News & Letters for the past 35-40 years. We're here with the person who broke the color barrier back in the 1950s and 1960s with KQED, the first Black broadcast journalist in the state of California, to ask his thoughts on the mandate of the people of the U.S. to elect Barack Obama, America's first African-American president.

Alan: I think it is high time that America did get an African-American president. But can this Black president be more than all the presidents? The prime duty of a U.S. president is to protect and preserve U.S. capitalism. No president has gone beyond that. I don't know whether President Obama can go beyond that and become a totally different type of president. Not just because he is the first Black president, but because he is the first president to face all the problems now facing U.S. capitalism: the inequalities that exist, the racism that exists, and all the things we have suffered through over centuries of presidents. We have gone through some bad wars during the period of non-Black presidents. We have to wait and look very closely to find out whether this will be a revolutionary change in what a U.S. president is.

Mel: Obama is being likened to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose era you lived through in the 1930s. What are your thoughts on comparisons between what Obama faces today and what Roosevelt faced in 1932 and 1933?

Alan: Roosevelt faced the Great Depression when millions of Americans were out of work, when poverty existed in every section of the country. He set up social programs to feed the unemployed, to house them, etc. Later, of course, he went to war. I was drafted during that period.

Mel: As someone who has lived through that era, did you feel that the WPA projects helped get people back jobs, and the economy moving?

Alan: What people got during the Depression was relief. They set up those institutions to feed and to house the people that were unemployed, that had no place to live. These were the social programs that came out of the Roosevelt administration. There were tremendous movements against this type of life. They were organized by the trade unions, by African Americans and other groups who were being totally oppressed by that great unemployment. We eventually got out of that when Roosevelt went to war.

Mel: Thomas Friedman, a contemporary author, indicated that we have never gotten out of the Great Depression, that we simply have gone into different wars: WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. We have had great economic times since then, but it seems that the U.S. is on a destined path of resolving economic problems by going to war.

Alan: Yes, I think that's true. But I don't think this country can resolve the problem by going to war forever. It's going to have to find some new solution to this problem of unemployment, poverty, and even U.S. racism, which has not been wiped out. Maybe we have to be very honest that it is capitalism itself that brings these things into being. Whether the president is liberal or conservative, whether he's old or young, it is the very nature of the system that determines politics and the types of social movements that make changes in the U.S. economy. I think that social movements have been more important than presidents. They have brought about changes that no president was capable of thinking about or bringing into being. The greatness of the U.S. depends on the activity of American people, American workers. These are the people that have made this country great, not the man who sits in the White House.

Mel: Your point is well taken....This is not only a man, but it is a movement and it is the movement that has brought about change. Do you see someone like Obama moving from Left to center and from center to Right?

Alan: I am not saying he is going to be guilty of doing that, but it could happen. The main interest of this country has to be supported by the president, regardless of what his race is. And we know what the main interest of this country is, it's a country of big corporations, a country that has to expand its capital in order to exist. This is the very nature of the system itself.

Mel: Obama is refreshing, however, in that he is coming from the Left, as a community organizer from the South Side of Chicago where you lived for years. Can he be the first president not to veer to the right of center? I think that's the ultimate test for this guy.

Alan: It's the ultimate test, but how and when is that ultimate test tested?

Mel: I think it's tested Jan. 21, 2009. This young guy is going to be on the hot seat. Your prediction is something we all look to in the future.

Alan: We have never had a real revolutionary figure in the White House. The whole purpose and history of this country has been to accumulate wealth and power. Some people will say that interest is to achieve freedom and democracy. But freedom and democracy come forward only when masses of people fight for them. I don't think we have an example of the White House leading any such movement. That is a view of a man who is 92 years old. I have lived through the Great Depression, and I have seen that the relief has come when the tremendous mass forces demanded and got it. No great change ever comes from Congress or the White House. It comes from the people's struggle for freedom.

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