<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" State Police Captain Ron Johnson looks at this point like he&amp;#039;s aged 10 years, which would still make him younger than the president, who looks like he&amp;#039;s aged a century. Missouri governor Jay Nixon looks a little bit younger, possibly because he joined the show already in progress. (Last night, hilariously, he informed Chris Hayes that the actions of a few outside agitators were &amp;quot;not the acts of Missourians,&amp;quot; who, as we know, historically have been as peaceful as sleepy kittens in matters touching upon race.) But there seems to be an unsettling kind of exhaustion descending upon anyone who is trying to make sense out of what is happening in Ferguson, Missouri. Johnson, in particular, seems well along the road to Golgotha. He arrived on the scene last week and almost immediately defused the original volatility that had arisen when the local police rolled up in the neighborhood as though they were liberating Bastogne. He gave a genuinely moving address to a gathering in a local church. And now, hell having broken out twice in as many nights, and with the National Guard called up to patrol the streets, and his own work being undermined by dumbass local cops with their own agendas, Johnson wearily spoke last night of Molotov cocktails and outside agitators and he sounded like nobody more than Governor Nixon, whose schedule for 2016 is clearing almost by the second. Johnson has been cornered by human weakness, and human idiocy, and, yes, by human evil. Ultimately, he&amp;#039;s a cop, and ultimately, he&amp;#039;s responsible for keeping the peace, and for protecting not only the community, but also the safety of his own officers. And now, the militarized police have been replaced by the militarized military, and Johnson&amp;#039;s brave and noble pursuit of community outreach and community justice is lost somewhere in the smoke. But Johnson is still out there, every night, walking his beat, trying to hold the whole thing together. (Note to whatever idiots are showing up in Ferguson from around the country to take their own psychoses out for a walk. I don&amp;#039;t care if you&amp;#039;re a self-styled anarchist, a Panther manque, or pretending to be General Nathan Bedford Dumbshit. You badly need to be ignored, called out, and arrested, if needs be. You do nobody any good. Yeah, the whole world is watching you, and a helluva big swath of it is approving.) What appears to have happened to the president is far more disturbing and far more dispiriting. His press conference yesterday was profoundly desultory, his statements worse than useless. He seemed rather spent. Today, the White House seemed to go out of its way to emphasize that Attorney General Eric Holder has decided to go to Ferguson of his own volition, also emphasizing that the president did not order Holder to do so, which seems extremely strange, and which makes it a fair question whether or not the president has made a political calculation to distance himself from the most serious outbreak of racial tension since the Los Angeles uprising in 1992. And the explanations from anonymous White House sources indicate that the people around the president still do not recognize the fundamental flaw in the allegedly transcendent event that the president&amp;#039;s election was said to have been. If Obama&amp;#039;s speeches aren&amp;#039;t as dramatic as they used to be, this is why: the White House believes a presidential speech on a politically charged topic is as likely to make things worse as to make things better. It is as likely to infuriate conservatives as it is to inspire liberals. And in a country riven by political polarization, widening that divide can take hard problems and make them impossible problems. President Obama might still decide to give a speech about events in Ferguson. But it probably won&amp;#039;t be the speech many of his supporters want. When Obama gave the first Race Speech he was a unifying figure trying to win the Democratic nomination. Today he&amp;#039;s a divisive figure who needs to govern the whole country. The White House never forgets that. Good freaking god, the president is not a &amp;quot;divisive figure.&amp;quot; He has been made into a divisive figure. He and his people have to know that by now. The harder he preached his message of conciliation, the more his enemies made a figure of division out of him. The more people seemed to be buying that message, the harder its opponents worked to frame the message as, at best, camouflage for the president&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;real agenda,&amp;quot; and the harder they then worked to frame anything he did for African American citizens as &amp;quot;reparations.&amp;quot; No matter how often he spoke about personal responsibility, the louder were the complaints about &amp;quot;Obamaphones.&amp;quot; He placed himself in a kind of box because his rhetoric about racial reconciliation and one America failed to take into account the political utility of entrenched racism. Hell, everybody believes we&amp;#039;ve &amp;quot;gotten beyond&amp;quot; our racial problems in this country. Even the people rigging state election laws, or cheering on radicalized police forces, believe that. However, racism is still politically powerful and, therefore, politically useful. It is not a demographic fluke that 66 percent of the people in Ferguson are African American, but that only three of the cops are. That ratio is the result of deliberate political decisions, deliberately made, in which entrenched racism was politically useful to the people making them. That is what the president never really acknowledged, that was the poison in the apple. That&amp;#039;s why he can&amp;#039;t speak out the way he should speak out. No wonder he looks tired. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wrote a very thoughtful piece for Time that attempted to differentiate between the problems of race and the problems of class. The difficulty with that proposition is that there is no vocabulary for a thorough discussion of class in American politics. Not any more. Joe McCarthy ran the last serious attempts at that conversation out of the national dialogue. (Rick Santorum regularly scoffs at the notion that we even have classes in American society, and have I mentioned recently what a colossal dick Rick Santorum is?) The parameters of economic populism, which is said to be on the rise, although I&amp;#039;m not standing on one leg waiting for that, are strictly drawn within what is called the &amp;quot;struggling middle class.&amp;quot; Remarkably, the poor are left out of any conversation, tepid or otherwise, that we choose to have about class. The point is that we don&amp;#039;t talk about class because we&amp;#039;ve forgotten how. That is not the case with race. We have a vocabulary for that. It is often dishonest and it is often destructive and it too often is used by bad people for bad ends. But we all know it so well that we are fluent enough in the language of race to pretend that we don&amp;#039;t know what is being said in code, or between the lines. We all know the language of race so well that we can hide behind it, lose ourselves in the twisted and shadowy underbrush of its syntax, and come out at a place in which white people are the real victims and black lives, especially young ones, especially male ones, are per se expendable. There is no political power to be gained in this country by talking about class. There is vast political power to be gained in talking about race, which is why people are so adept at using the language of race for their own ends to the point where the first African American president of the United States considers it politically perilous to speak about race in any but the most anodyne way. This is craziness. Weariness in a president is understandable. It&amp;#039;s the worst job in the world. I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that I should never vote for anyone who campaigns for the office because they are either power-mad or insane. But weariness in a president can be dangerous. Vietnam -- and the national upheaval it occasioned -- nearly killed LBJ. Nixon was eaten alive by Watergate. Reagan was a symptomatic Alzheimer&amp;#039;s patient for most of his second term. Lincoln once said that he felt like &amp;quot;the tiredest man on earth.&amp;quot; But, even at the end of their respective ropes, LBJ got a gun-control law passed, and Nixon increased the minimum wage, and Reagan managed to work with Gorbachev, and Lincoln managed to win the Civil War. The president can say anything he wants now. He will never run for re-election again. His opponents are going to screech like ravens on meth no matter what he says. Weary or not, he should take a tip from Ron Johnson and walk his beat again tonight. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a29692/weariness/>