So you may have heard something about the President of the United States visiting Hiroshima. The first sitting president to pay respects at the city which was laid waste by an American atomic bomb in 1945, when 166’000 Japanese lives were taken.
Obama’s visit was officially a very big deal, and if you listen to politicians, you’ll be under the impression that it divided opinion, in the US, in Japan, and around the world. But as we all know, politicians don’t represent genuine opinion, they represent themselves, the very rich, and vested interests. They’re sociopathic, and ordinary people, by definition, aren’t. Ask a regular person what they think about Obama visiting Hiroshima and they’re unlikely to over-opine or get emotional about it. Maybe they’ve been to Hiroshima themselves, and visited the Peace Memorial Park, where the ruined dome of a nuclear blasted hall stands preserved as a shattered reminder of the destructive agony that engulfed the city. If hundreds of thousands of tourists visit every year, why should anyone think it strange that Obama might?
The majority view here in Japan is that Obama did the right thing and handled it well. Among ordinary, reasonable people, because they’re ordinary, reasonable people, there was no expectation of or demand for an official apology. The speech was good, Obama connects and carries the moment, and he appeared genuine as he hugged a survivor of the nuclear strike.
In far away ancient lands, dusty, Islamic and hot, the kind we don’t care about because they’re guilty by association, American drones kill extra-judicially, but not atomically, so there are no contradictions, and nothing to be puzzled by.
If Obama isn’t a good guy, then he looks like one, and normal people- nice, everyday people who ride the subway, and go home to their families, and play futsal and drink beer and read manga, they take Obama at face value, and who knows- maybe he really is a good guy, and maybe when he stops being POTUS we’ll get to know what he actually thinks about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and drone strikes, and whistleblowers, and Hillary’s email problems, and everything else we’d like to know but can’t because he’s a politician, whose every word and action is, well, political.
Can we even think of politicians as people, really? When everything they ever say or do is calculated and pre-approved, and maddening doublethink is at the essence of their work, can any of it really matter?
Without doubt, the spontaneous actions of the thousands of American tourists who visit Hiroshima every year- all those non-politician, living, breathing real people- their presence, thoughts, kindness and good manners carry infinitely more value and authenticity than anything an American president in the current phase of US politics could ever say or do.
