Fist clinched! Raving, as in raving mad! Ranting and angry! Horns sprouting and eyes roving and glaring! (And crying, too!).

What an imagination but by no means original!

Corporate publishers, cinema and news moguls have succeeded in the last 30 years to fix this image of the transgressor. In the old days, it was the rebel, run-away enslaved Black, Crazy Horse, Geronimo, the Jew, the communist. Add the Muslim to the list of terrorists today who haunt the white imagination in the U.S. because these figures cannot be confined to the different still but acceptable image of the saved.

The classical age, writes Michel Foucault, gave us the “bourgeois dream.” It also gave a warning: Transgress this dream at your risk! For those who “cross the frontiers of bourgeois order of his [or her] own accord, Foucault writes, “and alienates himself [or herself] outside the sacred limits of its ethic are mad” and thus confined by language and the image of the transgressor.

On the founding nightmare that is the transgressor, rest the image of the saved. The saved is a familiar figure encased within the Master narrative. Africans on the continent and Indigenous on Turtle Island (U.S. soil), in submission, were barbarians and savages but saved - civilized by the conquerors. Today, Red, Black, and Brown youth put aside their violent nature, as the story goes, and manage to surface from the dungeon of certain urban communities with the helping hand of a grant-funded organization , a “church,” or a white teacher who just would not give up on a promising young Red, Black or Brown young man or woman.

Hollywood and New York book publishers love to depict these narratives of the saved as unique and therefore compelling. The image of the saved, stamped and shipped to the ranks of the consumer class, is big business for corporate capitalists. Nice suits! Fancy cars! Education at an Ivy League university! Job at a Fortune 500 company! Thank, you Master - Master narrative. We are finally free -

Free?

The fears and desires of angry whites spew racists slurs for a corporate news media all ready to denounce the culprit and “shed light” on “our national problem” while the same corporate capitalist machine empowers white liberals to aid in concealing its ability to confine Red, Black and Brown Americans to remain on the receiving ending of the system’s violence.

Confinement of justice, democracy, and freedom within the Master narrative to the image of the transgressor, the mad, acts as the “police force” that demonizes any challenge to corporate capitalist rule. We are all confined in the Master narrative - but not equally. It is in the European’s history, Foucault writes, that whenever “a new sensibility to poverty” created “news forms of reaction to the economic problems of unemployment and idleness,” confinement has served as a “social project against agitation and uprisings.”

Are the unemployed, uninsured, elderly, the poor, and disillusioned in need of another lynching or another cunning distraction?

Here we are now with the corporate media, liberal/right-wing, so labeled for clarity, supposedly exposing us to a coup: a transgressor is in the White House! “The President of the United States is a war criminal!” The transgressor has ignored the War Powers Resolution. His (as in, believe he is a singular figure gone mad at his desk in the Oval Office) - his war in Libya is illegal! Even Attorney General Eric Holder advised against it!

The liberals and their corporate bedfellows sold Obama as a dove and now they want to tell you he (and he alone) is the snake?

Years, ago, city hall in Chicago in their anointment of him, an outsider, declared Barrack Obama saved! Former Mayor Daley Jr. (of the Daley Machine) found Obama both familiar and different but not too different as to be considered confinable, i.e. demonized as mad as required by the Master narrative.

Barrack Obama is the manifestation of the “bourgeois dream” for white liberals. He is also the corporate capitalist’s response to the “economic problem,” the, i.e. the exploration of more fear and desires that, in turn, fuel corporate capitalism’s unflinching rule of Earth and humanity. King among the saved who must impress the powers with their cleverness and their willingness to “do one better,” Obama, an ideal figure to present to La Salle Street and on Wall Street and to the Empire’s political front in Washington D.C. The saved have to do better at furthering the institutionalization of destruction and death - better than their white counterpoints, these days - and Obama has, long ago, after he suddenly appeared in Chicago. I will wage a better war, presidential candidate Obama said, but too many Americans stood mesmerized by the stunning image of the saved.

A transgressor, Obama is not!

Obama is exactly what white liberals and angry whites want (even if half do not recognize this) because he is what the American Master narrative produced. Liberals and corporate capitalists worked on a response to their fear of Black Americans and their desire for a most appeasing Black figure. And he materialized, this great creation and negation of Black Americans who traditionally were anti-war.

The corporate rulers, looking to the future, presented their product to the youth, a collective of the population with a keen lack of history, and to white liberals looking to bring about a post-racism era, a “safe” environment in which to continue old habits.

But the angry whites did not buy brand Obama!

Obama is a war man and the peace man at once representing those still at war with their own fears and desires. Obama is dreaded by no one, despite the birther’s foolishness; he is the norm par excellence for everyone. Prior to his ascendancy to the White House, the chosen spokesperson for the new future America announced “change” and “hope” was forthcoming and Obama interspersed his jingles with soaring lyrical refrains: Health care, education, and jobs for all! No drilling, no nukes, and no conflict for oil! No torture and no Guantanomo! Taxes for the wealthy, net neutrality and civil liberties a priority!

The corporate handlers put a copy of the Constitution in his hand and had him wave it while they applauded Obama’s performance!

As President of the United States, Barrack Obama is a warmonger no matter which advisor advises him of how to go about killing. But - he was granted the right to sit behind the desk in the Oval Office because he was not a transgressor, and there is nothing mad about Obama. If he is mad, then the government itself, all previous presidents, slaveholders and warmongers, and, of course, the corporate capitalists are mad. And there is nothing mad about corporate rule!

Obama is not mad; he is scripted to represent the norm - in our “post racism” era.

Only the mad, the transgressors would denounce the imperialist Empire, war, death, and destruction.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.