By self-proclamation, President Obama is a community organizer.  We accept that term as if it has been a long-standing, honorable American profession, but the fact is, the term is only sixty-five years old, coined by our old friend, Saul Alinski, who was the modern exemplar of the species, but not the origin.  That distinction belongs to somebody else and it was not even Marx or Engel.  Think of somebody far older with the general interpretation of horns, a serpentine beast.  The interpretation, however, is wrong.  He looks like you and me; it is not his purpose to repel, but to invite.   You know who Alinski was, most famous for his last book, Rules for Radicals, 1971, in which he defined the necessary steps in the cause of societal change by revolution.  No, I err.  Alinski called it “war.”  In an earlier book from 1946, Reveille for Radicals, he defined community organizing:

“A People’s Organization is dedicated to an eternal war…  A People’s Organization lives in a world of hard reality.  It lives in the midst of smashing forces, dashing struggles, sweeping cross-currents, ripping passions, conflict, confusion, chaos, the hot and the cold, the squalor and the drama, which people prosaically refer to as life and students describe as ‘society.’ ”  [Alinski, Reveille, pp 133- 135]  A community organizer is, of course, a “People’s Organization” mentor.

Twenty-five years later, Alinski took the necessary next step with Rules to describe how, if those conditions of forces, struggles, passions and chaos did not exist, those conditions needed to be created.  They are the end game, they are the intent, they are the life-blood of community organization.  He does not bother to admit that if those conditions do not exist, society does not need to be “organized.”  You know the old line, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”  There is a better one: “if it ain’t broke, improve it.”  Some will argue the system is broken, but these types, whether they know it or not, align with Alinski.  We cannot improve anything by the introduction of passionate chaos.  What you do by destruction is create a completely different, but unsustainable system.  It may be an affront to call it building, for no such system attempted has ever successfully withstood the test of endurance.  It will fall.  They presume the system we have needs destruction and re-invention as something completely different.  In the process, individual liberties, the inequality of performance and merit are sacrificed because even in a free society, not all will contribute their capable share -- it has nothing to do with fairness -- and must be dismissed according to the war-party line.  What they have never understood is that in our system, everyone has an opportunity to exert the full measure of their capable effort and we are all free to succeed, or to fail and try again.  It is the original effort and the try-again against which community organization combats. 

A community organizer has no power against forces beyond his ability to master.  Would we have ever met the challenge to fly a man to the moon and return him safely to the earth if John Kennedy was a community organizer?  He inspired NASA to create, to engineer, to dare to risk something never done before.  In the case of Barack Obama and the gulf oil spill, it is not a society needing chaos and a social war to re-distribute wealth and to force fairness instead of individual effort and merit.  “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money,” Mr. Obama said recently.  Said like a true believer, but who should say so and who decides “enough” other than each individual?  This man-made disaster has quite enough chaos of its own without having to encourage it.  Until Barack Obama begins to look at this as the executive he is supposed to be, but never has been, as a problem with a scientific and engineered solution without the war-party mentality of a community organizer, he will continue to disappoint those, such as James Carville, who passionately called for, and were delivered, a community organizer.  Unfortunately, Carville is a sycophant of Saul Alinski as well.  Left to the devices of a community organizer who walks around a beach picking up tar balls and then gathers a press conference to say he’s in charge, the community of the gulf coast will certainly change.  Would-be fishermen will become minion organizers until other people’s money dries up, and then they will dry up and the rest of us may never again enjoy the rich heritage and culture of the gulf coast.  In fact, the system Saul Alinski would create has no local, differentiated culture and heritage; we become an ordinary, bland, uninspired gray.  That’s what organizers of uncreative communities do; they have no skills in differentiated individuality; they make mud pies.  In this case, the mud is saturated with oil.