Little Hope, Less Change

Consider: The 120,000 troops in “the surge is not working” Iraq are now complaining of ennui —while the White House is paralyzed over whether to send more troops to the new escalating front in Afghanistan. How odd the present perceptions: Bush’s bad optional war became good in the public mind, and Obama’s necessary good war became bad. (Careful study of the history of both countries, the existing challenges, and the topography might have suggested to candidate Obama to be careful about demonizing the surge while chest-thumping a war he never wished to finish. Did Obama really think he would be elected, hailed as the anti-war laureate, simply summon home the troops from the “quagmire” in Iraq, and then fly over to Kabul to do a Victory Column speech?).

The Russian gambit failed; Putin humiliated the Eastern Europeans and then rubbed it in by lecturing us about “hands off Iran.” The July threat to Iran of comply—or “face consequences” by September—morphed into September’s comply—or “face consequences by the October head-to-head meetings—which, in turn, morphed into October’s comply—or some day soon face consequences.

Sorta, Kinda, Maybe Diplomacy

Soon we will get everything on the official transcripts and websites scrubbed down to read: Guantanamo really will close on March 1, 2010; Iran must comply this time by June 1, 2010; all combat brigades will be out by March 2008, 2009, 2010; health care must pass by August, September, October, November.

Oil is climbing back over $80 a barrel; the dollar is falling against the Euro to 1.50. The annual deficit is already over $1.6 trillion and may go well over that. The tab for health care will hit right under $1 trillion. Unemployment may be headed over 10%. The people who voted for Obama were mad over Bush’s bailouts, unemployment, deficits, and supposed divisiveness. And?

They got greater bailouts, higher unemployment, larger deficits, and Chicago politics.

Please, please

Right now to save America we need some steady leadership that reassures businesses of lower taxes, less government spending, no new regulations, educational reform to improve the work force, and confident expansionary energy exploration and development. Instead, we get a prescription to terrify private enterprise: Mr. President, every time you besmirch someone as greedy, lying, and unduly rich, some business, somewhere, pulls in its horns.

Uncertainty Everywhere

Full recovery is uncertain, given (1) oil prices have been low and are now climbing, boosting the import tab higher and higher (what happened to candidate Obama’s promises of more drilling?); (2) interest rates are historically low, meaning the price of servicing the mega-deficits hasn’t hit yet; but they too will climb, further taxing the hocus-pocus borrowing; (3) so far higher taxes are just talk; but soon the income rates will climb at a time when many of the states have already increased their sales and income rates. Remember the promised end to the FICA caps on higher incomes; note the promised health care surcharge taxes. And keep in mind that 55% of those in the cross-hairs who make over $200,000 voted for Obama.

I have some confessions to make, not because any of you readers are particularly interested in my views; but rather because I think some of you are in the same boat: Have you stopped reading, listening, watching, and paying attention to most of what now passes for establishment public or popular culture? I am not particularly proud of this quietism (many Athenians did it in the early 4^th century BC and Romans by the late 3^rd AD), but not really ashamed of it either.

Shut up and see a movie?

Take Hollywood protocol—make a big movie, hype it, show it at the mall multiplex. But I went to one movie the last year. Maybe three in the last four years. There is not much choice here—car crashes, evil white men killing the innocent, some gay or feminist heroes fending off club-bearing white homophobic Mississippians in pick-ups. Or you can endure the American war-machine kidnapping, torturing, or murdering even more of the helpless abroad—with Robert Redford, glassed down, tweed in display, or snarly George Clooney sermonizing, like the choruses of Euripides’ tragedies.

The usual themes—some evil corporation is destroying something (fill in the blanks: the environment, the neighborhood, the small town, etc.), some CIA conspiracy is out to ruin a crusading heroic journalist, or some brave professor or writer is exposing a massive cover-up—are, well, boring, even with the sex, the blow-em-up explosions, and some nice scenery. (And all this from a corporate Hollywood—reliant on the security of the American military, crass in its high tastes and destructive in its behavior, and all the while profit and status obsessed! [The world of Halliburton makes the world safe for Botox?])

If it is not all that, we get instead some neurotic suburban psychodrama about a senseless midlife crisis of some aging yuppies, wondering whether their empty lives really have meaning. Then there are always the “action” movies about tomb-robbing, treasure-hunting, or Zombie killing, but even they try to mask emptiness with a politically-correct throw-away line now and then. Can’t they make one movie of the Lewis and Clark expedition or Lepanto, and one less with Tom Hanks as the anguished and caring postmodern man?

Why not DVDs?

If I watch DVDs, they surely are not of recent vintage. I couldn’t tell you a single release in the current most rented 100. I rewatch instead Westerns—Peckinpaugh, John Ford, the classics like Shane and High Noon, the greats like Henry Fonda, James Stewart, Lee Marvin, George C. Scott, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Paul Newman, John Wayne, etc., and, as I wrote a few months ago, almost anything with a brilliant, but now forgotten character actor such as a Jack Palance, Richard Boone (cf. Cicero Grimes in Hombre), Ben Johnson, or Warren Oates—if only for their accents, ad-libbed lines, and carriage. Only the greats like DeNiro or Pacino, or a Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, and a few others (a Hackman, Eastwood, or Hopkins) approximate the old breed. (A Mickey Rourke, Gary Oldman, or John Malkovich are at least originals and, like real people, look the worse for it). So I find myself replaying something like a Das Boot or Breaker Morant, or supposedly corny 1930s and 1940s classics like How Green Was My Valley or The Best Years of Our Lives.  If I want to watch a film that failed at the box-office, I’ll take One-Eyed Jacks or Major Dundee or Pat Garret and Billy the Kid; their failures are better than today’s “successes”.

Today’s under thirty American male actors sound like they either have sinus congestion, or are trying to convince someone they are not as effeminate as their contrived appearance otherwise suggests. If my life depended on it, I could not identify any of the current leading actresses. The country needs a screen presence of a Burt Lancaster or Frederic March and it gets instead a Ben Affleck or Leo DiCaprio.

Musical Time Warp

Ditto music. I don’t know the name of a single rapper. Don’t follow rock anymore. Don’t want to. I like a Mark Knopfler or Coldplay, but mostly missed music’s 21^st century. I’m so lost that I think a Bob Seeger and Bruce Hornsby are contemporary mega-stars, though I couldn’t identify a recent hit of either. I haven’t seen any of the kids write as well as Springsteen or Van Morrison. One Otis Redding had more talent than the entire hip-hop industry.

Who is Katie Couric?

Add in television. I haven’t watched a network newscast in 10 years. If I want to see a 60-Minutes hit piece, I’ll watch a You Tube video where the amateurs are far more interesting and honest about their ambush journalism. Do the CBS hit-men still try to jump in and cross-up some poor official, as he stammers while they hammer on? Is Andy Rooney still around?

I don’t know which anchor is where. I bump into them in their re-aired interviews like the Couric/Palin disaster or Gibson with his eyeglasses on his nose as if were a professor of Romance Languages grilling Sarah the Idaho co-ed, but other than that could care less.

I’d take an old paleo-liberal like Eric Sevareid, John Chancellor, or David Brinkley any day over the most conservative on NBC or CNN. The old guys had style, even class; today’s crowd spends more on teeth-whiteners than on books.

Obama is perfect for the age. Like Bush, he had the Ivy-League degrees; unlike Bush he had the pretension that they meant something, even though in his mind the Berlin Airlift, the German language, Auschwitz, World War II, Cordoba, the geography of the U.S., almost anything dealing with history, geography, literature, or well, knowledge in general—well all that is stuff that others less relevant than he learned in college.

Commercial-free TV?

I like C-Span and have always admired Brian Lamb. I used to be a big fan of PBS and PR, but no more. The laudable shows are far outweighed by the race/class/gender agendas, usually someone in a soft drone, talking scarcely above a whisper, about some new heretofore unnoticed pathology of the US military, corporation, or government (pre-Obama) that a particularly angry but heroic professor or investigative reporter is going to enlighten us about.

I get confused by the news quite often. Here are five anomalies that make no real sense.

1)   Football as Ethical Sermonizing. Most watch football as a release from anxieties, work, and even the race/class/gender obsessions of our age, and see players in non-racial terms. And I think viewers put up with the growing hypocrisies, pretensions, and repugnancies of the NFL—star players involved in drugs, assaults, shootings, (even the creepy  base cruelty to animals), the dubious origins of some of the owners’ vast fortunes, hack sportswriters masquerading as Platonic thinkers, high-priced, crass spoiled multimillionaires occasionally offering cheap sound bites as if they were civil rights leaders of the Gandhi or King caliber—because of the courage of hundreds of gladiators to engage each Sunday in an incredibly dangerous, nearly pre-civilized struggle in the arena.

But with the Limbaugh matter, the entire Potemkin edifice is exposed. The race mongers Jackson (‘hymie-town”) and Sharpton (“white folks was in caves…”), the latter whose incendiary antics defamed a DA and led to rioting and death, talking of decorum is like, well, NFL players talking about proper role-model behavior. And are proper politics now, in this brave new world of government control of an increasing number of businesses, criteria for private enterprise? Is Ted Turner never allowed to buy another sports team, given his outrageous political statements about Iran, Israel, Bush, global warming, etc? Perhaps we need a federal “acquisition board” with “nonpartisan” humanists and former federal officials like a Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, or Van Jones to adjudicate the moral character of potential buyers?

2.To Russia With Love. Do you laugh or cry about our policy with Russia? When we serially cried out “reset” button, blamed Bush for the new Cold War with Russia, and promised to “listen”, we knew the US was walking blindfolded up the steps of Putin’s guillotine. So we humiliated the Czechs and the Poles (who have suffered far worse from the Russians) in exchange for the mythical “help” with sanctions on Iran. Today, Putin’s brief verdict of “premature” on sanctions said it all. If we can reconstruct the Obama/Hillary disaster, it goes something like this: Putin always liked the win/win/win/win idea of a nuclear Iran (the missiles point at the U.S., good profits for Russian companies, tensions in the Gulf always a help with high oil prices, everyone begs Russia to “leash” their new feral nuclear bulldog). So he entraps the idiotic Americans by vague promises of Iranian sanctions in exchange for reestablishing Russian fear and obedience in the former Soviet sphere—while revealing how America’s economic dive and strategic hesitation are proof of a more endemic decline. When Hillary talks of how delighted she is that Russia is “so supportive”, are we to cry for the beloved country? It is as if Putin not only knew he would win on this one, but get the added bonus of showing the world how obsequious, naïve, and impotent the new U.S. was in the bargain.

3. Not to be Spoken. What is this recent confusion about sodomy in the news, which transcends even the context of rape and coercion? I don’t quite understand how “sodomy” in the current press is presented as a sort of force multiplier to all sorts of sins. For example, the grotesque Polanski matter is not just presented as a repugnant rape of a child, but emphasized ad nauseam as even more repulsive and horrendous due to the additional wage of sodomy. Almost anytime the press wishes to emphasize the particular cruelty or the unpleasant carnality of a sexual crime, they include, if applicable, the word sodomy, with the understanding that such an act is sensationalized and fraught with depravity. And, again, it is not always just the matter of coercion, but rather what the Greeks called “para phusin” (contrary to nature, as in the notion of confusing sexuality with the excretory system [see Aristophanes on this]). Popular culture has all sorts of expressions that correlate the act with a certain physical unpleasantness, from prison jokes to the generic “We got screwed” by this or that. But yet at the same time, the act seems to be an absolutely taboo subject in even the most generic referencing to the male homosexual movement. I know the issue of civil rights is a separate one (and one I support as equality of all before the law), but if popular culture has all but suggested that heterosexuals who engage in such an act are depraved when carried out consensually, and especially worthy of odium beyond that accorded to the rapist, when as an act of coercion, why is the subject simply taboo in matters of public discussion of male homosexuality? When it was touched upon in the days of worries over co-factors for the increased vulnerability to the HIV virus, a firestorm followed that such discussions were indirect expressions of homophobia. (As a father of three, who in the 1990s went through the California public school,explicit sex education classes, I can attest that my children were taught that unprotected sex in general, not especially particular types of unprotected sex, were equivalent to a near death sentence.) So what is the politically-correct stance to take the next time a talking head on the news grimaces and then in sober tones goes on to relate that case A involving coercion or incident B without coercion or revelation C involved sodomy--are we to be outraged at his deprecation of a particular act more associated with a particular group and to think this is selective moralizing if not homophobia, or to be outraged that suspect A or person B crossed the lines of behavior and is even more morally repellant for such an act that went beyond rape, or as now simply to think in paradoxical fashion,  ‘wow, that is a really awful act / wow  I am not supposed to think that is a really awful act”?

Nobel Prizes from Lala Land.

Norway is a tiny country that was born lucky. It is weak and defenseless (and was quickly overrun in World War II [while neighboring, neutral Sweden sold the Third Reich 40% of its iron ore, that went for everything from Tiger tanks to kill Americans to the ovens at Auschwitz—with free shipping across the Baltic included as a favor]. In the late 1940s it would have been Finlandized during the Cold War, if not for American-led NATO. And the world’s largest military is still pledged to its defense, in case any of the nations, to whose icons it bestows awards, some day decides to send terrorists or nukes its way

Second, it sits on or near enough oil to allow what is otherwise a rather insignificant country to be the wealthiest per capita oil producer in the world, and enjoy the influence that many in the Gulf have grown accustomed to. Throw in minerals, natural gas, timber, and fish and the nation sits on a bonanza of natural wealth. No wonder there are philosophers who ponder how to dispense the largess and absenteeism is a national crisis (one receives almost ad infinitum the same cash whether “sick” at home or well on the job). The population of under 5 million is largely homogeneous (90% Nordic), and is thus stable, and both rich and safe beyond its wildest dreams. It does not border a Third World country; “difference” and the “other”—even with recent Islamic immigration—is still defined as speaking Swedish or Danish.

Hollywood Nation

In other words, Norway has the leisure to be utopian, and cannot quite understand why other countries are not as liberal as it has proven. So Norway loves to give award to all sorts of right-thinking frauds (Menchu), scoundrels (Elbaradei), terrorists (Arafat), Stalinists (Le Doc Tho), Elmer Gantrys (Jimmy Carter) and hucksters (Gore)— as it sits in judgment of others from Lala land.

Remember, though, the Norwegians privately would not like to live under Central American communism of the Ortega brand, or right next to nutty nuclear Iran, or have Palestinian terrorists on their borders, or in general live the real life that the nation sanctimoniously advocates in the abstract. It sees what happens to neighboring Denmark’s cartoonists when they exercise free speech. It once saw what Neville Chamberlain wrought for its own neighborhood.

Norway is, in other words, the Hollywood nation. Imagine it is as the son or daughter of a movie star, one who grew up in Malibu, and feels so terribly about it that he lectures the U.S. about everything from global warming to George Bush’s assorted sins—confident that he will never have to work at Ace Hardware, and never have to live near South Central LA. That’ sums up  Norway.

T-Ball Awards

Effort and intention, not achievement, matter to these pious Europeans. We should honor preseason favorites, not 20-game winners; praise dazzling book proposals, not best sellers; gush about on-the shelf Pentagon plans not battle victories. Don’t dare end the Cold War, or save millions in Africa from AIDs, or get rid of Milosevic; but most certainly do dare to convince the world that the Muslims jump-started the Renaissance. For that brave assertion, global peace will surely follow.

Norway on the Potomac

More seriously, the Obama Prize represents two recent larger Nobel trends: 1) an effort to curtail American foreign policy in favor of international deference (as in the case of rewarding Carter and Gore for their defamation of Bush in their opposition to Iraq); 2) a general disconnect from accomplishment in favor of leftist intentions, as in the case of Elbaradei or Rogaberta Menchu who accomplished essentially nothing (and spoke or wrote about that nothing in suspect fashion), but were a hit among international Western elites as authentically anti-Western non-Westerns.

Anyone who has taught in the university over the last thirty years has witnessed dozens of mini-sorts of Nobel Prizes each year handed out to faculty on the basis of what they represent or said rather than accomplishment; but it is still remarkable to see such postmodernism hit the world stage, where reality is virtual and constructed on language and expressed intent.

Think of the tiny Norway’s Machiavellianism: A utopian American President is now supported for his rhetoric—and yet also sent a signal that brave new Nobel Prize laureates simply don’t support Israel, pressure Iran, stay in Afghanistan or Iraq, or keep open Guantanamo. It is as if that Oslo is saying ‘our man in Washington’ is, well, now really ‘our man in Washington.’

Nemesis Everywhere

I have believed in the power of the goddess Nemesis (“dispenser of dues”) ever since I was introduced to the concept as a teenager studying classics, especially in the texts of Hesiod, Herodotus, and Sophocles.

Some of you know her also as a variant of eastern Karma, or the folk notion of ‘what comes around, goes around’, or the now common “ain’t payback a bitch”? We all agree on the symptoms: overweening success and surfeit (koris) lead to hubris (gratuitous arrogance), which in turn promotes destructive behavior (atê), that at last calls you to the attention of divine Nemesis—who ensures your ruin.  At Rhamnous on the Attic coast there is a beautiful temple to the goddess, proof of her ubiquity and power.

Obama as all-knowing Oedipus

As sure as sun rises, you readers knew that, as early as 2007, Obama’s fiery rhetoric about the disaster in Iraq and the good war in Afghanistan was not only disingenuous, but would come lurking back to haunt him—especially given the efforts of the talented David Petraeus, and the myriad challenges of the age-old tribalism in Afghanistan.

And so it has. He now owns the “good” and “necessary” war that, according to Obama, we supposedly wrongly “took our eye off of.” Now at last Obama is free as he wished to go into Pakistan in hot pursuit of terrorists (and as he once boasted in the debates amid the trashing of the then big-target Bush administration.)*

Snap My Fingers—Guantanamo Closed!

Remember Guantanamo? He could have said in January: “Tough call. Eric Holder once thought it was fine. Where else do you put non-uniformed murderers, who are sort of foreign soldiers in a global war unlike domestic criminals, but yet not soldiers either as we have traditionally defined them at Geneva?  We will have a long look at the facility, get bipartisan input from the Bush administration and the Congress, and then choose the bad rather than the worst choice.”

Nope. Instead, we got the hope and change soaring cadences about shutting it down within “a year” and “reset button” inanity—ad nauseam. That will prove to be impossible. Already he is throwing his Guantanamo czar under the bus, even as Mr. Craig blames (you guessed it) the Bush administration for his inability to depose of the detainees. (Did he really think that divine-sounding Germans and British leftists who shouted that we were running a Stalig would really want their own terrorists back home rather than in Cuba under lock and key?)

Snap Twice—Europeans Hypnotized

In fact, most contemporary meltdowns involve Nemesis. Did Obama imagine that he could wow cynical Europeans with diversity stories about Chicago, as if they were props at a campaign rally or guilt-ridden college deans? Yes, it worked in 2008, but already then his fatuousness was gaining the goddess’s attention. (I am careful when doing European interviews; even sympathetic Euros have at best an ironic streak, at worse a sort of delight in embarrassing you, given their world weariness and suspicion of anything that sounds of idealism or naïveté (cf. the old trope of ‘innocents abroad’). Obama should have learned all that from his Brandenburg Gate/Victory Column stunt two summers ago. (When he stands next to the smaller, but more significant Sarkozy, Obama now seems almost pre-teenish.)

And Then There is Always Letterman to the Rescue

Ditto David Letterman. It was not just that he indulged in the same sort of behavior as the butts of his jokes serially enjoyed, but that such jibes naturally turned attention to his own supposedly exempt lifestyle. If a Clinton or Edwards got caught up in the vanity of power, and needed the ego-boosting or enjoyment that younger flesh might impart, why did Letterman, given his similar character, think he was any different? Did he think the goddess was snoozing when he libeled the 14-year daughter of Sarah Palin as a dugout tart?

Be Careful….

The Greeks remind us that when success and bounty arrive, then, especially, it is time to be self-effacing, modest, generous, and forgiving. If not, retribution follows—whether because human nature dictates that the crowd wishes misfortune upon the haughty, or, as I confess that I believe, there is a sort of divine force that seeks to remind us of our own folly and can only do that in appropriately dramatic and timely fashion.

If it were true that the financial meltdown of last September and the tough time in Iraq were reminders to the Bush administration that once around 2003, coming off Wall Street surges and easy victories in Afghanistan and Iraq, they should have calmed down, and treaded softly (rather than ‘mission accomplished’ and ‘bring ‘em on’), so too Obama should have feared the goddess last winter.

Nemesis Was Watching, watching…

Nemesis has caught up with him in oh so many ways. From what we can tell, he was not a serious student, but rather a glib and politically astute observer, who rode affirmative action, identity politics, and campus trends (I am now gleaning this from his own autobiography) right through Occidental and Columbia to Harvard Law—without much scholarship. He was given much more attention at Chicago Law School for what he represented than what he accomplished. He arrogantly thought he could glide into the racist cauldron of Trinity Church, and glide out as an authentic African-American organizer of the Jesse Jackson sort.

His Senate career was similar—long on soaring rhetoric, in perpetual campaign mode, predicated on white liberal guilt and ease with a charismatic “other”—and short on actual accomplishment.

The Olympic Fiasco

I think most Americans were rooting for Chicago. As I wrote on NRO’s corner, I know I was. But Rio had a really convincing hope and change/ multicultural/new guy on the block case. And consider: given the recent bad windy city publicity (You Tube beatings, state and city corruption, Blagoism, Daley ward mobsterism, rumors of pre-Olympic wheeling and dealing on land angles, administration Chicago hard-ball Rahm Emanuel/David Axelrod politics, etc.), Chicago, Illinois ,was seen abroad as less competitive, far less competitive, than the other cities. I think almost any fair-minded neutral judge could grasp how those realities were going to play out. (Do not forget that Euros love to be gratuitously fickle and so in the first round trashed the reset-button, fawning American who wants to wow them through obsequiousness. And the more I watched Barack/Michelle do the “I grew up in the neighborhood” thing, the more I noticed the Euro-audience wincing (not smart bragging about your childhood Chicago “right hook” to an audience that has just watched horrific fighting in the streets of Chicago).

But even without the self-centered story-telling it was a hard sell anyway.  How can a post-national, I’m sorry Obama, trapped in a sort of we are the world paradox, be seen in nationalistic and near tribal fashion stumping for his own home town?  Again, it did not help that he appeared in campaign mode, tossing out the usual personal, somewhat hokey (and all but narcissistic) stories about himself and his family, that I know don’t resonate, much less make effective arguments, in the less therapeutic world of hardball politics abroad. In short, the community organizer was out organized by the multicultural ascendant Rio.

Almost all of Michelle’s statements were heartfelt and well meant. But they too proved in a global context counterproductive—and almost embarrassing in their now accustomed egocentricity. So the mystery remains, why did Obama think he should risk presidential and national capital in such ambiguous circumstances? Ego? Sloppy prep work? Payback to pals? Hubris?—e.g., I can fly in, do the hope and change cadence, fly out, and leave them hypnotized.

Sarkozy Drew Blood

Sarkozy really hurt Obama internationally, since his sarcastic ‘beam back down Barack’-like statement cut to the bone on the issue of such fluffy talk versus little substance: utopianism sermonizing on non-proliferation is great, but what about the spinning centrifuges? What does the Left do when the French are now to our Right? How can a weaker power sound braver than the stronger? And more principled? Europe is becoming worried, in the “be careful what you wish for” fashion about the Obama era, since the old bad cop/good cop game is up. It is now Europe good cop/US nicer cop. Much irony in this again…

The Challenge Ahead

Here is the problem for our President: the Iranian negotiation is an IED that will blow up in our faces. The theocrats want, need a bomb for a variety of reasons (why would a country that burns natural gas off at the oil well head need “peaceful” nuclear power?). Bombs have been a win/win situation for both Pakistan and North Korea. If Iran wins, we are off to the races—Saudi Arabia next, Egypt? Syria? Venezuela?

I hope the President is up to encouraging madcap drilling in the Alaska, Gulf, California, and the Dakotas to get these new finds into production, since if or when the Israelis strike, all hell is going to let loose in the Gulf. Cannot someone tell Obama that the moral, the peaceful, the only realistic thing now is to get tough with Iran through ostracism, sanctions, boycotts, even, heaven forbid, a blockade if need be, to prevent the far more terrible scenarios that lie ahead?

How to distill the news? After watching it far too much the past nine months, I offer five random conclusions from what I think is going on in the age of Obama.

1. Disconnect. There is little semblance between how one lives and how one envisions others should live. We saw that with the cabinet nominees. Tom Daschle, cheating on the taxes on his free limousine service, was the obvious caricature of someone who likes the high life, has found a way through tribuneship to get it, and makes so much money that he easily has enough money to pay for the taxes he wants to raise on others—but would prefer, given his status, not to pay them at all. A Geithner, Dodd, or John Edwards typify a rather large influential class of such moralists who suffer on our behalf. The more influential the environmentalist, the more likely his house does not meet his own green requisites he wishes to impose on others, so that he might better think on our behalf. The more a Charles Rangel talks of affordable housing, the poor, and social justice, the more he suddenly finds hidden bank accounts, unreported income, and subsidized apartments in his name, so that he might better agitate on our behalf. Hypocrisy is a human, rather than a partisan sin (note the philandering evangelical or the capitalist who wants government money to rig the game), but the man on the barricades shouting about social equality is especially prone to it—since it pays so uniquely well both materially and psychologically.

2. Abroad. Foreign policy now starts with the assumption the world is not naturally chaotic, but tranquil—if not for the obtrusive presence of a largely ignorant and selfish United States. The past is selectively invoked—Native Americans, slavery, sexism, racism, imperialism—and always without consideration of the far greater sins of other comparable societies or the astounding achievements of American society that allow our present spokesmen their exalted status and influence. By reaching out to troublemakers, and airing our pathologies, we are supposed to calm the misunderstood and demonized, as we insidiously try to address their complaints. A Chavez or Ahmadinejad should be less hostile once they learn that we too are moving to socialized health care, income redistribution,  high taxes, blanket entitlements and becoming more part of the statist solution rather than of the cowboy capitalist problem. To understand  such a policy, shorn of its pretensions, as old-style appeasement is considered a smear. Or to think that a Syria, Venezuela, or Cuba hates individual freedom and exists for a professional cadre of elite autocrats is considered naïve and simplistic. The greatest defenders in America of a Castro or Chavez are precisely those whose lifestyles and income would be impossible under such regimes.

3. Top and bottom. Obama is the embodiment of the new Democratic Party that appeals to the very poor and the upscale, the one reliant on federal largess, the other making enough money not to care all that much about the taxes necessary to fund it. On almost every issue—environmentalism, social issues, larger government—there is a new alliance that simply downplays the ordeal of the larger middle class of all races and ethnicities, especially those who are self-employed and wedded to more traditional values. The hardware store owner, dentist, real estate salesperson, and farmer, are seen as the “boss” with capital to dispense to others, rather than the critical but harried entrepreneurs who get up each morning with no certainty of an income or benefits. The chief difference between the support for the new Obamism among those in the gated community (tastefully gated) and the barrio was the level of vehemence and near anger in which it was expressed—far greater the more upscale the neighborhood.

War II Thoughts

We can learn a lot about our present dilemmas through looking at the past. This month I’m teaching an intensive class on World War II, and again reminded how history is never really history. One lesson: do not judge past decisions by present considerations or post facto wisdom from a Western point of view, but understand them given the knowledge and thinking of the times from an enemy perspective.

We ridicule the disastrous Japanese decision to go to war against the American colossus on December 7, 1941. But that correct analysis enjoys the benefit of hindsight, and does not explain why rather intelligent militarists for some reason believed that they could win, or at least within six months of aggrandizement obtain a truce. That they could not, and destroyed their country in the bargain, is not the point.  Nor is “fanaticism” a completely adequate exegesis for Pearl Harbor; logic of a sort is.

Why Did Japan Attack (or Rather Why Not?)?

Let us count the ways: 1) The US had not intervened in Europe, despite over two years of seeing Nazi Germany overrun its democratic allies in Western Europe and blitz London. The Japanese were convinced that we simply could not be provoked, or did not have it in us to fight for long under any circumstances;

2) It had just signed a non-aggression  neutrality pact with Russia (tit-for-tat payback to Hitler’s earlier perfidy). That April 1941 deal ensured there would not again be a bloody August, 1939-like border war in which thousands of Japanese (50,000?) perished. So Japan would now have a one-front war against the U.S. and Britain; but the latter would have a two-front war against Germany (and Italy) and Japan;

3) The Japanese coveted oil, rubber, tin, rice, and other strategic commodities. And now the Dutch East Indies were without their colonial masters after the fall of Western Europe. Vichy France was compliant in Southeast Asia. In other words, a world of raw materials was at last at Japan’s doorstep, much of modern-day Malaysia, Indonesia and Southeast Asia, ready for the taking if it had a convenient short war. Britain was tied down in North Africa (soon to lose Tobruk), and Burma and then India were also ripe for the picking;

4) By late November 1941 Germany was at the gates of Moscow, Leningrad was cut off; the Crimea was to fall. German U-boats were reaching records in destroying British convoys. Not only would Hitler certainly win the European war, but there was a good chance that the Japanese might meet him either through Suez or in the Persian Gulf. And why fight Russia, when soon Russia would be no more?

5) The Chinese front was mostly quiet, long-term occupation either run by puppet governments or made easier by Nationalist-communist rivalries;

6) The U.S. was still in a depression, its industry under-utilized and its military infrastructure largely embryonic. It had a bad habit of lecturing Japan, embargoing Japan, but not proving to Japan that it had the force to deter Japan and the willingness to enforce its edicts;

Almost all six calculations within a few months (say after the pivotal Midway and Guadalcanal battles) proved flawed. But that again is not the lesson. At the time, the Japanese, being aggressive militarists, drew logical conclusions about their self-interests, which only in hindsight seem preposterous, and largely because of the phenomenal, but easily unforeseen response of the United States.

And Today?

We should remember the past these last few weeks as we watch U.S. foreign policy turned topsy-turvy.

Consider Obama’s outreach to Russia. He assumes Bush gratuitously polarized Russia, a state that otherwise had few post-Cold War preexisting problems with the U.S., despite its oil wealth, autocratic government, policy of serially assassinating dissidents at home and abroad, and loss of face with the breakup of the former Soviet republics. So we blamed Bush with the monotonous “reset” refrain.  Then we threw the eastern Europeans under the bus with the vague “we have a better mobile missile system anyway” defense. Then we claimed a thankful Putin will appreciate such magnanimity and help on Iran.

Thinking like a Russian

But we are looking at all this from our postmodern eyes. Try, as in the case of 1941 Japan, seeing it from theirs.  Bush’s friends are now America’s expendables—whether a Poland, Israel, Honduras, Columbia, or Iraq’s Maliki. Bush’s enemies are now its friends or neutrals—suggesting that Obama agrees that to be angry with America, as Russia was, was once understandable, and during 2001-9 to be friendly with it logically suspect. All the past Russian sins from assassination to oil leveraging of Europe are now washed away as “Bush did it.”

The World’s President

The President’s UN* talk was more of the same, same old formula: Me, me, me / then Bush blew it / then I came /and, presto, the waters parted.

There is no need to listen to these speeches anymore:

Mr. President, Mr. Secretary-General, fellow delegates, ladies and gentleman: it is my honor to address you for the first time as the forty-fourth President of the United States. I come before you humbled by the responsibility that the American people have placed upon me; mindful of the enormous challenges of our moment in history; and determined to act boldly and collectively on behalf of justice and prosperity at home and abroad.

I have been in office for just nine months, though some days it seems a lot longer. I am well aware of the expectations that accompany my presidency around the world. These expectations are not about me….

I took office at a time when many around the world had come to view America with skepticism and distrust. Part of this was due to misperceptions and misinformation about my country. Part of this was due to opposition to specific policies, and a belief that on certain critical issues, America has acted unilaterally, without regard for the interests of others.

I think “acted unilaterally” does not refer to all the allies in Afghanistan and Iraq, but something like simply calling the Poles late at night to say the missile deal is off, and we’re cutting our own deal with Putin.

If Obama is right, and American exceptionalism is over, and we are just one of many, why, then, does he expect to garner the world’s attention and to seek the world’s limelight? What is it about America that gives him, the two-year Senate veteran, such prominence?

In fact, it is America’s 20^th century of achievement, its wealth, its singular morality, its competence — all the things that Obama either takes for granted or snarls about — that alone explains everything from his enormous Air Force One to the influence he enjoys. Put mellifluous Obama as president of Sweden or Slovakia and the world, rightly or wrongly, snores. Obama tragically does not understand that America made him — he does not make America.

Here is the synopsis of the president’s speech: “Ok, I came in, dissed Bush, offered hope and change, and deigned to sacrifice myself, the smartest you’ll ever meet, for you, the world. So now  we aren’t Bush’s America, but Obama’s America, and therefore I expect you to reciprocate in kind — since you only have one last chance to get a divine American president of my caliber.”

There must be some Microsoft automatic program that writes these speeches.

America’s College President

I wrote today about Obama running the country as if he were an Ivy League president and we were his faculty.

If one wonders why Americans are asked to send in fishy people to the White House, or why  the NEA now wants to correlate artistic grants to political obsequiousness, or why those who disagree are deprecated as mob like and worse, or why Eric Holder calls us “cowards,” or why Dr. Chu says we are like teenagers, the answer is that we are to be run like a campus, and Obama is our all-knowing paternalistic president.

Good Wars and Bad Wars

A year ago also I wrote an article predicting that the Democrats’ good war/bad war prism was a profound mistake, and that if elected Obama was going to have a hard time matching campaign rhetoric with presidential decisions. The truth is that Afghanistan — no harbors, landlocked, next to nuclear Pakistan, terribly difficult terrain, opium, harsh winters, 7^th century tribal infrastructure — was always the more difficult challenge than Iraq: on the gulf, oil-rich, some secular and educated segments of the population, flat and clear weather, strategic location.

I don’t think I wrote anything a year ago that would not be entirely applicable right now:

Policies no, Obama maybe…

Barack Obama is charismatic. He can charm, and has mastered the art of set cadence, pause, articulation, and voice modulation, in the manner of a JFK.  He has appeared on television far more in nine months than have prior presidents in an entire administration. But his problem is that his policies—cap and trade, nationalized health care, $2 trillion deficits, fringe-politics czars, therapeutic foreign policies, etc.—poll below 50 percent. So his advisors quite understandably  assume that by sheer magnetism Obama can still sell the public a product they doubt—sort of like GM’s top salesman thinking he can sell a Honda Accord buyer a new Malibu. (trust me, it does not work)

In response to his own declining polls, his initiatives are stalled—and, more importantly, his centrist Democratic supporters are themselves dug in, fingers in the wind, waiting until his polls go back up to 55%.

When in doubt…

Barring sudden changes in the economy, or a Clinton-like 1995 flip to the center, the Obamians feel that they can still overwhelm the public through two strategies: have subordinates (but never the White House) demonize opponents as “racists”, and unleash Obama on the media, convinced that his attractive personality can become persuasive as well (the two are not the same: I like Bruce Springsteen’s music and enjoy his occasional talks, but would never follow his political advice; Tommy Lee Jones is one of my favorite actors; but would never follow his enthusiasm for Al Gore).

Wolf, wolf and more crying wolf…

A variety of liberal icons has weighed in on the racist theme. What is again sad is that many of the most prominent accusers have forfeited credibility, given their own past record of wolf-crying.

I remember in the campaign that most of the race embarrassment, in fact, was on the liberal side: the imbroglio over Bill Clinton’s charges about the “race card” played on him; Joe Biden’s “clean” black remark and Indians in donut shops; Howard Dean’s wild charges about Republicans and black servants; Geraldine Ferraro’s suggestion that being black helped, not hurt Obama; the 95% black majorities in the primaries that voted in bloc fashion against a white, very liberal candidate; Obama’s own racial baggage with Rev. Wright, “clingers”, typical white person, etc.

In other words, eighteen months ago at this time, Obama was struggling with the suggestion that his past record illustrated that he was close with racists like Wright, and saw the election in racial prisms. Meanwhile, liberal rivals had tried to emphasize those very contradictions, often in clumsy terms. Currently, he vehemently denies a racial component to criticism against his policies (he reads the polls that to do so is political suicide), but oddly apparently does not privately send the word out to his operatives in the media and in Congress to cool it, since he also sees political advantage if such charges blunt criticism of his unpopular initiatives.  (A note: part of the problem is that elites dominate the issue: calling someone “racist” does not work in the workplace for most people who are not so easily intimidated; but our talking heads and journalists are themselves passive-aggressives who are as timid in real life as they chest-thump in public.)

But is there any credibility?

Fast forward: I just read the charges of Bob Herbert, the New York Times columnist, who now swears racism fuels anger at the Obama new deal. He even cites the Kenney assassination as dire warning. But, wait—JFK  was killed, as the Warren Report detailed, by a pro-Soviet, Fair Play for Cuba Marxist.

Bob Hebert himself not long ago alleged on television that a McCain ad was abjectly racist because it had two supposed phallic symbols in the background: those Freudian bogeymen, the leaning tower of Pisa and the Washington Monument.

The racists in the McCain campaign, Herbert swore, used subliminal imagery to scare us about purported black sexual prowess. But wait once more: Herbert crafted all this. The image was simply the Victory Column in Berlin. It was chosen as a backdrop to remind viewers of the pomposity of Obama himself using the icon (after being turned down for wanting the more presidential set of the Brandenburg Gate). Even grade school students can distinguish the Washington Monument—and most likely the leaning tower of Pisa as well. (By the way, given the hysterics of the New York Times in its Obamania and the lengths to which it has gone, and given its dire fiscal condition, and given the federal bail-outs under Obama, and given the spread of czardom, we know what will follow very soon….)

And on and on…

Maureen Dowd had no evidence of racism either. No matter once more—she inserts the word “boy” into Joe Wilson’s unfortunate “You lie” rude interruption, to invent a racist rather than a merely boorish remark. But with all due respect once more, why believe Ms. Dowd, who just recently lifted sentences from another writer, used them as her own, and then, when caught, claimed she absentmindedly cut and pasted from an email?