Hesiod

Hesiod was an ancient Greek poet who wrote about the world about him from the angle of the farmer. His Works and Days were a sort of a tough take about how hard life could be, and the world view that the no-nonsense farmer should adopt about the world about him if he were to survive. I have never posted blogs before but I will take Hesiod to heart here in the beginning. — Victor Davis Hanson

From Obama to the Wild Bunch

Paradoxes everywhere

What strange paradoxes: the more the Democrats tried to show their egalitarian fides, they more they crafted an undemocratic nominating process; the more Obama talked of transcending race, the more he appealed to racial solidarity; the more Bill Clinton stumped and shook hands, the more he threw away his legacy; and the more Hillary and Barack slurred McCain as a right-wing nut, the more they repaired his relations with the his conservative base. And all this is only half-way through…

Obama and race

Lately a number of Obama’s African-American supporters have taken the airways to make the argument that his astounding percentages of 90% and above among African-American voters are not racialist because the community would not vote in such numbers for a Clarence Thomas or Condoleezza Rice.

But that is a dangerous comparison that raises only more questions. So it’s politics, not race? Why then not a mere 60/40 margin over the ultra-liberal Hillary, wife of our first “black” President? The answer? Obama represents a certain racial chauvinism that neither a white liberal nor black conservative can convey. In other words, in the world of identity politics, he seems to reflect an authentic representation of grievance, and a perpetuation of the entire industry of racial reparations.

Most think the corpus of Rev. Wright’s sayings, comments like “typical white person”, and snotty condescension about white Middle American yokels were terrible gaffes. True, but such wedge politicking apparently ensures him the astounding margins in the African-American community that really are unprecedented—when not long ago there were concerns among his strategists that he might not capture the black vote in such numbers. That problem of authenticy was put to rest by his choice not to disown Rev. Wright.

Speaking of whom, the snippets from his interview with a fawning Bill Moyers were about as disingenuous as they come. He claimed they were out of context and his critics divisive, but never disowned what he said. He claimed he was a pastor outside of politics, but his attraction apparently hinges on his political views about everything from the AIDs conspiracy to apartheid. And on and on. The problem with Rev. Wright is, well, he loves the attention, makes a profit on it, and won’t shut up. And as long as he is not disowned by Obama, the more Obama has to explain why he continues to worship in that church, whether Wright is or is not really retired, and what exactly did Obama know and when did he know it. A fair reading of the Obama memoirs suggests he knew exactly what Wright was saying and heard a great deal of it.

It doesn’t help his cause that when CNN and Fox bring in analysts from the universities (e.g., African-American studies professors), they not only excuse Obama, but Wright too!—usually by the tactic of redefining a Martin Luther King not as a healer, but a proto-firebrand like Wright. That sounds catchy and may ooh and aah the white elite base, but in the general election the defense of Wright and what he stands for will prove catastrophic. To fathom the soul of the Obama campaign juxtapose Obama’s Pennsylvania comments alongside the recent Axelrod’s dismissal of the need to reach out to the white working class:

“The white working class has gone to the Republican nominee for many elections, going back even to the Clinton years. This is not new that Democratic candidates don’t rely solely on those votes.”

Now we wait to hear the “context” for “don’t rely”.

More on the Movies

I learned a great deal from the comments on the movie posting. I still maintain, as do many readers, that elements of physical ordeal and elemental challenges have vanished from the American middle-class lifestyle, and with their departure, the sort of actor who clawed his way up, and was familiar with the underbelly of the United States is disappearing as well.

Again, I sense the tell-tale difference is in the voices. Today’s male sounds metrosexual, ambiguous, nasal, sing-songy—feminized. Today’s Westerns are embarrassing, as Hollywood searches in vain for a southerner, or anyone who does sound like a Valley Boy from San Fernando. Sam Elliot made an entirely successful career out of having an authentic Western voice, or at least something that resonates experience outside the suburb.

In general, I don’t think we will ever see again the wide range of rich resonant and idiosyncratic voices of a Burt Lancaster, Frederic March, Henry Fonda, James Stewart, or Robert Mitchum, much less a Ben Johnson, L.Q. Jones, or Richard Boone (one of my favorite actors). The ability of today’s wild young actors to drink, snort, party, go on rampages, work as a bartender, drop out of high-school, provoke—part of the Sean Penn profile— is not comparable to the masculine world of the 1930s and 1940s, where there was a brutal honesty and hard decency utterly lacking today. That said, there is something in the eye and voice of a Robert Duvall, Christopher Walken, Robert DeNiro, Bruce Willis, and a few others, which readers immediately noted, that reminds us at times of the old breed.

My interest in movies was inculcated by my father, who grew up outside of Kingsburg, California on a small farm in the Depression to Swedish parents, was a central fire control gunner on a B-29 for 40 missions over Japan, lost many of his teeth playing football for Amos Alonzo Stagg at the University of Pacific, and was never quite tame or predictable, despite his ability to both farm and become a successful junior college administrator—and remain gentle and gentlemanly at all times.

He took us to the movies quite often, roused us when a movie came on one of our three scratchy channels on a small black-and-white television in the kitchen, and shared with us his notion of the tragic hero, who either self-implodes as he eliminates the problem along with himself, or deals with an awful fate with a sort of resigned nobility. These are some of the great scenes I remember best—and I watched them all with my father from the 1950s to his death in 1998.

The Wild Bunch: The scene when Ernest Borgnine, Bill Holden, Ben Johnson, and Warren Oates decide to give it all up, put on their guns, smile, and head off to take out the federales and meet their fate.

Shane: Brandon De Wilde yells “Shane” and runs after the gunslinger, who rides off into the sunset, leaving the viewer unsure whether his limp arm is a minor or fatal wound. The entire movie is one of unresolved tensions and a certain dignity shown in not giving into the temptations.

High Noon. A worried Gary Cooper accepts that his town has abandonded him, as he walks down main street, sweating and watching the clock as Tex Ritter sings ‘Do not forsake me…” Never understood Howard Hawks simplistic critique of this brilliant movie.

Breaker Morant: Breaker and Handcock sit waiting for their bullets in their head, and Morant yells, “Shoot straight, you bastards! Don’t make a mess of it!”

Das Boot: The submarine somehow blasts to the surface of the Mediterranean, the crew opens the hatch, and races to the Atlantic, as the crew signs, “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.”

The Magnificent Seven. Steve McQueen and Yul Brenner climb on the caisson to drive it up to boot hill—to the cut-in of the famous soundtrack.

Pat Garret and Bill the Kid: Katy Jurado watches Slim Pickens hold his guts in, sitting on the riverbank as he dies to “Knock, knock, knocking on heaven’s door.” Great cinematography. My paternal grandfather, a disabled WWI veteran and cowboy of sorts who spoke in a thick accent, once sold a horse to Slim Pickens in Traver, California (Frank Hanson broke them for a living), and claimed he was the most decent person he had encountered.

Twelve O’clock High: Dean Jagger snaps out of his long flashback of the awful B-17 missions, and rides off on his bike from the weed-filled airfield at Archbury.

The Vikings: the Viking music cuts in as the Norsemen send their fire arrows into the funeral ship taking Kirk Douglas’s body out to sea.

Hombre: Richard Boone shouts out to Paul Newman who has come down the hill on a suicide rescue mission, Mister, you have got a lot of hard bark on you coming’ down here like this.”

The Searchers: the loner John Wayne walks his walk out the door to shadows and music—and a solitary existence after his work is done.

Zulu: the survivors of Rorke’s Drift look up and suddenly see thousands of Zulus chanting on the hilltops—saluting their bravery and their survival.

Give Me a Warren Oates or Jack Palance Any Day

What’s Wrong With Hollywood?

It is more interested in political correctness than profits, as the Iraq War movie bombs attest. Talent is no longer gravitating to Hollywood, but staying put in Europe and Asia. Alternate media, from the Internet to video games to cable television, mean that fewer go to the movies anymore (I went once in the last 12 months). The old bread-and-butter genres—like the Western or the war movie—are either moribund or merely landscapes for political revisionism.

One difference is the steady decline in the quality of male actors. We simply do not have a James Stewart, Burt Lancaster, Henry Fonda, Gregory Peck, Bill Holden, or John Wayne any more, much less brilliant against-the grain actors like a Robert Duvall, Lee Marvin, Jack Palance, or a Yul Brenner, nor character actors like a Slim Pickens or a Ben Johnson.

Today’s he-man actors don’t even sound the same as the old breed. Compare the speech patterns and intonation of Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Spencer Tracey, Henry Fonda or Bill Holden to those of a Sean Penn, Tom Cruise, or Tom Hanks—and there seems to be a new, but separate species of male. The appeal of a Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, or Daniel Day-Lewis is that they sound like, well, the old breed rather than sensitive metrosexuals.

Some of you will sigh: Victor, Victor, actors only reflect the society that produces them. We don’t have a Henry Fonda or Jimmy Stewart because we aren’t Fondas and Stewarts any more.

Perhaps, but what I also don’t understand is that we know that excellent war films—Breaker Morant, Saving Private Ryan, and Das Boot—win over critics and audiences. Why then do we keep seeing snoozers like Redacted, Lions for Lambs, or Stop Loss? Is there that little talent left?

Obama’s Problems—Let Me Count the Ways

I continue to get barrages of furious mail from Obamiacs, full of self-righteousness, and outrage that anyone might dare criticize the next Messiah. So some additional thoughts:

By any standard measure, Democrats should win the November election by a landslide. The dollar is collapsing. Fuel is sky-high. The deficit is too large, the economy stagnant. The war goes on; real estate prices have nosedived. Food is climbing each month. Many of these problems are due to the entry of China and India into the world economy, as hundreds of millions of new consumers are demanding the consumer lifestyle that Americans take for granted, and resources are now bid upon by the entire globe. Nonetheless, the American political tradition mandates that a President gets the credit he doesn’t deserve for good times, and the blame for the bad he didn’t completely earn.

So instead of McCain running even or better against Obama or Clinton, he should be polling 10-15 points behind. Why, then, is McCain doing so well? Much of the answer is the Obama-Clinton cat-fighting; but Obama has also shown an inability to come clean the first time after an embarrassing disclosure or gaffe. By now the public expects instead that more of his serial half-truths will follow ad nauseam.

Rev. Wright. Because Obama never distanced himself from the Rev., the latter will come back to haunt him again and again. Just these last two weeks, examine three ways in which his ghost did so.

Wright himself gave a speech caricaturing the Founding Fathers, and using the old Jefferson-as-pedophile trope, while the cable news channels showed his 10,000 sq. ft. gated estate (a dividend of the hated “black middleclassness”?); second, Obama’s Pennsylvania comments immediately called for (Wright) analogies that Obama is so famous for: if white Middle America “clings” to its religion in fear and in bitterness, what then were the Obamas doing for 20-years at the Wright ministry?; there has been a number of racial “slips”, from Rev. Lee in Los Angeles and his anti-Semitic outbursts to Congressman Geoff Davis’s “That boy’s finger does not need to be on the button.” But in these cases and those to come, Obama has lost the moral high ground of commentary, and instead has in advance offered the cover of contextualization for any future perpetrator. Now anyone can say, “But, I did a lot of good things; and you’re just using snippets; and you’re just playing this over and over again for political purposes; and we all say things like this from time to time; and you don’t understand the milieu in which the insensitivity was uttered.”

Michelle Obama. After the “no pride” and “mean” America speeches and interviews, someone should have given her a written script, lest she trumps Mrs. Kerry’s wacky performance in 2004. But she’s back at it again with her “raise the bar” and “had to pay back those college loans” shrillness. Yet once again, new events always overtake a problem not solved. So this week the 2007 Obama tax returns revealed over $4 million in income. In that context, the same old whine about Ivy-League student loans, summer camp costs, piano lessons, et al. are becoming even more tiring. The Obama campaign’s challenge: can Michelle give a single uplifting speech in which she sounds the theme of America as a land of opportunity—or at least the notion that she is hopeful and confident, given that she received an Ivy-League education, bought a $1.6 million house, and makes over a third of a million dollars in salary? If not, by September she will become a Saturday-Night-Live caricature of the proverbial whiner, and by November a would-be, post-modern First Lady who travels the world explaining to others what’s wrong with the United States.

Jimmy Carter. At first, Obama said Carter’s Hamas’ gambit was none of his business. Then he said Carter should not meet with a group that advocates the destruction of Israel. So why then does Obama wish to meet with Ahmadinejad, whose position is identical to that of the Hamas leadership? In short, he should simply assume that whatever Carter is for, he is against.

Cut out the analogies. They are usually false and such similes only reveal a disturbing pattern of mendacity. Sen. Coburn is not similar to Bill Ayers: the former is a US Senator who offered the idea of a hypothetical death penalty for the abortionist should abortion ever become a capital crime; the latter was an unrepentant terrorist in deed.Obama’s grandmother is not analogous to Rev. Wright: what she says in private is not the same as what Wright declaims in public; suggesting that black males might frighten solitary women has a basis in the fact that black young males have higher than average incarceration rates; there is no basis in fact for Wright’s claims that the US government created the AIDs virus or that Israel and South Africa created a special racial bomb. Wright is not like a typically eccentric “uncle”, since we pick our pastors, not our relatives. Anytime Obama tries to talk in the abstract or evoke similes to excuse a lapse (the “everyone does it” defense), he only makes things worse.

Cut out the use of “they”, as in the yokel “they” who cling to guns, or Michelle’s “they” who raise the bar on her. Who is this “they”? A President leads “us”, not “them”. When the Obamas are in charge, will they be “they”?

But no matter. We are in the realm of prophets and holy men, and we must trust in Lord Hope and God Change that are immune from answering bothersome facts. Trust what I really think, rather than what I say and do, is the new Obama creed.

Our European Candidate

The Real Obama?

The problem with the Obama Marin County speech, inter alia, is that it invites comparison to himself—as all condescension does, being the nursemaid to hypocrisy. So if religion is a crutch for the embittered of Middle America, what is the creepy Rev. Wright for Obama? So the frustrated protectionists of Middle America are “anti-trade”, what then does that mean for the Harvard-educated NAFTA-trashing Obama? If Middle America can distinguish illegal from legal immigration, why can’t Obama in remarks to sophisticated Marin county elites? If jobs “have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them” why then is the Pennsylvania unemployment rate around 5%? And does small-town America cling to “antipathy to people who aren’t like them” any more than does Rev. Wright, Rev. Meeks, Rev. Lee, or all the others that gravitate to Obama, but who are spared the condescending “they” write-off?

I used to think the clumsy partial explanations for Rev. Wright or Michelle Obama’s speeches or the slips like “typical white person” were due to inexperience, and too much trust in the persuasive powers of his own rhetoric. But his inability to simply apologize for the stupid remarks and move on suggests that he may well think he has said nothing wrong. His memoirs prove that he was aware of Wright’s anti-American and anti-white venom; Michelle gave the “pride” speech and expressed similar sentiments in interviews on more than one occasion, and he never really apologized for his Pennsylvania remarks, but simply reissued them in a Bowdlerized form. The problem in his eyes is not the message, but either the message was not quite polished enough, or foolishly was issued in its uncensored form.

In some sense, this is all as it should be. America will have a clear option to vote for someone who has a European view of the United States—as a rather primordial mean and backward society, salvageable only when run by cosmopolitan Ivy-League elites who can somehow stomach their own contempt long enough to delude and get a pass from the yokels they must help.

Where Does that Leave Us?

As I keep saying ad nauseam—about where McGovern was in September 1972, when the initial anti-war, anti-Nixon hysteria led to a messianic nomination that embarrassed Democrats by the fall and led to their destruction.

There are simply too many ticking bombs in the Obama campaign: Rev. Wright was at it again, defaming the Founding Fathers while praising that far better statesman Louis Farrakhan. Michelle will say something outrageous in the next month or so. Rev. Meeks and Rev. Lee are the tips of the iceberg. There will be more quips like ‘typical white person’ and neat explanations for Middle American stupidity.

Why? All one has to do is to read the two Obama memoirs, review the careers of his mother and father and the views they promulgated, wade through the Wright corpus, remember the message that is conveyed in black liberation theology, remember even more the world view that predominates at Harvard Law School and Columbia, collate all that with the benefits that accrue to someone that goes into the industry of racial grievance, remediation, and white guilt and recompense, and, presto, if you didn’t have Barack Obama you would have to invent him.

Note the furor on the left at the latest gaffe. Obama is so close to being nominated and elected! And with that reality, almost all dreams are finally realized: white guilt is alleviated in a stroke, the United States transmogrifies into a hip, revolutionary society in the eyes of those abroad, with entirely new attitudes toward Hamas, the Iranians, Chavez, Castro, and others. We get a young charismatic icon who can wow those abroad. The possibilities are endless!

And yet, and yet—it all can go up in flames by a silly innocent (but also sincere and courageous) remark by Obama, one that will be hyped, snippeted, looped and beat to death by those right-wing zealots and flaks for capitalists, racists, and imperialists. They always “steal” a sure thing with their “Rovian” tactics.

No sense of Sophoclean tragedy here—that Obama has several hamartia, that due to hubris keep growing and growing, until at the opportune moment they bring on nemesis and with it atê.

The Real Tragedy

What is really tragic is that successful African-Americans, who have had it far rougher than the Obamas—a Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas, Tiger Woods—excel in American society and really do transcend race. And yet white elite leftish America senses that such talents don’t need liberals’ permission and ratification, and so don’t do anything for their own left-wing guilt. The elite liberal wants to be told that HE did something for a poor African-American and therefore in recompense deserves to be finally free of guilt—and yet also wants to forever be in a position of condescension and being owed some sort of perennial thanks. With the successful, independent thinking minority race become secondary, and therefore a Thomas or Powell is of little psyshological use to the liberal—or the army in the race industry that they have helped to create.

You can almost see the furor on television when a moderate or conservative African-American analyst offers brilliant commentary and refutes the white liberal, who stammers and sees red, thinking “How dare her! Who does he think he is? After all I did for them, and now they think they can talk to me that way!”

On the Orwellian nature of Obama’s “clarification” I posted this at NRO’s corner:

Why Orwell Matters [Victor Davis Hanson]
Here is what Sen. Obama said:

“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them…And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Here is what Sen. Obama now says he said:

“So I said, ‘Well, you know, when you’re bitter you turn to what you can count on,’ ” he continued. “So people they vote about guns, or they take comfort from their faith and their family and their community. And they get mad about illegal immigrants who are coming over to this country or they get frustrated about, you know, how things are changing. That’s a natural response.”

1. Note how version #1’s “cling” becomes version #2’s “vote about” and “take comfort from”—as the condescending dismissal becomes empathetic understanding.

2. Note how version #1’s “religion” and “antipathy to people who aren’t like them” become version #2’s “faith” and “their family and community” —as fundamentalist xenophobes now become beleaguered folks who band together against the unfairness.

3 Note how version #1’s “anti-immigrant” becomes version #2’s “mad about illegal immigrants” —as the nativist who opposes all immigrants, legal and illegal, now becomes understandably angry only about those coming here illegally.

4. Note how version #1’s “as a way to explain their frustrations” becomes version #2’s “they get frustrated about” as the misguided scape-goaters become those who react understandably to adversity.

5. Note no explanation in version #2 for version #1’s “anti-trade sentiment”—and no wonder since Obama himself is embarrassed that so far he’ has voiced far more “anti-trade sentiment” than those he caricatured.

6. Note how version #1’s “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter” becomes version #2’s “your’e” and “you” and “Thats a natural response”, as the condescending use of the embittered and distant “they” now morphs into a kindred “you” and the quip “not surprising” becomes the sympathetic “natural.”

7. Note how version #1’s idiotic logic that Middle-America has only become religious or pro-gun in the last 25 years as a result of job loss is simply omitted.

8. Note how there is sudddenly no “context” for the landscape of version #1: an elite Bay-area audience that is told stories about those Pennsylvanian gun-toting zealots.

With Obama, the clarifications (cf. the Wright and Michelle contextualizations) are always more interestig than the original lapse.

04/13 08:27 AM

Is There a Pattern Here?

Here we go again with Wright Redux.

By now no one is surprised by what is said by a Rev. Wright (“KKK of A”, Israel is a “dirty word”, etc.) or a Rev. Meeks (“white people” as “slave-masters”), or that they have figured prominently among Obama supporters.

Now the latest is apparently Rev. Eric Lee (“What other kind of Rabbis are there, but Jews?” “The Jews have made money on us in the music business and we are the entertainers, and they are economically enslaving us.’”), one of the designated co-sponsors of a Feb., 2008 “Obama—Get Out and Vote Rally” in Los Angeles, who on April 4th went on a public unhinged anti-Semitic rant about Daphna Ziman, the recipient of the Tom Bradley award.

The point is not to what degree Rev. Lee is directly involved in the Obama campaign (the usual official distancing will follow), but rather three other considerations:

First, once Obama failed to condemn Wright and offered contextualization, the flood gates of extremism were thrown wide open. Now any hate-monger, it seems, can go on a public racist rant, with the expectation that there will be no credible and absolute public condemnation. You see, our potential next President has already weighed in on Rev. Wright’s hate speech by citing his past good works, the commonality of such talk among all our religious figures, the special nature of the black church, and the unfair snippets that are replayed—all of which, of course, will offer the same “context” of mitigation for the Eric Lee hatred. We can imagine the accolades to come in the next few days concerning Lee’s public benefactions.

Second, when one collates what Wright, Meeks, Lee, and Sharpton have said, and then compares those “snippets” and “loops” with the cheery characterization of the unique protocols of the black church by Obama, then one realizes that the public is supposed to accept that African-American pastors are exempt from the sort of no-go speech zones that everyone else rightly accepts. It seems that we are rapidly reaching a sort of scary situation in which the black pastor will say whatever he wishes, no matter how anti-Semitic and racist, and then almost dare anyone to challenge that hatred, knowing that his congregation will support him, African-American intellectuals will contextualize him on television, and politicians like Obama (cf. Hillary’s past hugs of Sharpton) will defend him.

Three, these incidents will only continue until someone of stature in the civil rights community issues a zero-tolerance speech of the sort Obama should have given but failed at. In isolation, each subsequent outburst is explicable; in the aggregate they paint a picture of a deep-seeded racism and hatred that have been encouraged by the absence of any censure—the appeasement that we know so well from the Obama/Wright controversy.

Three weeks ago I wrote, in a number of postings, that we would see more of such Wright-like hatred in response to the widely-praised Obama race speech, which was, in fact, one of the great regressions in civil rights history. I don’t think that anything I have written has received more angry emails in response; but the Lee case, I think, shows that I was correct—and we can expect more still to come in the next six months. I also stand by my second prognosis—that in Obama we are witnessing the slow formation of a McGovern candidacy, a disaster to come that won’t be fully appreciated by now starry-eyed Democrats until September or October when, as in 1972, it will be too late.

Liberalism—a Strange Thing Indeed

Where Art Thou Democrats?

With the release of the Clintons’ combined $109 million post-presidential aggregate income (cf. Hillary’s call for the creation of a poverty czar), we are a long way from clips of Harry Truman strolling around Independence, Missouri in his retirement. John Edwards’ 30,000 sq ft. castle (apparently part of one of his “Two Americas”) is a far cry from the hole in Adlai Stevenson’s shoe. And John Kerry’s various mansions are not quite like Hubert Humphrey’s tract house in the DC suburbs. But then the Rev. Wright’s gated estate and the Obama income aren’t quite like Martin Luther King’s either.

The point? In the general enrichment of the United States over the last quarter-century of globalization, it is hard to ascertain one’s politics by one’s financial circumstances. Being a Democratic leader now does not suggest any greater intimacy with poverty than a Republican’s, or any greater reluctance to indulge in the rarified good life. If anything, the Democratic party (cf. the Obama nexus) is increasingly an alliance of those who want federal entitlements, combined with the elite who are willing to hand them out—precisely because their own financial circumstances mean that tax increases hardly affect their standard of living.

Indeed, whereas indulgences in gambling, sex, or drugs may have embarrassed conservative Republicans, the hypocrisy for Democrats lies in the combination of high living and condemnation of the present economic system. Al Gore leaves a bigger carbon foot-print than most of those he condemns. Rev. Wright disdains the middle class—perhaps because he lives as if he were in the upper-class. The Clintons talk ad nauseam about “fairness,” but weren’t about to stop at $50 million when $100 million could buy so much more.

The Academic Morass

One can collate all the various reasons that have embarrassed the current university—the politically correct curriculum, the relaxation of standards, the political imbalance, the intolerance for diversity of thought, etc. But the one charge that proves the most lethal is this same hypocrisy, or the notion that well-paid tenured professors, with life-time assurances of employment of being on the job only 30 weeks a year, and usually accountable for only 6-12 hours of teaching a week on campus, harangue cash-strapped, working students with sizable loans, about the unfairness of society.

I have never quite encountered an intrinsically less fair institution than the university, at least in liberal terms of egalitarianism and respect for the underclass. A full professor may damn Wal-Mart, but Wal-Mart would never get away with the two-tier system that the university in built upon: the PhD part-timer has no job security, sometimes no benefits, no privileges, and earns usually about 25% of the compensation that is paid to the full professor to teach the identical class.

When one factors in the use of graduate assistants not merely to TA courses, but to teach them in their entirety, then you can appreciate the level of exploitation that the university is built on. And add to the notion that tuition has climbed higher than the annual rate of inflation, and the picture is complete of an institution that is entirely immune from public scrutiny.

I have a modest prediction—just as the bloggers, talk-radio, and cable news began to make irrelevant the grandees at the New York Times and the likes of Dan Rather at CBS, so too online colleges, web-based data archives, and junior colleges are starting to question the notion that one pays $40-50 thousand a year for university training—and often gets biased professors, part-timers and TAs, and a curriculum imbued with popular culture and politically-driven therapeutic courses. Learning and the university are not any longer synonymous, and the divide is ever widening.

The Morality of Environmentalism

The idea that we were going to devote 25% of America’s prime corn acreage to ethanol (while supplying millions of dollars of subsidies to large farms) was always absurd. And now we see the wages in increased prices for meat, rice, soy, corn, and wheat, as food for fuel means less food for eating. At some point someone is going to say that an oil well in a tiny patch in Anwar is a far more humane proposition than taking out hundreds of acres of food land to produce the same amount of energy, or sending millions over to terrorist-sponsoring nations for comparable oil production, or allowing Russia or Nigeria to desecrate planet earth through far less careful protocols of extraction to produce the same amount of petroleum.

Who’s What?

Close your eyes and imagine. You hear one party demand tariffs and an end to free trade. Its supporters talk in terms of racial values and racial separateness, as it leaders calculate the white versus black vote state-by-state. It denounces the idea of protecting a democracy abroad from thugs and terrorists. And it has out-raised its counterpart over 3-1 in cash donations for political campaigning. Its nominating process is Byzantine and ultimately determined by the undemocratic votes of unelected Superdelegates accountable to no one. And this is all deemed “liberal.”

Airline absurdities #3

In two past postings I listed the sort of craziness that follows when you cram dozens of people on transcontinental flights, from cell-phoning in the aisle to smashing two gigantic carry-ons into tiny overhead compartments.

I noticed three others today flying back from New York.

1. The seats are so small and Americans are so large that it is almost impossible to walk down an aisle without hitting a knee or ankle. The stewards have a strange solution: they simply slam their mega-food carts full speed ahead and hardly worry how many bruises they inflict on the way, the theory being that once your foot is run over by a stainless steel cart you won’t put it out there again.

2. Boarding is a joke. A huge crowd assembles in a circle. The various zones are announced, and then everyone feeds his own self-declared line into the fray, from all sides—the duration one has been there waiting mattering little. The poor ticket gatherer sometimes rejects a Zone-4er trying to get into Zone 1, sometimes not. The theory is that the crowd swarms to ensure claim to the rare on-board carry-on space above the seats?

3. I don’t understand the protocol of “lounge” position of the seats. I try never to use it, since the person ahead of me almost destroys my computer or knees when he goes into full “relax” position and leans back, and I wouldn’t wish to do that to those to my rear. I thought, to paraphrase Aristotle about land alienability, that while it is legal, “it is not done” out of deference and manners? True or not?

4. I think airline pilots should be hired by politicians. With a simple mike and ad hoc, they can so spin and reconstruct terrible delays due to mechanical slips, weather, incompetence, or simply traffic that one hardly objects. Usually a calm, slightly southern male voice comes on, notes a sense of frustration at the incompetence of others that has made us all late, and then in JFK-fashion assures us of a terrible, but necessary “10 minute delay” or “15 minute hitch”—and then one hour later we still are not mad when the voice returns to comfort us that “we are now on our way” (10 more minutes follow). These are pros and natural press secretaries—at least far better than a Scott McClellan.

Interesting Times

What’s Real?

There is a mini-gold rush in California. Companies and individuals head to the old Mother Lode in the Sierra Nevada mountains to rework old sites in search for $1000 an once gold. There is a big oil rush to Western Canada and North Dakota where companies are busy discovering new oil and oil shale finds—in hopes of capitalizing on more $100 barrel oil. There is a land rush, as well, as corn and wheat prices have reached historic highs. Food prices are outpacing inflation. We could add booms in copper, steel, aluminum, and nuclear power.

Suddenly the 6-billion-person planet is realizing again that it is not hedge funds, currency trading, or even stocks that make the world run, but food, fuel, and metals. Suddenly the world needs more wildcatters, farmers, and miners and less investment bankers and stock traders. We can’t live in cyberspace, but apparently need to eat, keep warm, and find shelter for a bit longer. A trader and speculator at Bear Stearns won’t keep us fed and fueled, but more likely someone a bit more uncouth and tougher on a tractor or derrick.

The most ostensible reason for this rush for food, fiber, is usually cited as two billion Chinese and Indians, and another billion together in South America and Asia, wanting the same lifestyle as Westerners enjoy and they now are starting to have the money to bid for the resources to make it happen. I hope our children get the message as their high school test scores plummet, college remediation classes spread— and I-pods and DVD sales keep strong.

Lessons (So Far) From the Campaign

While this has been a particularly nasty, long campaign, we have also learned a lot about the current state of America, both bad and good. Let’s start with the Republicans.

We learned no one quite knew, ‘What’s a conservative?’ It was easy to grumble that John McCain—after his McCain-Feingold campaign legislation and McCain-Kennedy immigration reform package—was not. But who was? Gov. Romney had governed Massachusetts from the center. Mike Huckabee was more a populist than a tax-cutter. All evoked Ronald Reagan; none remembered that Reagan has signed amnesty for illegal aliens, increased the size of government, and at times raised taxes.

Is the Republican Party running against, for, or parallel to incumbent President George Bush? Government grew 30% under his watch. We embraced a neo-Wilsonian idealism abroad of fostering democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq, and at home wanted to offer amnesty to illegal aliens. And yet he was tough on terrorism, cut taxes and opposed stem cell research, abortion, gay marriage, and liberal judges. Was he a centrist, moderate, or wayward conservative Republican?

Democrats? Plenty of lessons. Bill Clinton (even before the release of his tax returns) threw away his carefully reconstructed legacy. It took him nearly eight years to recover from impeachment, Monica, and the pardons, by smiling, holstering his pointy finger, suppressing tantrums, touring with George Bush, Sr. and becoming a “citizen of the world.” And now he is back as the old partisan hack, with infantile temper tantrums, trying everything from the race card to the loyal spouse of Hillary to “I suffered all this for you” complex. All and anything to get back in the limelight. Too late, it’s over.

Hillary was proven almost pathological in not being able to tell the truth—odd, since a cornerstone of her campaign was the supposed duplicity and mendacity surrounding Iraq. She has played hardball and so will end the Clintons, for a while at least. Her legacy? By running as she did, she turned all her leftist apologists into Clinton-haters and rewrote the history of the 1990s. But wait—is that fair? Rather her identity campaign was out-identied by race, which always trumps gender preference. Her erstwhile liberal constituents simply dropped her like a stone weight that she had become, an obstacle to their dreams of finally being liked at home and abroad.

There are no more lines anymore?

Obama is a complex figure. Few know anything about him. Michelle and Rev. Wright are now somewhere in the campaign gulag, missing or in limbo. Gone are the fiery, whiney speeches of both.

But the damage has been done. The standing ovation Wright now receives, and the angry defense offered for him by black intellectuals, has sent a chilling message that his speech is not eccentric, extreme, or even embarrassing, but spot-on and “get used to it!”

Obama’s rationalization and contextualization of Rev. Wright is little more than a vast IED that will soon explode on the national scene. Either the Wright corpus will leak out another hate-filled speech that Obama will tsk-tsk, or someone like an Imus or Michael Richards will blow up, and the nation will suddenly stare at Obama for his response. And if he condemns the one-time racist outburst unequivocally, the nation will brand him a hypocrite for not considering contexts—What was the occasion? Had he said this before? Do we understand the genre in which he navigates? Is he from a group that has historical grievances (woman, Asian, Hispanic, Muslim, gay, Native-American)? Don’t we all have such loose-cannons in our family, an uncle, rabbi, or pastor?

That is the racialist legacy of our first transracial candidate, and it’s only a matter of time before the proverbial chickens come home to roost.

His second bequest is the notion that he may be elected President without ever saying what he is for. He does not articulate or defend the policies that are written on his website; I doubt he even reads it. He says he is not a liberal, but outside adjudicators rank him the Senate’s most liberal. He ignores associations, and charges McCarthyism when other don’t—but he is intimate with gay-bashing reverends, racist preachers, and unapologetic 60s terrorists. When I see clips of Palestinians trying to raise money for him, there surely is a clear reason. “Hope and change”, the desire for racial atonement, eloquence and charisma—he hopes all that will be enough.

Recession?

We have not yet had one quarter of negative growth, much less two in succession. Inflation, unemployment and interest rates are low. It’s not yet like the 70s when inflation ran 12%, unemployment 7% and interest 18%, despite cheap gas and housing. I’ve gone to two restaurants this week to (very unscientifically) check consumer habits—they were packed with waiting lines., even though Fresno and Selma are not exactly Carmel and Westchester. Weekend traffic remains brisk. I got a bike part the other day, behind someone buying a $1500 bicycle. Hesitation there is, but it seems mostly psychological rather than a result of massive job losses and liquidity.

Calendar

I and severals others debate at Yale on Thursday and Friday, some of us defending what is known as “hoplite orthodoxy” (war was frequent in ancient Greece, there were rules in theory even if not always followed in hoplite battle, hoplite warfare and the phalanx emerged in the seventh century, there was a push or literal othismos, running to the clash, the breaking of spears, and limited pursuit, there were mesoi, or middle-class agrarians who made up the bulk of those in the phalanxes, etc.) against a new cohort of revisionists who argue: hoplites and phalanxes were late; there was no middle class or much connection with agriculture; no push, no run or collision, no breaking of spears, etc. Much of the revisionism rests on contextualizing the literary evidence we have.

In New York on Monday, I speak on “unclassical education” and what happened to traditional learning in the university. When Obama calls Wright “brilliant” and a “scholar”, you can see what we have wrought.

What Rev.Wright Has Wrought

“Part of what my role in my politics is to get people who don’t normally listen to each other to talk to each other, who [say] crazy things, who are offended by each other, for me to understand them and to maybe help them understand each other…I think he’s saddened by what’s happened, and I told him I feel badly that he has been characterized just in this one way, and people haven’t seen this broader aspect of him,” Obama said.” Barack Obama

I. The Issue Won’t Go Away

Barack Obama is a gifted politician, an eloquent rhetorician, and a savvy politician. He is young and vigorous and offers the Democrats inspiration that they can smash old canards about liberal minority candidates not winning the presidency, or the post-1960 law that a northern liberal Democrat can’t defeat any Republican for President.

That said, it is tragic watching the Wright-Obama mess, and the slow almost deliberate way in which the two, hand-in-glove, are eroding racial relations. I have received a ton of mail about my recent four or five essays on Obama’s Wright dilemma. I would characterize them as mostly negative, some hysterically so, and a few over the top. The calmer ones demand an explanation of why I would write repeatedly about the subject. The answer is simple. Under the guise of utopian brotherhood, Barack Obama is establishing a new relativism in matters of race, and, contrary to what he thinks, Rev. Wright is not the only beneficiary. While it was not Obama’s intent to unleash racial animosity, the net effect of rationalizing Wright will be precisely that. And Americans of all races need to speak out forcefully, clearly—and repeatedly—about this growing madness.

II. Contexts?

Obama’s evocation of “context” is the new/old defense that one suddenly hears to excuse extremist language against whites, moderate African-Americans, Italians, Jews, America, Israel, the WW II generation, etc. as in:

(1) The Wright slurs were just snippets; or
(2) Came in a context of historic oppression; or
(3) Were part of unique protocols of expression in black churches; or
(4) Were more than balanced by prior good works; or
(5) Were just rhetorical flourishes and hardly offensive; or
(6) The right-wing noise machine is using the Wright sound-bites for the political embarrassment of a Democratic candidate rather than due to genuine anger over his racism.

While some of these mitigations in theory might have some merit, what the Wright defenders—most prominently Sen. Obama himself—don’t realize is that the classical liberal tradition always argued that absolute standards trumped relativism and that situational ethics were never an excuse for extremism.

A clear discussion of the dangers of such relative morality is found in Book III of the historian Thucydides. There the violent revolutionaries on ancient Corfu claim they had cause to destroy the framework of the law and natural decency —and then found no such shelter when they in extremis were in need of it.

The Wright apologia is insidiously tearing down the accepted norms of public expression (sermons in a pulpit merchandised on DVDs qualify as the public domain). And the pastor will sorely miss them should he find himself the victim of racist outbursts against his person that will be inevitably excused by his own contextual contortions.

III. We Are All Victims Now

If one were to compare Wright’s present misdemeanors to historical felonies, we should remember that the Klan in the 1860s cited contexts for their violent racism by arguing poor whites were suffering at the hands of scalawags and carpetbaggers. Hitler contextualized German hyper-nationalistic hatred by reference to the unfairness and humiliation of post-WWI treaties. The horrendous treatment of the 19th-century Irish was a central context to the IRA’s rampage against the British. The murderous round-ups by the Bolsheviks were said to be in reaction to the excesses and exploitation of the prior Czarist aristocracy. Every racist or hater always has had a context—usually dredged up from the past.

But in these cases and dozens of others, liberalism countered that such boilerplate rationalization, even if there were in theory some merit, neither enjoyed a limitless shelf-life nor excused subsequent hatred.

IV. Irony Upon Irony

There are other issues of irony. First, the refuge in context has always been the nursemaid of prejudice and racism. Obama himself seemed to grasp that when he condemned his “typical white person” grandmother’s purported racist remarks by rejecting her supposedly irrational fear of black men on the street. His own subtext was that, even if crime statistics might suggest a greater risk to women from young black men than white, there was nevertheless no rational sanction for lumping anonymous black men loosely under the rubric of the suspect. Would that he applied the same absolute standards to Rev. Wright and thereby jettisoned his own extenuating rationalization of “not particularly controversial”, “five to six minutes”, “loops” and “snippets.”

Second, what is needed is not another national sermon on race-relations that inevitably devolves into a shout-fest about slavery and white racism. A true dialogue instead would explore the strange phenomenon of why and how contemporary African-American elites, whether an Al Sharpton, Michelle Obama, Rev. Wright, or Richard Williams (father of Venus and Serena), are often more, rather than less, likely to cite historical grievances, almost in direct proportion to their own success. The Right Honorable Rev. Wright is currently building a 10,000 square foot mansion in a gated suburb of Chicago (at $1.6 million, right up there with Michelle’s house), hardly a reification of his anti-capitalist, anti-black “middle classism.” Presumably from such a sanctuary he will continue to blast “greed” and “white people” and hard-working African-American compromisers deluded by the need for middle-class material reaffirmation.

In addition, such a discussion would touch on the bizarre national exemption given to some African-American churches, talk-show hosts, and entertainers to adopt a sort of racialist vocabulary and narrative that are not accorded to other groups, whether Asian, Hispanic, or poor white, despite their own competing claims on collective historical grievance. African-Americanism is no longer synonymous with unique victim status. An Asian boatperson refugee from Vietnam and survivor of reeducation camps or an impoverished immigrant from central Mexico can make the case that his own life has been far more difficult than anything experienced by Barack Obama or Jeremiah Wright.

V. Brave New World Ahead

Moreover, Rev. Wright, and the reaction to Rev. Wright, in conjunction with the Imus or Michael Richards controversies, has taught us that the sin is not the employment of racist slurs per se, such as the N-word, “ho”, or “garlic noses”, but rather the particular context—or rather the person who voices them.

At some point, a Wright, who grew up in a middle-class household amid a reforming America and prospers in an enlightened United States, must be judged by his own words in the present. And if the public allows these contexts to excuse what he said (and will no doubt say again), then we will have done our part in destroying the entire notion of public censure to deal with racist speech.

That the issue involves a possible next President of the United States has transformed an otherwise irrelevant pastor into an examination of our own contemporary morality. And so far we are flunking that test with flying colors.

Ten Things a Candidate Might Promise

What we want to hear.

1. Surplus! Talk of the notion of surplus, rather than mere budget-balancing. Deficits, and national and foreign debt, are matters of more than statistics. They are barometers of a nation’s self-confidence, its mood and self-image. Percentages of GDP may be the real indicator of debt, but in practical terms Americans think in terms of dollars owed. So we need a candidate not only to outline a balanced budget, but one of surplus that will pay down the debt as well, and by spending cuts rather than tax increases. Do that and much of the American malaise will disappear. Economists might shudder, but imagine no annual deficit, a national surplus of $1 trillion or so, the Social Security Trust Fund in Al Gore’s lockbox, $10 trillion in foreign bonds held by US interests, a dollar at a Euro (yes, we know the trade difficulties that would accrue), and gold at about $300 an ounce.

2. Close the borders. No need now to fight about amnesty, guest workers, deportation, assimilation, etc. All these key issues loom in the future. For now simply reduce the number of illegal arrivals to zero—through border fencing, more patrolling and manpower, employer sanctions, and stern negotiations with Mexico. Then as we squabble and fight, the number of foreign nationals or those not assimilated will begin to shrink in a variety of ways—once it is not growing. We need to take step one, rather than bicker over steps five and six. Who knows—we might just see many state treasuries miraculously recover, and thereby be spared the mantra that illegal aliens ‘really’ are a budget plus for states?

3. Iraq. Explain Iraq in blunt terms—that the first war against Saddam was won, but the second, more important one against radical Islam is still being won in the heart of the caliphate. Here Americans wish to know how many of the enemy we’ve killed, the degree to which other nations have stopped nuclear proliferation (cf. Libya or Dr. Khan), and the degree to which bin Laden and the tactic of suicide bombing have lost popularity. We need to explain to the American people how the tactical success of the surge translates to strategic victory, in the way stabilizing Korea, for example, allowed the powers of capitalism and constitutional government to be unleashed in the south and eventually to make a mockery of the fossilized north. If we can stabilize Iraq, its government and economy might do the same vis a vis Iran or Syria. In any case, we need some strategic vision of what Iraq is supposed to look like in five years and our role in it. A viable prosperous free Iraq is the worst nightmare of al Qaeda—but why and how needs to articulated daily.

4. Race. No more “conversations on race” but simply an end to identity politics. Americans are worn out with racial tribalism. The post-racial candidate Obama recently posed with Bill Richardson to gain a “Latino” endorsement, on the hope apparently that just as African-Americans are supposedly voting 90% for Obama, Hispanics might do likewise on Richardson’s prompt. But the scene was Orwellian. Both Obama and Richardson are elites of mixed ancestry and they just as well might have argued that they were “white” candidates. When either one claims fides to one side of their heritage, they implicitly reject the other. I can’t believe that a naturalized citizen from Oaxaca would vote for the grandee Obama because the grandee Richardson claimed that as an authentic Latino of similar background and perspective he should. And if he were to do that, then we are simply a tribal nation after all.

5. Taxes. Some simplification of the tax code. Americans can’t figure out their taxes. When in their 50s some of them finally make good money, more than 50% go to taxes while they are demonized as “the wealthy”—even as the mega-wealthy either pay on “income” as capital gains at 20%, or are so embedded in corporations that their expenses are taken care of as business deductions. In America, the couple that makes between $150,000-500,000 carries the country and gets less relief than the really well-to-do, but just as much grief and envy from the less well off. Some sort of flat-tax, simple-form is critical to our survival as a nation (I confess I just filled out my taxes and found it much harder than reading the choruses of Aeschylus).

6. Fuel. We don’t need to be “energy independent”—as opposed to cutting our appetite for imported oil by 5-6 million barrels per day. We have the world’s largest coal reserves. There are still a million or two barrels a day to be captured off our coasts and in Alaska. If every other family were to have a second electric commute car plugged into a nuclear-powered electric grid, we could easily accomplish all that rather quickly—until we arrive in 20 years at the so-called big rock candy mountain of hydrogen, flex-fuels, sustainable ethanols, etc. At $108 a barrel Vladimir Putin, Hugo Chavez and the Middle East kleptocracies have the cash to cause us great trouble abroad, at $40 they are merely thugs. Would it help if someone said, “Ok, either drill in Anwar, or cut sales of SUVs by 10% per year,” or “Drill off the coast and build nuclear power plants, or have gas at over $5 a gallon—your choice”?

7. Colleges. We need more transparency in our universities. Why do tax-exempt private institutions use their funds largely to enrich an elite rather than to subsidize student tuitions? Universities avoid taxes, but as non-profits don’t use that saving to help those for whom they exist, but rather spend their fortunes more often subsidizing faculty and administrators. They are no different than those scandalous charities who exist for their apparat. How universities have been able to up their tuitions consistently above the rate of inflation, while exploiting part-time, poorly paid contractual faculty, and masquerading all the while as liberal institutions are among the great mysteries of the modern age. Yet any inquiry into the labyrinth of identity politics, racial quotas, the absence of intellectual diversity or the problems with tenure are met by charges of “McCarthyism” or worse. American universities are rated the world’s best only because of our sciences and engineering—and thus despite, not because of, our failed liberal arts curriculum

8. Health Care. Simply mandate, as in the case of car insurance, that everyone buy catastrophic health care plans, and use health saving accounts for everything else. When we go to K-Mart and see a sign that says “Strep Diagnosis and antibiotics—$50” or ”Check our rates for heart exam and medication” and expect to pay cash up-front out of our saving accounts, while reserving insurance for emergencies and major illnesses, the price of health care will plunge and the patient will become an adult again—rather than rushing to the emergency room at 3AM with the “flu” and no insurance, and less ability or willingness to pay. As someone who has been in emergency rooms four times the last five years for either kidney stones or broken bones, two facts I discovered: more than half don’t have health insurance, and 100% had cell phones, the costs of which per month would nearly pay for catastrophic medical plans. Americans for some reason are outraged that they might pay $3000 in health or drug uninsured costs per year, but hardly object to an extra $2000 in moon roof, rims, or GPS on their new cars. We are Hillary’s proverbial “nation uninsured” with plasma TVs and 4x4 trucks.

9. Infrastructure. The objections to government spending revolve around redistribution, not construction. We need a slash in entitlements and more investment in bigger, better, and more roads, rails, and airports. A highway 101 (note I don’t call it a freeway yet after a half-century, given its suicidal cross-traffic breaks) is a cruel joke. In California, there are still only two major winter routes in and out of the state on an east-west axis. Driving a highway 152 or 41 east-west is circa 1955. Most of our Sierra roadways are wonderful up to the crest, where they suddenly stop in their tracks or devolve into pot-holed paved cattle trails—on the apparent assumption there is not ecological damage driving up the western slope, but would be plenty descending the eastern (or that our forefathers were scoundrels that gave us these beautiful roads to the summit, but we are saints for using them and offering nothing of improvement to our children to get over the other side).

10. National Security. Talk honesty about terror and national security. Why can’t a candidate say—“We will monitor what we think are terrorist calls routed through the US. So do you think this is right, or an abject violation of your privacy?” And instead of “Close Down Gitmo!”, one might say, “We prefer to have about 400 Padilla-like trials instead”. Or we could say, “No water boarding and we will take our chances that what damage a terrorist might do is overshadowed by the damage we will do to our reputation.” I don’t think Americans quite know what they want, but they are very tired of being told the question is black/white, win/lose rather than a mess where each answer poses another question. Treat us like adults, and let the public back a candidate who apprises them of the costs and benefits and risks, instead of either mouthing “police state!” or “a nuke will go off!”

A Look Back at the Obama Week

Does Success Breed Anger?

Michelle Obama has two Ivy League degrees, private school for her children, a third-of-a-million-dollar salary, a large home, and a U.S. Senator as husband and would-be President—and says she has hitherto not been proud of the United States.

Rev. Jeremiah Wright has created a huge following in his Trinity Church, merchandises his lectures, enjoys nationwide recognition, and by all accounts is both well paid and popular—and chants “God Damn America.”

Recently the father of the multimillionaire celebrity tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams, Richard Williams, pronounced, “Well, I’m black and I’m prejudiced, very prejudiced…The white man hated me all my life and I hate him…I’m not even an American, it just so happens that I was born in America.”

Is there a connection between success and furor at the United States? There are many ways to explain these baffling announcements, and those like them in the African-American community, sometimes offered up from the likes of a Harry Belafonte to prominent rap stars: (1) are these sentiments any different from those of a wealthy Michael Moore, Sean Penn, or Tim Robbins? (2) Does one’s racial fides become suspect the more wealthy and successful one becomes—and thus requires periodic proof of authenticity in the mode of easy anti-Americanism? (3) Does the more a Michelle Obama or Richard Williams or Jeremiah Wright succeed in America, the more one’s aspirations for even greater success accelerate at a geometric rather than arithmetic rate, creating expectations that can never be met—and hence scapegoating to explain the frustration?

More Conversations on Race?

I think that it is the last thing we need now in this country. Sadly, I don’t believe Sen. Obama or any other politician has either the wisdom or courage to resolve all of these competing hatreds and the particular contexts that their perpetrators always evoke in self-serving fashion. And it would perhaps be better that they did not even try.

Obama, after all, skipped unpleasant themes that are essential to any discourse on race. First, the United States is not a white/black dichotomy anymore. Millions like Obama himself are biracial. There are as many Asian and Hispanic Americans together as African-Americans. And the result is that racism, being an entirely human phenomenon, is now often the property of a variety of races, who form baffling coalitions that cannot be reduced by Wright to simple white/black formulas.

More important, we are in the fifth decade since Civil Rights legislation. The problem of African-American parity cannot any longer be explained entirely by white racism. Inordinate illegitimacy, drug use, incarceration, high-school drop-out rates, and crime in the African-American community are part of any conversation of race—and of concern to millions of Americans who are not white and have their own extenuating private stories of poverty, bias, and ordeal.

Instead we should simply insist on a universal code of public decency and kindness. Americans should not voice racist sentiments in the public domain, or by our purse and attendance empower those who do. And if we are found wanting in that regard, we will be judged so by absolute standards that are unchanging. And they will not provide exemption by citing the bad that others do, or the good that we think we’ve done in the past, or the extenuating contexts in which our hatred was voiced.

By that measure Sen. Obama’s failure to resign from his church and disassociate from the Rev. Wright and his own inspirational speech to allay racial tensions, caused more problems than they solved.

Such a judgment may seem harsh. Yet it is not mine, but instead can be seen among the people themselves of all races. They remain appalled by Rev. Wright and Obama’s tepid reaction to him—to the point of abandoning a candidate whose eloquence, astuteness, and likeability are otherwise unrivaled in modern political history.

Rice and Thomas

I was suprised that almost no one has commented on Wright’s slurs against Justice Thomas (“Clarence Colon” ) and Secretary Rice (Con-damn-nesia”). Neither Obama nor any prominent African-American voiced outrage. Why? The two most powerful African-Amerians in public service are an apparent embarrassment to their own communities, due to their ties to conservatives. In other words, in the Ward Churchillian mode, one is not necessarily as much African-American by race as by ideology;thus a half-white Obama of African heritage, who experienced far less prejudice than the older, darker, and African-American Thomas, is the more authentic African-American because of his leftist Chicago politics and his patronage of the fiery Wright

This has real repercussions for future racial relations. Since the liberal left has been able to dictate to the African-American population that a particular leftwing philosophy is essential to one’s genuine (as opposed to false) identity.

What is Next?

I think the contentious Democratic race continues to the end, Clinton winning the majority of the remaining states, establishing momentum, claiming she’s won most of the plebiscites (rather than caucuses), and the most important states—and losing the nomination. Then with the renewed Obamomania breaking back out over the summer, at least 25% of Democratic voters will defect to McCain. The ensuing controversy and drama of the election will be the degree to which McCain attempts or does not attempt to distance himself from very effective Wright/Obama infomercials aired by anti-Obama coalitions. And given that Wright is a megalomaniac, who like a moth to a flame, always seeks the light, expect him to sound off once or twice before November, either voicing more hatred of whites and the United States or trying to hint that he and Obama are closer than we think.

A Forgotten Artifact…

of the Wright mess have been the continued progress in Iraq, the dissolution of the anti-war movement, and the radical shift in Democratic rhetoric from “we’ve lost” and “the surge failed” to even victory was not worth the aggegrate costs.

The Obamastrophe

The Me-Campaign

I admire Barack’s Obama rhetorical skills and ability to run against Clinton, Inc., but racial polarization will be the legacy of an Obama campaign that promised to transcend race.

It now routinely counts on winning 90% of the African-American community on the basis of racial affinity against a similar liberal Democratic candidate, who herself in short order in turn relies on racial identity politics. Pennsylvania might prove to be the most polarized election yet, and it’s likely that Obama will reap what he’s sown with his failure to disassociate himself from a racist. The speech, for some reason aimed at solidifying the African-American base and capturing praise in the New York Times, succeeded on those counts as much as it turned off middle-class America, set racial relations backward, and destroyed his campaign.

One legacy of his speech is that 85-year-old Mrs. Madelyn Dunham, once praised for saving the Obama failed household, will be remembered by America for her supposed racist, “made me cringe” sneers that provoked her brilliant grandson’s metamorphosis into a trans-racial messiah. That cruel evocation was symptomatic of a generation that does all it can to claim credit for itself for its perceived successes, and to allot blame to its predecessors for all its present unhappiness.

But then the Obama campaign already had focused on the Obama’s neuroses, their angst about their loans, the cost of their kids’ school and camp, and whether or not Michelle felt ‘pride’ this particular week in the rest of us. The Wright mess and the relativist apology for it are not the only reason for the slide in the polls; America also got tired of the self-indulgence and self-referencing that exceeded even that of the Clintons’, heretofore the past masters of the me-generation.

The only suspense will be how the great healer explains to the nation why in the world white voters outside of the elite suburbs suddenly turned on him in record numbers that cannot be balanced by the record majorities he piles up in African-American communities. Pennsylvania will be the barometer of the reaction to his modified hangout speech this week, and I think he could well lose the state by 20%. And that will send a powerful message that the Democrats have nominated someone who will not or cannot “disown” an abject racist—or at least apply the same standards of condemnation that he once applied to Don Imus when he asked him to resign.

Indeed, as two liberal candidates duke it out, we now matter-of-factly talk of the “white voter” and the “black voter” and the “Latino voter.” The overwhelming majority of black commentators on television who hear the replays of the Wright venom find ways of assuring audiences that what they are hearing is not what they think they are hearing—given that listeners are not experienced with that past grievance or this present custom in the black religious community.

Reporters hunt in vain for a black preacher or members of churches similar to Trinity who find Wright’s racism, anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism abominable. But then why should they when Barack Obama himself has put such hatred in the proper context of ‘everyone does it’—your rabbi, his grandmother, the “corporate culture”, the “Reagan Coalition”, Geraldine Ferraro, and all the other racists who are moral equivalents of Rev. Wright spouting out “God Damn America”, “rich white folks,” the “KKK of A”, “Clarence Colon” and all the other sickness? (In this regard I smiled when the Rev. Sharpton the other night swore that the Rev. Wright had not said anything untoward about “whites” (cf.”KKK of A”) or toward any one person (cf. e.g., “Clarence Colon”, “Condamnesia” Rice).

Giddy elite whites chime in solemn tones that the “speech” was historical and the burden is on the less sensitive than they to appreciate it and fall into line. Meanwhile tens of millions in the middle-class of all races remain appalled. They are puzzled that their intelligence is being insulted—that a would-be President can neither explain his past intimacy with a racist nor promise to disassociate himself from the font of such hatred.

So history will record that the disturbing legacies of the Obama racial paradigm are his twins of moral equivalence and contextualization. That is, once a private remark of a grandmother is elevated to the same sin as a public hate-fest, for purposes of rationalization, or a quip of Geraldine Ferraro is similar to “God Damn America” or the “KKK of A”, then all metrics disappear. The next time someone utters something reprehensible, there will be a chorus that points out a similar tit-for-tat pretext.

And since we are to understand that the peculiar frustrations of blacks and the protocols of expression within in the black church must pardon the effects of the Wright hatred, it unfortunately won’t be long until the next racist outburst is likewise explained away. Imus tried that when he advanced the argument that his past good works and the raunchiness of talk-jock radio made his racist remarks merely crude rather than ill-intended.

That argument rightly failed (as the “old” Obama pointed out at the time); after Wright and Obama, similar ones won’t next time—and the future is sadly going to be wide-open, true to the Wright brand of coarseness and crudity. Thanks to Obama there will be fewer to speak out with any credibility that an absolute standard of decency condemns all forms of racism from anyone under all circumstances.

Obama’s eloquence and his postmodern deftness with false analogies and slick relativism may have ensured both that the super delegates don’t yank his nomination, and that public anger over his falsehoods about what he knew and when is chalked up to racism, but the damage he’s done won’t be undone easily. The Democrats flocked to this Pied Piper and now he’s going to lead them over the proverbial cliff.
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“Oppression Studies”

For Obama’s theories on education, see the following I posted on NRO (before the landmark “speech”):

“The forces of division have started to raise their ugly heads again.”

Today a news item reported on Sen. Obama’s recent take on the current status of education:

“He said schools should do a better job of teaching all students African-American history “because that’s part of American history,” as well as women’s struggle for equality, the history of unions, the role of Hispanics in U.S. and other matters that he suggested aren’t given enough attention.”

“I want us to have a broad-based history” taught in schools, he said, even including more on “the Holocaust as well as other issues of oppression” around the world.”

But anyone familiar with the historical illiteracy of today’s college student understands that more of the “oppression” history that Sen. Obama is advocating is precisely the problem, not the solution. Our high school students already know who Harriet Tubman is, but not U.S. Grant or Shiloh. They have been introduced to Crispus Attucks, but not Alexander Hamilton. They know World War II largely as the Japanese internment and Hiroshima (cf. Reverend Wright on that), but have not a clue about the Bulge or Okinawa or the Munich travesty.

In other words, it is precisely this pick-and-choose therapeutic curriculum of “oppression” history presented as a melodrama of winners (white male Christian capitalists) and losers (women, people of color, the working classes) that has ensured an entire generation of historical illiterates, who can’t distinguish between the profound and trivial, or identify basic names, dates, and places to ground even their politically-correct views. They are told to remember and repeat that Hiroshima is bad, but not why or how it occurred, what were the alternatives, and what were the consequences in a war of bad and worse choices.

Instead the sins innate to mankind—war, oppression, slavery, bias, etc.—are nearly always presented as sins unique to the West in general, or to America in particular. We hear always of commission, never of the remediation, always of our terrible past, never of the pretty awful present that goes on outside the United States.

What we need from a healer at this late date is not advocacy for more gripe-history that tries to portion out equal victim status to various competing constituencies under the guise of multicultural brotherhood, but rather tries, in holistic and inclusive fashion, to explain both the noble and tragic history of the United States, an experiment that was and is not perfect, but still very good and preferable to all the alternatives.

What continues to be so disturbing about the Obama rhetoric is that in the abstract he always talks of utopian brotherhood and idealism, but whenever he devolves into the concrete, we learn that he promotes victimhood, identity politics, and subsidizes both by his presence and his purse racial intolerance and invective.

More disturbing still is that even to mention this disturbing contradiction is to incur the charge of being racist, or—in Obama’s own self-serving formulation—to confess that “the forces of division have started to raise their ugly heads again.”