Obama, the Show

By Jonah Goldbeg

Saturday, February 07, 2015

I sometimes think Obama thinks he’s in an episode of The West Wing or some other Aaron Sorkin version of reality where the facts always line up to preconceived liberal narratives. In most “sophisticated” Hollywood movies and TV shows about politics, the enemy is usually us. The real threat isn’t some external foe, but the fearsome spirit of Joseph McCarthy that the external enemy might arouse in us. The heroic statesman is the figure who steps forward and points out our own hypocrisy and ignorance; the one who tells us to come to our senses. In The West Wing, President Josiah Bartlet always stepped in to settle the arguments by pointing out our own sins, or what the Bible really says, or what the Constitution really means. HBO’s The Newsroom, a show set two years in the past just so Sorkin has enough time to come up with clever comebacks to today’s events, begins with Will McAvoy, a news anchor, going on a tear about how America is not the greatest country in the world.

It all sounds very smart. It’s like Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness” in that it often sounds true. But one could also call it “smartyness” because the real goal is to sound smart. One of the reasons I cannot stand Sorkin’s oeuvre is that it is all written so smugly. Every argument ends as if the liberal should simply drop the microphone and proclaim, “Bartlet out.” But it only really works if you either assume great ignorance on the part of the audience or if the audience already agrees with whatever is being said.

It’s amazing to me how much Obama’s speeches depend on, and benefit from, the same things. The solipsism of the liberal egghead press is partly to blame. Obama goes out there and literally persuades no one about anything, but since he says exactly what a liberal president is supposed to say, they think it’s all brilliant soaring oratory and bold statesmanship.

What Obama shares with the collective authors of the liberal narrative is a deep and abiding suspicion that the American people are bigots, that they don’t understand their self-interest as well as liberal elites do, that America/Americans has/have no right to judge others given our own sins, and that we should never overreact to anything that makes liberals feel uncomfortable. Oh, you can overreact as much as you want to whatever liberals are overreacting to. In fact, that is encouraged. But if you get excited about something the folks at MSNBC think is weird or scary or could lead to the McCarthy poltergeist will-o’-the-wisping through the Upper West Side of Manhattan or Park Slope, then it’s a scary time here in America. 

Which brings me to the crusades, the Inquisition, and slavery. My column from yesterday touches on a lot of this. And if you read The Tyranny of Clichés, you know I’ve dedicated a lot of pages to the Inquisition(s), the Crusades, and the Catholic Church, so I won’t rehash it here. (You can read an excerpt of my crusades chapter here.)

But I simply find it amazing — and amazingly pathetic — that the president felt the need to chide a room full of religiously literate people about how they shouldn’t get too judgey about what the Islamic State is doing right now because Christians did bad things almost 1,000 years ago.

Every single thing about this is ridiculous, and it would still be ridiculous if all of Obama’s assumptions about the Crusades, the Inquisition, slavery, and Christianity were accurate (they’re not). I feel like Obama went out and talked at length about a ten-horned unicorn and I’m forced to explain that (1) unicorns only have one horn, what you’re talking about would be a decicorn and (2) unicorns don’t frick’n exist either.

The Islamic State is crucifying people right now. Romans crucified people over 2,000 years ago. Does this mean that Italians can’t criticize them? How is it that the sins of Christianity are eternal but the sins of Muslim fanatics right now aren’t even Muslim? The Islamic State is enslaving people right now. America had slaves 150 years ago. And, speaking of non-sequiturs, vests have no sleeves.

I’ve gotten a lot of criticism about my column yesterday, nearly all of it whiny nonsense. But there is one fair jab. Obama did go on to criticize the Islamic State and Islamic extremism, even if he refused to call it Islamic. I didn’t mention that in my column.

True enough. But that also misses the point. Obama can’t help himself. He just can’t give a full-throated denunciation of Islamic extremism, or even a tepid one, without doing his creased-pants Niehbur schtick. But look: This isn’t complicated. It’s really not. If you have to clear your throat for five minutes about the skeletons in our closet before you can feel comfortable denouncing barbarians who bury little boys alive and then go on to rape their little sisters, that’s is your hang-up, man. I’ve got my faults, all reasonable people can agree, but I don’t feel compelled to list them before I denounce rapists and murderers; “Hey man, I know, I drink too much scotch and I’m sometimes needlessly sarcastic, but you really shouldn’t rape little girls or set people on fire.”

That would be only half as crazy as what Obama is claiming here. Because in the above analogy, they’re my faults. Meanwhile, Obama is checking-off crimes from nearly 1,000 years ago to make it clear he’s not on a high horse. The more apposite analogy would be “Hey man, I know, my great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather was a real prick, so I’m not being preachy. But you really shouldn’t crucify people.”

​MERE CHRISTIANITY

Which brings me to Christianity. Again as I say, Christianity, or rather Christians over the course of history, aren’t without sin. I know this from many sources, but one of the biggest ones is from Christians themselves. They know they’re sinners and they say so, quite a bit actually. And I’ve never met a serious or informed Christian who’s denied that Christians have made mistakes, sometimes grave mistakes, in the past. Indeed, this isn’t even a remotely hard admission for any Christian I have ever met.

But what really drives me crazy is how people get the causation all wrong. Here’s how I put it in the Tyranny of Clichés:

As a fairly secular Jew I cannot and will not speak to the theological questions, in part because I do not want to. But mostly because I do not have to. The core problem with those who glibly invoke one cliché after another about the evils of organized religion and Catholicism is that they betray the progressive tendency to look back on the last two thousand years and see the Catholic Church — and Christianity generally — as holding back humanity from progress, reason, and enlightenment. They fault the Church for not knowing what could not have been known yet and for being too slow to accept new discoveries that only seem obvious to us with the benefit of hindsight. It’s an odd attack from people who boast of their skepticism and yet condemn the Church for being rationally skeptical about scientific breakthroughs. In short, they look at the tide of secularism and modernity as proof that the Church was an anchor. I put it to you that it was more of sail. Nearly everything we revere about modernity and progress — education, the rule of law, charity, decency, the notion of the universal rights of man, and reason were advanced by the Church for most of the last two thousand years. Yes, compared to the ideal imagined by atheists and secularists this sounds like madness. But isn’t the greater madness to make a real force for good the enemy because the forces of self-anointed perfection claim to have some glorious blueprint for a flawless world sitting on a desk somewhere? It is a Whiggish and childish luxury to compare the past — or even the present — to a utopian standard. Of course there was corruption, cruelty, and hypocrisy within the Church — because the Church is a human institution. Its dark hypocrisies are the backdrop that allow us to see the luminance of the standard they have, on occasion, fallen short of. The Catholic Church was a spiritual beacon lighting the way forward compared to the world lit only by fire outside the Church doors.

ANGLO-AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM & SLAVERY

Forget the Inquisition and the Crusades for a moment. Take slavery. It was an evil institution. It will always remain a stain on America’s honor.

But here’s the thing. America put an end to it at an enormous price. Moreover, slavery was a constant on every continent for thousands of years. Looking at America in the context of the great tide of human events, the remarkable thing isn’t that we had slaves, it’s that we ended slavery. We ended slavery because deep in the founding principles of this country were deeply Christian — or, if you prefer, Judeo-Christian — principles that eventually couldn’t be reconciled with slavery.

Obviously, the better example is Britain. The British had slaves, as did countless other societies and civilizations stretching off to the dawn of man. What is remarkable is that, thanks to a Christian renaissance, they decided to not only abolish slavery in their own lands, but to impose their values on others. The British got on a very high horse, thank God, and they had the courage to act on their sense of moral superiority.

As should we. It’s entirely fair to argue that we shouldn’t get on a high horse with regard to how the French or the Canadians do things, no matter how much fun it may be. But the Islamic State? The Mullahs of Iran? Boko Haram? Please, we’re so much better than them by any objective moral or intellectual standard it’s insulting to be asked to make the case. That doesn’t mean we don’t have faults, but it does mean our faults are entirely irrelevant and one should not bring up such irrelevancies for fear that reasonable people will hear false equivalencies.

Unless, of course, you’re the kind of person who isn’t comfortable with the idea that America or the West can be wholly, completely, unapologetically on the right side of a major question of human affairs, particularly when that conviction gives you license to kill evil people. Such confidence makes some people very uncomfortable and so they start scanning the horizon for a topic they can drag into their comfort zone. “Enough about how bad they are,” they seem to be saying, “can’t we get back to how bad we are? Where’s Joe McCarthy when we need him!?”

THE HORSE EQUIVOCATOR

One last thing about this high horse. There’s a kind of Escher drawing pas de deux of asininity here because Obama is telling people not to get on a high horse from the saddle of a much higher horse. I mean is there a man in public life who preaches from a higher equine altitude than this guy? This is the guy who explained that Hillary Clinton’s supporters in the Democratic primary in Pennsylvania were backward yokels bitterly clinging to their sky god and boom sticks.

What offends Obama isn’t sanctimony, judgmentalism, or arrogance; it’s competition. What rankles him is when people refuse to genuflect to the trite pieties he unspools as if they were spun from gold.