Wednesday, May 23, 2012
When Barack Obama two years ago joked at the White House
Correspondents’ Dinner that potential suitors of his two daughters might have
to deal with Predator drones (“But boys, don’t get any ideas. Two words for
you: Predator drones. You will never see it coming.”), the liberal crowd
roared. That failed macabre joke would have earned George W. Bush a week of
headline condemnation from the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Obama, in fact, has increased those
judge/jury/executioner targeted assassinations tenfold during his tenure. But
apparently, the combination of Obama’s postracial “cool” and the video-game
nature of such airborne death — no CNN clips of charred torsos and smoldering
legs, no prisoners with their ACLU lawyers in Guantanamo, no Seymour Hersh
exposé on a Waziristan granny who was vaporized for being too near her
terrorist-suspect grandson, no American losses for Code Pink and Moveon.org to
demonstrate against — earned general exemption for that new liberal way of war.
What bothered us about the Predator strikes in 2006–2008 was not the kills per
se but the uncool nature of twangy Texan George Bush, who ordered them.
Last week 28-year-old, $17 billion–rich, jeans-clad Mark
Zuckerberg took Wall Street for a multibillion-dollar ride, making his original
buddies instant billionaires and his loyal larger circle millionaires. Note
that there is no Occupy Wall Street protest at Facebook headquarters. Just as
there are none at Oprah’s house or the residence of Leonardo DiCaprio, despite
their take each year of between $50 and $100 million.
No one has suggested that Hollywood lower movie-ticket
prices by asking Johnny Depp or Jennifer Lopez to walk away with $10 or $20
million less a year. Steve Jobs found ways to dodge taxes comparable to those
deployed by any Wall Street fatcat, but he was iPad cool, and so his iPhone
billions were exempt from the Occupy nonsense. Cool capitalists are immune from
the neo-Marxist critique of capitalism — a racket that $40 billion–rich Warren
Buffett learned late in life, but well enough, with the “Buffett Rule.”
We simply don’t mind that Google and Amazon rake in
billions, but we despise Exxon and Archer Daniels Midland for doing the same.
It is not that we need social networking and Internet searches more than food
and fuel, but rather that we have the impression that cool zillionaires in
flipflops are good while uncool ones in wingtips are quite bad.
I am sure that the tax lawyers who help Richard Branson
and Mick Jagger are no less skilled at shorting the Treasury than those who
work for Rush Limbaugh, but the profits of the former are okay while the
latter’s are obscene. Limbaugh is a misogynist for using the word “slut” and
apologizing for it; Bill Maher is a feminist for using slurs we cannot print
and for which he did not apologize. One is uncool, the other very cool — as was
a cynical and sarcastic David Letterman, who implied that the 14-year-old
daughter of Sarah Palin had snuck into the Yankees’ dugout for quick sex with
Alex Rodriquez.
The power of cool is evident also in politics. State
quite correctly that you can see Russia from parts of Alaska, and you are ditzy
white-trash Sarah from Wasilla; state falsely that Franklin Roosevelt addressed
the nation on television in 1929, and you are just “good ol’ Joe Biden.”
John Kerry’s second married-into fortune probably dwarfs
the one that Mitt Romney made himself, perhaps by a factor of ten. While we
heard in 2012 that Romney wanted a car elevator in one of his many houses, we
never heard much in 2004 of presidential candidate Kerry’s various mansions,
boats, or assorted playthings, or how he proved to be a keen investor as a
senator helping to set U.S. financial policy.
Kerry, you see, was cool. He windsurfed and wore spandex
as he cycled, and found his exemption by championing the poor he rarely saw.
The same was true of John Edwards of “Two Americas” fame. Do we now recall how
he ran to the left of both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, despite the $500
haircuts and the self-indulgent mansion, replete with “John’s room,” a hideaway
with all sorts of adolescent toys? Edwards, remember, earned those spoils by
charming juries in his smarmy style, and nearly destroyed the practice of
obstetrics in North Carolina through his flurry of malpractice suits. No
matter, Edwards was liberal, Kennedyesque, and cool — and he earned prophylaxis
in the manner of JFK himself, of whose White House orgies we did not learn
until a half-century later. Likewise we have been taught that there is no
“power imbalance” or “insidious asymmetry” when a “mentor” has sexual relations
with his young intern — as long as he is a feminist like Bill Clinton.
What, then, exactly, is this cool that allows you to earn
whatever you like without censure, and then to spend it as you please without
fear of public scorn?
It would seem that the disconnect is liberal politics,
the coin by which one buys a sort of medieval indulgence from liberal
gatekeepers in the media, academia, the arts, and the foundations that permits
one to continue the pursuit and enjoyment of lucre and to indulge the baser
appetites without harassment — in the manner that the medieval moneylender or
sexual zealot still got to heaven by buying marble for the cash-strapped
cathedral. That $20 billion–rich George Soros was a money speculator who almost
destroyed the small depositors of the Bank of England and was convicted in
France of insider trading matters not at all: Without his roulette-wheel
billions we would not have Media Matters. Jon Corzine of MF Global cannot
explain what he did with $1.2 billion of other people’s money. But there will
never be a “Corzine Law.”
Who cares what George Clooney makes an hour, or how
exactly his close friends can afford to pony up for a $40,000-a-plate dinner —
when the takings will help Barack Obama feed the children? If Halliburton were
wise, it would buy the shut-down Solyndra plant, make solar panels at a loss,
and write the cost off as a lobbying and public-relations expense.
So cool is not obtained just through liberal politics.
Images and intent are critical too. The stuffy tea-party crowd looks like the
plain suburban guys and gals who sell us houses, cars, and insurance. And so,
of course, they must be racist, even though their demonstrations give no proof
of any such fetish. Their only oddity would seem to be a certain desire to
ensure that they leave no litter in their wake for poorer custodians to clean
up.
But Occupy Wall Street? That movement has produced thugs,
thieves, rapists, would-be bombers, rioters, and street urchins who pollute
their surroundings and cause mayhem. They act pre-modern but earn no scorn
because they are cool – they sport a sort of elite grunge that suggests that
the environmental-studies major at Brown empathizes with those poor for whom
grime is not makeup.
Identity is key here. In general, to win exemption from
the left-wing critique of America, the affluent must construct cool identities
as far distant as possible from the white Christian heterosexual male, who is
most culpable for creating our present affluence from ill-gotten gains. The multimillionaire
Elizabeth Warren and her husband make nearly $1 million a year. They live in a
home beyond the reach of 99 percent of America. And she may well have
plagiarized and been dishonest about her own heritage. No matter — Warren
washed away both her privilege and her sins by reinventing herself as a
“Cherokee” who fights Wall Street oppressors.
So too Barack Obama. It was Obama himself, not the fringe
Birthers, who first made the case that the president was born in Kenya — not
because he was, but because to say now and then that he was added an exotic
touch of cool to Barack Hussein Obama — a cool that a Barry Dunham born in
Honolulu and prepped at Punahou would have lacked. Poor George Zimmerman — had
he only called himself Jorge Zimmerman he might not have been written off as a
“white Hispanic” vigilante.
Network news anchors anguished over whether George W.
Bush had tried coke while thousands of African-Americans languished in jail for
doing the same — but they snored when Barack Obama boasted that he had done
that and much more. Push down a gay student fifty years ago as a teen, and if
you are straitlaced Mitt Romney then you always were a homophobe; push away a
little girl decades ago, and if you are Barack Hussein Obama, then you were struggling
with identity and coming of age.
In short, millions of well-off Americans, from the
entering college student to the full professor of law, from the billionaire
thief to the president of the United States himself, endlessly chase cool.
And why would they not? Cool is now America’s holy grail
that allows the elite and the rich not just to pursue and enjoy nice things,
but to damn others who do the same.
No comments:
Post a Comment