By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, December 22, 2015
Race makes people crazy, but often not in the way you’d
expect. A nation watched wide-eyed as Melissa Harris-Perry of MSNBC complained
that the Star Wars franchise was racist because the major villain is “black.”
Darth Vader is black in the sense that Johnny Cash or Ben Roethlisberger or
certain figures from Arthurian legend are “black” — white guys in black outfits
— so people kept waiting for Harris-Perry, “America’s foremost public
intellectual,” to crack and let us know that she was joking. But she wasn’t joking.
One cannot imagine what she’d make of that Adolf
Hitler/Darth Vader episode of “Epic Rap Battles of History,” in which the Nazi
dismisses the Sith and his off-brand Stormtroopers: “You leading an army of
white men? Disgraceful.” And, of course, in the latest installment, The Force Awakens, one of those white
men turns out to have the black face of English actor John Boyega.
This isn’t the sort of thing that drives people nuts: If
you’re breaking down the hidden racial significance of Darth Vader’s black
armor, you’re already there.
The American people, who are generally more tolerant,
more sensible, and more wry than is appreciated, have learned to laugh at that
sort of thing. A popular image among AR-15 enthusiasts shows the
fearsome-looking rifle over the caption: “It’s because I’m black, isn’t it?”
The same joke has been made about coal, certain cats that provoke a superstitious
response, Anas rubripes, dark
T-shirts, and one very mean-looking 1987 Buick Grand National.
Barack Obama doesn’t get the joke.
In a pre-vacation interview with NPR, the president
argued that (as the New York Times
decodes the message) “some of the scorn directed at him personally stems from
the fact that he is the first African American to hold the White House.” I.e,
“It’s because I’m black, isn’t it?”
This is kind of clever, in a way. The president says that
much of the unhappiness with his administration is “pretty specific to me, and
who I am and my background,” which is slippery in that by saying it’s about him, he’s really saying it’s about his
critics, and their bigotry and prejudice. “It’s not me, it’s you.”
This is, needless to say, intellectual dishonesty, which
is Barack Obama’s specialty. Yes, there are racists in the world, and they are
engaged in politics, mainly in the form of basement-dwelling losers with
Dungeons & Dragons avatars oinking about on Twitter. They are a significant
consideration if you are Donald Trump’s psephological engineers. They are not
much of a real factor if you are Barack Obama wondering why you haven’t been
celebrated like one of the men on Mount Rushmore.
(Not counting Teddy Roosevelt, of course: Who on Earth
thinks: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and, uh . . . that guy who might be the
guy who came up with the Maxwell House Coffee motto?)
The reason President Obama has not been hailed as the
equal of President Washington, President Jefferson, or President Lincoln is . .
. kind of obvious.
The sage marketing wisdom is: “Under-promise and
over-deliver.” That was hardly an option for Obama, who promised, quite
literally (literally, Mr. Vice
President!), a sea change. When you are billing yourself as the fulfillment of
Hegelian capital-H history, as not only a redeemer of nations but a healer of
planets, it gets a little awkward when you have to spend most of your
administration explaining why the economy still kind of sucks and the secretary
of state feels the need to lie about everything from the murder of diplomatic
personnel to the fact that she’s storing state secrets in the crapper. If you
had bought shares in Obama As Advertised and then had to sell them at the price
of Obama In Fact, you’d know what it felt like to be running a
mortgage-derivative fund back in 2008.
If you’re the Right, then you can enjoy the pessimist’s
pleasure: Sure, things have gone terribly, terribly wrong – exactly as we expected! If you’re the
Left, Obama’s not looking too great, either: The guy fought an illegal and
counterproductive war in the Middle East (“to the shores of Tripoli!”), didn’t
close Gitmo, didn’t end “Too Big to Fail,” and just reinvaded Iraq. Ask the
victims of Boko Haram if this is the moment the planet started to heal.
“It’s because I’m black, isn’t it?”
No, Mr. President. It’s a couple of other things. The
first of which is that here it is on the very verge of 2016, President Obama’s
last full year in office, and he has not figured out that there is more to the
job than giving speeches. The other thing is: To the extent that he does try to
do the rest of the job, he isn’t very good at it. Building a better future?
Team Obama can’t build a website. President Squarespace probably would have
been an improvement in some respects.
The really maddening thing, though, is that President
Obama thinks the reason he isn’t perceived as being especially good at his job
is that we yokels aren’t smart enough to understand how spectacularly
spectacular he is. Barack Obama is a man almost entirely incapable of
self-criticism, and in the NPR interview, he repeated one of his favorite
claims: He has had trouble with public opinion because he didn’t explain his
awesome ideas well enough. That’s a very politic way of saying: “These rubes
don’t get it.”
Politicians find themselves crippled by sex scandals
rather than by financial scandals because almost everybody understands sex but
almost nobody understands futures trading. (Bill’s loss is Hillary’s capital
gain.) Everybody understands racism, too, and all people of good will reject
it, which is what makes “It’s because I’m black, isn’t it?” so powerful as
rhetoric. But it isn’t all-powerful.
It’s too late to break up with Barack Obama. But if we
did, we’d have to tell the truth: “It’s not us. It’s you.”
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