Deconstructing Barry

(And the Myth of White Racism)

She had seen May Day parades when people were still enthusiastic or did their best to feign enthusiasm…As a group approached the reviewing stand, even the most blasé faces would beam with dazzling smiles, as if trying to prove they were properly joyful, or, more precisely, in proper agreement.
(…)
Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.
–Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

You know he talk so hip he’s twistin’ my melon man…
Don’t you know he can make you forget you’re the man?
–Happy Mondays, Step On

The appeal of Barack Obama is best understood as kitsch.

The Obama campaign, as any, is more a work of art than of argument. It is (present tense, for it continues) a narrative blend of hagiography, historical fiction, mythology and propaganda. Like any work of art it may blend various genres and themes, but it is ultimately of one specific type. All political movements rely more or less on kitsch, but the Obama campaign, stripped to its essence, is kitsch.

This phenomenon-as-political movement is a masterwork of improvisational, interactive environmental theatre, with the electorate as its participatory audience. But a political campaign is no mere work of fancy or fabrication. When power is the end for which the narrative is the means, one cannot refuse his role in the play, even in opposition. We are all players now in Barry’s melodrama.

What do I mean herein by “kitsch”? Not the common usage that has rendered the word little more than a synonym for “inferior.” Nor any of the only slightly narrower meanings of unsophisticated, anachronistic, culturally irrelevant or crude. I do not mean merely that it is sentimental; though sentiment is its active ingredient. I refer specifically to that self-conscious and obliquely self-referential aspect of kitsch; of kitsch as the celebration of a given sentiment as its own end and justification, as an ennobling thing it its own right. The quote above captures it better than I can. In that part of Kundera’s book devoted to the subject he notes how ubiquitous and permanent kitsch is, how inseparable it is from the whole of culture and human existence. The author was not only outlining kitsch’s role in the totalitarian movement that looms grey and dour over his story, but also conceding the kitsch element in that story.

Content does not make kitsch; kitsch is in the nature of our relationship to content. Kitsch is the self-indulgent celebration of one’s capacity to feel and emote, through the deliberate suppression of doubt, nuance and skepticism. Kitsch is not the artist saying “behold this truth”, but the audience prompted to declare, “behold our love of truth.” Kitsch is the saccharine film soundtrack that drops in before anything has actually occurred, cuing us to emotion. For the acolytes of the Obama campaign the kitsch element can be summed up as, “behold the depth of our feeling.”

This is kitsch’s appeal, directly to our vanity. Even as we seem to be drowning in the language of its opposite and mortal enemy, irony, kitsch is everywhere. Even our gangsta rappers indulge in kitsch; they are among the worst offenders. The unfortunate rap theme written for Barack Obama was a prime example of kitsch, by a familiar practitioner thereof.

Kitsch’s prevalence and permanence are so great that unravelling it from the totality of our experience is daunting, and most will (perhaps with more wisdom than this author) come to sigh that it is “everywhere” before moving on to more productive pursuits. This is unfortunate, because that very same prevalence is precisely why an understanding of kitsch is so important. There is no sensible “anti” kitsch position, as if we will eradicate the ineradicable. It would be unfortunate if one political faction or other were to successfully fashion it into an adjectival anchor to weigh down their adversaries, creating a new term of calumny to go with “fascist”, “communist”, “racist”, et cetera ad nauseum. But we’re well served in better understanding it, so as to better understand ourselves and that vast area of effective human behavior that is neither wholly rational nor studiously moral, but desperately and sometimes dangerously emotional.

What makes kitsch bad art, its unearned catharsis, makes it the most effective demagogy. It requires nothing of us other than acquiescence to the sentiment. Because kitsch is the willed absence of doubt, it acts as a neatly closed emotional system, impervious to skepticism and hostile to introspection–herein lies its political genius. Through propaganda, kitsch arouses revolutionary ardor and imposes totalitarian control. Kitsch fires up the rabble and cows the mass.

Those few of us left capable of viewing the Obama phenomenon with detachment will recognize its seductive offer of an easy, celebratory catharsis, its encouragement and indulgence of the individual’s sense of moral superiority. The effectiveness of this appeal is manifest in the adoring crowds, in the deliberately incurious and uncritical appreciation of the candidate and now president-elect that continues. In the candidate’s unspoken collusion with the media to equate his personal ambition with the civil rights movement itself and to subsequently equate any rejection of the candidate’s race-based appeal with a rejection of his race, holding criticism of the campaign guilty of bigotry until deemed innocent.

In the wake of electoral victory, the rhetorical purges would begin within hours. One such story in the New York Times portrayed Southern white support for John McCain not as merely as evidence of the declining influence of these voters–but assigned a reverse cause-and-effect, ascribing their declining influence (as a sort of punishment) to their resistance to Barack Obama.
They were presented with candidate brandishing his race as a value–a moral superiority–in and of itself. They rejected the race-based candidate, voting more than usual for the nationalist Republican over the liberal Democrat. The charge then follows that they’ve rejected Obama entirely because he’s black (not because he runs, almost entirely, as black; needless to say, any automatic support accruing to Obama for his race is, curiously, anti-racist); of course, this is then fed back into the system, as proof of the desperate need of the candidate, to rout once and for all this “racism”.

In the case of Obama, kitsch appeal operates at a heightened advantage, cuing a long-conditioned response in whites inclined toward critical self-examination and conspicuous expressions of tolerance. This practice has always come with an expectation of change, of eventual improvement in relations among the races generally, between blacks and whites specifically. This subconscious expectation of a final conclusion is borne of our familiarity with the cinematic arc of film.

But after decades of unprecedented state action and an opening up of the culture none would have imagined possible, the foreseen idyll of perfect racial equality and its ensuing harmony (the kitsch promise), has faded into the harsh reality of a stubborn inequality. Inequality increasingly reveals itself as the predictable result of a society unprecedented in both its fairness and ethnic diversity.

But this cannot be said. Even as blacks gain cultural influence disproportionate to their numbers but not talents, they continue to lag in the professions and business pursuits. Meanwhile, other minority groups advance disproportionately as well up through the ranks of society. The rate of change, the opening up of opportunity in a society that not long was as segregated as the rest of the world remains to this day is nothing short of revolutionary. There is no historical precedent for America; yet, the more liberal, the more meritocratic our society, the deeper the resentment of inequality–and, contrary to our hoary egalitarian assumptions, we can expect increasing material inequality as the result of increasing equal opportunity. We have the unfortunate task of reconciling a diverse and restive population to this humiliating reality. Strategies are subconsciously developed.

The historical reality and present romance of black suffering in America assigns a moral premium to blackness; not unrelated, the general appetite for and fascination with black culture assigns it a cultural premium. Routinely, a thing is dismissed as inferior or, yes, derided as kitsch, if it is deemed too “white.” All of this serves to heighten, in the projecting mind of the audience, the candidate’s natural gifts, and assign others not in evidence, such as wisdom.
Whether he understands it or not, it was in pursuit of these structural advantages that Barack Obama abandoned his origins and embarked on his anthropological excursion into the heart of African America.

Instinctively the ambitious sense the path of power. The dirty little open secret of Obama’s personal narrative is the “multicultural” candidate’s lack of curiosity in things beyond the narrow and provincial Ghetto Gatsby identity he’s crafted for himself. Quite contrary to the attempts of some to portray the man as foreign and Muslim because of his time in Indonesia, what’s truly striking about that is his apparent–or deliberate–indifference to the experience.

It was there that he and his feminist mother were exposed to a stark counter-example to the West; it was there, not in the United States, that he was bullied for being different. It was from there that he was sent home to take advantage of the vastly superior opportunities and advantages of home and, eventually, to entrance earnest white liberals relating the emotional torment induced in him by the outrages inflicted on a Black Man in America: someone asked to touch his hair, his grandmother feared an intimidating black beggar (who “could have been my brother” he narrates, impervious to the irony that this man for whom he imagines a comfortably remote brotherhood is assaulting an actual relative, for whom the young Barack apparently felt not a moment’s protectiveness). For Barack Obama, Indonesia and Hawaii look great on a resume, but their experience and contrasts aren’t of much practical use.

In light of this, his attitude toward conservative whites, his charges of narrow bigotry and provincialism, would be found laughably oblivious if not outrageous placed in their proper context, but one gets the impression he doesn’t truly understand the nature of his metamorphosis, of his ambition and rise. The language, for him as well as his acolytes, is too seductive; its effect too successful; its rewards, he has brilliantly demonstrated, only as limited as the ambition and energy that harness it.

Examining the phenomenon one is struck–and perhaps reassured–at how unexceptional, outside of ambition, is that which we know of Barack Obama. Having deliberately veiled himself in a cliche, welcoming the projection onto him of the neuroses and hopes of a restive nation, he is like the void in the eye of the storm.

In this environment the convention that structural disadvantages and white attitudes account for the lack of black success in business and the professions, for disproportionate rates of incarceration and poverty, for the whole host of ills for which each white individually is daily hectored to feel responsibility, as a feature of collective guilt, is not merely unsupportable, it’s absurd.

The more evident this becomes the more fiercely defended the taboo against questioning collective guilt as a model for race relations. The absence of comprehensive societal equality requires ever more fanciful explanations; ever greater expressions of commitment to equality of results are required of public servants; ever greater denunciations of a nation that has taken historically unprecedented actions to achieve it. This is the pathological behavior of a neurotic society. The nation yearns for a climax, a final act of absolution. It stubbornly recedes the more we strive for it. Thus Barack.

To maintain the taboo, any resentment of this must be equated with bigotry; skeptics are ostracized and deprived of status. Propagandists distinguish themselves fashioning rationales and assigning blame for a distressing reality. In America the civil rights movement has made the familiar trek from revolution to totalitarianism. Kitsch has sustained it on that journey.

Of course in this cultural milieu, adopting the collective guilt model so regularly and inelegantly expressed in such arenas as Barack Obama’s former long-time church, “whiteness” as an ineradicable sin in itself is a necessity. The candidate himself stated as much clearly when describing slavery as “America’s original sin”, as if the institution originated and continues here, rather than in Africa. He also means, more to the point, “cardinal sin”. There is no final absolution for white America, just perpetual contrition. The fact that this immodest and wildly presumptuous phrase isn’t controversial in the least, acquiesced to by silent consensus, is cultural sanction itself. The Caucasian holds second class moral status. Whiteness is the “human stain” of a stigmatized identity. This is too valuable a bludgeon for those who wield it (ironically they are mostly white elites, mobilizing minority resentment to bring their white opponents to heel) to be surrendered without a fight.

Ritual condescension of offended identity groups is a requirement of polite society and public stature. To escape a censure that grows harsher the more hollow the condescension becomes, whites individually and as a group place a premium on the achievements of prominent blacks, who must be found and promoted to assuage and take advantage of this. This is the environment Barack Obama burst upon with his 2004 speech to the Democratic national convention.

Barack Obama effortlessly assumes the mantle of grievance for the greatest sins of the nation–slavery, segregation, disenfranchisement. But, contrary to the habitual assumption, his unique personal history gives him not a greater understanding of this history, having neither the typical black American nor typical white American experience, but a lesser understanding. Barack Obama stood outside of this epic dynamic, looking on with envy. His choice of a fabricated identity on one side of it should disabuse us of the assumed inherent misery and unfairness imposed upon black America–no one is so fortunate to be born an American than an African American. There is no cachet in being white.

For Barack, American race relations is a cherished romance that became one with his considerable ambition. This romance will not be sacrificed now. Observers silently take solace in the assumed falsity of his black struggle. About the time of the election a prominent political reporter could be found on a television interview program, with perhaps unintentional frankness, trumpeting Obama as an African American without the African American experience and, more to the point, anger; touting, to put it crudely, his inauthentic blackness.

For a candidate to arrive on the scene as a sort of prefabricated historical figure, for his ascension to be defined as an act of justice and absolution; in light of the grand myth of the civil rights movement in America and the sheer power of this narrative–the wonder of Barack Obama is not that he is here, but that it has taken this long for him to arrive.

The news reports following the candidate’s triumph proclaimed the fall of a “barrier.” But the barrier had faded long ago–in fact it was over ten years ago the nation was so transfixed by an African American public figure, Colin Powell, for the very same reasons it’s now enamored of Barack Obama, that at one point it seemed he could have chosen between the presidential candidacy of either political party–this before his political affiliation was confirmed. In fact, the automatic goodwill bestowed on that man has still not dissipated, despite the fact his personal career of mediocrity in powerful positions has only been interrupted by his implication in the misinformation campaign preceding the Iraq war.
Barack Obama did not “smash a barrier”, as the headlines trumpeted. Barack Obama was carried along by a powerful force to where he is. Barack Obama was inevitable.

We’re probably fortunate it is this man, and not some other–probably because he seems decent enough, and relatively free of corruption for an ambitious politician; this of course we’ve taken on faith, as part of the deal. He may even prove capable.

It is not entirely an earnest if misguided aspiration to justice from which arises this absurdity; it is also a form of chauvinism. It comes from the cloistered sense that history begins with and is confined to America. This truncated historical context is accompanied by a shrinking of the present’s context, ignoring the example of every other nation in the world that must grapple with the challenges of diverse populations and tattered histories. The libel compares the nation to an idyll that has never existed, not to the world that is and has been; it’s a further outrage that the imagined idyll is born of a distinctly Western and Judeo-Christian concept of equality before God, regardless of race. The charge that “America is a racist country” is meaningless placed outside of its proper context: as compared with what other country? Likewise the hoary fashion and shallow conceit condemning Western culture as a whole. In America we alternate between ignorance and disdain not only for the past but for the world beyond our borders–even, or especially, those who routinely condemn America for its racism.

Contrary to the mass conceit of the Obama campaign, it is more this chauvinism and not a post-racial, global consciousness upon which Barack Obama depends. Escaping us is the irony of this moral bludgeon being wielded by a man far more likely to be descended from Kenyan (as well as European) slave traders than black American slaves. Again, there is no environmental history of blackness for Barack to call upon, only the birthright bestowed by his transitory father; only, in the end, the color of his skin and the features of his face. Barack Obama is a white liberal living out the exquisite dream of actually being black. More relevantly, he is an ambitious politician taking advantage of it.

To be successful a campaign must identify itself with and within a single, all-encompassing myth. The McCain campaign attempted to make itself one with the myth of national greatness, through the personal narrative of heroism of its candidate. The Obama campaign, more successfully, made itself one with the myth of civil rights. Ultimately the point is to present the candidate as the living human embodiment of Providence. In a post-religious age, politics and celebrity fill the evangelistic void. Personality captures power and familiar interests and factions advance behind this wedge.

By myth I do not mean illusion. Fundamental truths are revealed to us through the myths we hold dear. The fundamental truths our candidates sought to co-opt this year were the necessity of love of country in one instance, the justice of equality before the law in the other. But through the vulgarizing exploitation of the ambitious, a nation’s founding mythology becomes flattery and demagogy, mere caricature. The fundamental parent truths underlying our mythology are difficult, humbling and, perhaps most relevant to this, limiting. Through political expedience our founding myths are becoming overladen with contradiction, no longer recognizable to us.

The disappointments in store will reveal to us that a nation is not sustained by wealth, or power, or even democratic process, but the binding power of a fundamental truth that, unlike the flattery of kitsch, demands something of us and guarantees nothing. What we may be witnessing now is our degenerate end as a people that brandishes as a weapon a mythology it no longer believes.

Sunday Sermon

Post formerly in this space (of 11/22, “Deconstructing Barry”) removed by author (update 12/1: reprinted above). Thanks to the commenters here and the few over at AmCon (where it has also been deleted, by me) who got it and were intelligent and fair in either criticism or praise. To the style-critics, I’ll let you know when I tire of my usual shtick and start crafting punchy two-paragraph missives on what Blogopundit said in reaction to Instablogger’s critique of Snarkette’s refutation of Blogopundit’s…etc. I’ll have to get over my shyness and revulsion regarding circle-jerks, both real and analogous.

The blog environment is wonderful in a lot of ways; in others it is profoundly depressing. It’s beyond me how any idea, small or large, ingenious or insipid, being instantly pounced on by the glib attentions of the mob, will survive in the future. Everyone checking in with their opinion, mistaking the right to it with the need for it; as if everything is to be put to an immediate referendum, and thus quickly approved or dispensed with. My God, how we disdain doubt and cower before the merest hint of contradiction. Stray, dissident thoughts are pounced on like fumbles, disappearing beneath the desperate mass of converging egos. I’m rambling, but suffice it to say: not everything has to be neat, practical, clear-cut and promptly resolved. That first impulse is always less thoughtful than what comes in time. But we all behave now as if time is nearly out–even though, or perhaps because, technological innovation gives us more and more of it. This leisure of time and freedom is new to humanity, and we sometimes embarrass ourselves. We need to start acting like we’ve been in the end zone before.

The transitory nature of the blog post, and the rapid, coalescing migrations of the internet’s vast audience, with its here-today gone-tomorrow attentions, makes for writing both too glib and too plain. Above all it’s introduced an element of desperation into our discourse. The blogosphere resembles a depression-era dance marathon.

It’s also created a whole new reader; he who mistakes his lack of concentration for authorial incoherence, his shortened attention span for your long-windedness, his inflexible and unsubtle intellect for conviction. Do not humor him. Taunt him mercilessly until he shapes up or ships out for whatever dull, reassuring confines he may find among his like-minded.
As for the piece that was here originally, its only real flaw was in being over-edited, not overwritten; it was about half as long as it should have been. My sin was self-consciously editing it down, and cross-posting it where it didn’t fit. It will be back, longer and bellicose as ever. What can I say? If you want someone to write for you the way a military unit marches, the blogosphere is overrun with this sort of thing. Several such authors are two clicks out by way of the blogroll to the right. But if this trend keeps up we’ll all be communicating in monosyllabic grunts before long. I understand the elegance of minimalism in fiction, but there is no real place for it in the essay. That’s not to say that a piece shouldn’t be properly lean; this isn’t the same thing.

As for military drill, I’ve done it. It has a certain appeal, especially for someone who’s always felt awkward and ill-suited for society. “One big heel” our drill instructor used to enthuse, compelling us to stay in step. Sometimes we marched right up onto the sealed concrete between two barracks, and that big heel would echo off all of that cool, flat stone about us in a positively intoxicating fashion. You don’t need me to tell you how dangerous a thing that is, how much it says about us. The converse of safety in numbers is danger outside of them.

Every profession, George Bernard Shaw said, is a conspiracy against the laity. Likewise, every organization is a conspiracy against the individual. Conspiracies we engage in against our autonomy. Necessary, but no less destructive (not always necessary, and rarely as necessary as any proposal to organize shrieks). If there’s to be any benefit for you and I in this gut-wrenching levelling of culture and society that now passes for modernity, this mindless, ongoing demolition project for which respectable opinion is forever scrambling to fashion rationales and contrive pretexts, it should be that we claim our rights as individual men in relation to the State and all those quasi-states and aspiring tyrannies–“movements”, organizations, activists. If we can’t keep them from pulling the rug of tradition and custom out from under us, if we can’t keep from doing it to ourselves in our infinite capacity for greed and blindness, at least perhaps we can resist the new hierarchies and oppressions the ambitious are fashioning for us. This is a salvage operation.

Never lament the state of this or that “movement”; it’s all a farce, a ruse for organizing us rubes. I have a few colorful suggestions for your various “movements.”

Contrary to our instinct, the result of democratization is not necessarily liberating. Quite the opposite. First ideas will be given no time or room to breathe, then they will simply start expiring in the womb. There is no true or lasting wisdom in mass opinion or consensus, just coercion of one sort or another. Only in solitude and reflection can one see beneath the sometimes mesmerizing reflection on the surface, to the murk beneath. There’s no guarantee of anything but satisfaction at having had the courage to look.
“Strike me, but listen!” Thucydides is said to have cried to a general who had raised his hand in outrage at an inconvenient truth. Well, curse yourself for doing it, but look.

Like mom used to say, having two ears and only one mouth means one should listen twice as much as he speaks; we all need to read more and write less.

Forgotten But Not Gone

He gives orders
which no one hears
King’s hat fits over their ears…
–Eno

I’m still standing, yeah, yeah, yeah…
–Elton John

You’re enjoying your day
Everything’s going your way
Then along comes Debbie Downer
–The Debbie Downer Theme

January 20 is a long way off. A certain overly proud man still stalks the halls in the White House, self-conscious under the august gazes of those imposing portraits on the wall (oh to know the content of the imaginary dialogues), ruefully retracing his dizzying rise and humiliating fall. We’ve all been there, when trying to fathom failure or heartbreak: obsessively revisiting events in one’s mind over and over again, searching for some gap, some logical inconsistency that will reveal reality anew, altered and made compliant, or at least bearable. Altogether an unhealthy process when done in isolation.

The Family’s hired narrative help in the media have been reassuring, or threatening, us that he cares not a whit for how we appraise him, confident in history’s judgement. Well, no sober perspective regarding popular opinion was on display when we were treated to a glib, cinema-age version of a Roman triumph, vulgarized to the point of sacrilege, stripped of solemnity and verging on camp. When I recall him prancing about for the cameras on a warship, decked out in battle gear with strategically placed sock, I shudder, plotting on the graph in my mind the egomaniacal crash that should follow such–let’s call it irrational exuberance.
So let’s hope that those still in power, whether nursing wounds or hangovers this morning, recuperate quickly and heed the admonition that nothing is so dangerous as a humiliated lame-duck president preparing to hand over power to the opposition. Perhaps there was at least one timely Debbie Downer at Obama HQ last night. At this point I’d like to say something optimistic. Which would no doubt prompt Debbie to offer, “has anyone seen Dick Cheney lately?”

John McCain’s Base Base

Perhaps you‘ve seen it, the near-precise moment when John McCain lost control of his campaign. The scene is a now familiar one, the bogus “town-hall meeting.” He’s passing the microphone around like a decrepit Donahue, standing before a woman who starts by saying she “can’t trust” Obama; McCain is nodding along, intimately engaged for the moment in manipulating the neurotic angst that is the dwindling lifeblood of his campaign. About the time she says her fear is due to what she’s been reading, a look of worry creases his trademark frown of condescending concern; he’s contemplating preemptively snatching the microphone back from her, when she lays it on him: Obama is “an Arab”. She’s managed to confuse her slander (assuming there isn‘t an “Obama is an Arab” email careening about the internet), but it matters not.

Taking back the microphone, still in the affectedly somber tones we usually hear dulling the senator’s continual call to panic (before the more immediate economic panic swamped it along with his campaign) he informs his disappointed supporter that while he‘s spent the last several months denouncing as irresponsible peace-mongering Barack Obama‘s marginal departure from a foreign policy of serial occupations determined by the requirements of AIPAC and the defense industry, no, the man is in fact human, and all that entails. The crowd lets fly with various notes of despair, all but booing their candidate.

It was about as close to sympathetic as our too-proud would-be president has come in a long time, but it’s the anonymous woman, now a momentary punchline, who deserves our compassion (in taking a break from writing this I find her being parodied on television as “Crazy McCain Campaign Lady”). Her only sins are a lack of sophistication and an abiding faith in a political party. In taking advantage of this that party has terrorized her with the serial bogeys of Iraqi WMD, Iranian nuclear weapons, treasonous Democrats and now an Islamic Manchurian Candidate, with only resolute John McCain and his platoon of lobbyists and ideologues standing athwart these allied furies, united solely but unalterably in their Hatred of America and Her Freedoms.

If you’re a severe enough white liberal, witnessing the exchange you probably experienced that familiar rush of ethno-masochistic ecstasy at the welcome sight of white Republican “bigotry”, producing an odd combination of gloating and dismay (think of the old joke about the conflicted lover: “Don’t! Stop! Don‘t…stop! Don‘t stop! Don’t Stop!”). Whatever internal psychic tension is produced in the breasts of our liberal brethren by this fetish, this conspicuous self-abnegation, is probably one of the great unexamined social effects of our time.

Indeed, soon after, on the subject of the increasingly hysterical mood of Republican rallies, Chris Matthews sounded as dismayed as the McCain crowd as he all but demanded that Pat Buchanan personally reign in the cranks. One wonders how Mr. Matthews, having participated in the fear mongering preceding the Iraq War of which this woman‘s neurosis is the continuing effect, plans on enforcing his edict. Judging by the volume of his indignation he’s going to defend his offended sensibilities by deluging us all with spittle. Watching the man snap one more tether to reality, assuming it can’t be long before someone relieves him of his microphone, I console myself that the affair is not without its entertainments and compensations.

If you’re just paleo enough to find the preceding mostly inoffensive, and you saw the video above, you probably cringed. You may be tempted to sue the liberals for peace, if they‘ll only protect you from the barbarian hordes that have sacked and taken over the Republican Party. GOP, we hardly knew ye.

If you’re a supporter of John McCain you’re not reading this, but lapsing into carbon monoxide induced unconsciousness in a sealed garage, sitting in an idling Cadillac Escalade with a “Drill Here, Drill Now” bumper-sticker. I confess I’m finding it difficult to feel sorry for you. Nonetheless: don’t do it; you’ve got your whole life ahead of you; things are never as bad as they seem; this is not the answer. And so forth and so on.

The town hall format is proving disastrous for McCain, who has been deluded into thinking close quarters suit him–probably by the many reporters who’ve flung their skirts overhead at the first wink of we-think-alike-don’t-we-won’t-you-accompany-me-on-my-way-to-the-White House complicity. The candidate, his disdain for common folk barely concealed beneath his deliberately sedate (or sedated) style, cuts an unappealing and alien figure among the living and breathing. One imagines there are none on his staff willing to brave the volcanic vanity of their boss by suggesting, however gently, that he‘d be better served parking his doddering personage behind a podium.

But McCain willingly crawled into the coffin his own supporters are now nailing shut, when he declared the Jeremiah Wright controversy off limits. In so doing he left the issue to his more rabid supporters, and a deliberately oblivious media. Despite his independent pose, John McCain strictly observes the rules of engagement as set by his former “base” in the press. That base deserted him almost immediately, ironically as a requirement of the same politically correct rules of engagement that McCain dutifully observed by forfeiting the Wright controversy. This Maverick never goes below the hard deck, and would probably report someone who did to the Commanding Officer (before heading off to the officer‘s club to brag about how he told the Old Man off).

Thus, even as he stokes fear of Islamists, Iranians, Russians, the Chinese, terrorist cells, suitcase bombs, and Barack Obama’s suspect commitment to the defense of America, he cannot bring himself to exploit what should be his opponent’s biggest weakness, his political mentoring by the buffoonish crypto-segregationist Jeremiah Wright. Why Wright is off limits has never really been explained. In a more open and honest media environment, the Wright controversy would have played out by now. Of course, McCain was likely conceding a battle he rightly figured he could only lose. This all delineates for us some of the extent of Barack Obama’s considerable advantage as the potential First Black President.

Few remain to lament the lost McCain administration. One is tempted to welcome any route by which this dangerous man is shunted off to retirement. But, despite our culture of personality and ambition, the citizenry’s appreciation of reality is always far more important than the candidates who spend much of their time seeking to obscure it.

Understanding Jeremiah Wright, and the need of his flock of upwardly mobile black professionals–of which Barack Obama has fashioned himself into a prime psychological exemplar–to identify themselves as oppressed despite the obvious blessings of their citizenship in America and their participation in Western, “white” culture (indeed, perhaps because of this) is a fascinating and exigent question. But it is forever obscured beneath a rigorously limited discourse that says, in effect, that no claim against white America can be baseless–legitimacy is conferred in the making of the charge.

In the years ahead, as unprecedented demographic shifts occur, perhaps simultaneous with the painful economic contraction attendant upon the decline of American power, the preservation of the Republic will largely depend on whether or not we can reconcile a diverse population to the inequality that results from equal opportunity. This may be a longshot; indeed the respectable consensus holds that inequality in wealth and influence is necessarily a result of unequal opportunity. Another more severe consensus is forming as well, as the first becomes less and less tenable, as the idealism of the sixties resolves increasingly in bitter disillusion: that equality in wealth and influence apportioned by demography is the goal itself, and that equality of opportunity is either a delusion or the very instrument of oppression.

Despite the promise of cross-racial unity, Barack Obama’s career, his very identity, depends upon casting in relief and exploiting the most problematic division in American politics. You have to hand it to him; he spends his formative political years mastering the narrative of guilty America’s permanent racial division, and then he offers himself as its solution. Whether he truly believes in either is suspect. An Obama presidency will be welcome opportunity to give the lie to the demagogues of various degrees who see in the resentment toward white America (and perhaps soon other market dominant minorities) an inexhaustible vein of political power and patronage.

None of this is to paint Barack Obama as a extremist. He too is a highly conventional politician and thinker. Even if he’s the closet radical his detractors make him out to be, there is little significant change he, or any president, can effect. The process of candidates surrendering certain ideals as the price of admission to higher office isn’t without its benefits. As Obama’s demonstrated himself of superior temperament to his rival (no great boast, yes) I say, bring him on, delusions and all. Barack Obama has promised to unite us, largely by rephrasing conservative critiques of liberal excess and returning them to his opponents as high-sounding but meaningless sops disguising the unoriginality of his boilerplate. His presidency will be a welcome opportunity to call his bluff. Perhaps we can finally have that “conversation” about race the liberals are always talking about–that is to say they’ll finally allow their counterparts to get a word in edgewise.

The elite consensus is that black nationalist radicalism, as evinced by Jeremiah Wright, is a harmless indulgence to be humored only when it can‘t be ignored. Media and political elites do not take the Wrights of the world seriously, and with some good reason. These demagogues typically content themselves with shake downs and patronage. They are prone to internecine squabbling and a Big Man mentality that can only be discomforting to the studiously tolerant–that is to say deliberately ignorant–observer. Liberals can’t say outright that Jeremiah Wright and his ilk are ultimately irrelevant jokes; this upsets a certain carefully calculated pose that always assigns a premium to both the intellectual achievements of blacks and charges of white racism.

McCain left the radicalism of Barack Obama’s political coming of age to the nut cases behind the “Obama isn’t a U.S. citizen” emails. Now he’s lost his audience. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. But the result of an ambitious but untested melancholic backing into the presidency by stepping effortlessly into America’s great romance of racial atonement at a moment of profound national doubt, well, that should have happened to another country.

Election 2008: Bile vs. Guile

Regarding George Will’s welcome broadside on the Straight-Jacket Express that Leon Hadar brought up over at the AmCon blog, even when Will’s right, he’s wrong:

It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency.

Some of us believe McCain is clearly unsuited for the presidency and no more due to “moralism”, boiling or tepid, than to “bottomless” certitude, unless we’re referring to a morality that places John McCain’s advancement above all else and the ensuing certainty that anyone and anything getting in its way are fair game. It’s ambition unrestrained by a modest or measured temperament, and the subsequent lack of morality, preachy or otherwise, that McCain displays, despite the fatuous theme of “service”.

I’m reminded of Will misreading the minor controversy regarding Jim Webb’s snub of President Bush at a White House reception for newly elected congressman. You’ll remember Webb tried to avoid shaking hands with the president, only to be confronted and asked, “how’s your boy?” Will, perhaps due to his own basic decency, was quaintly clueless as to what had actually happened:

…disregarding many hard things Webb had said about him during the campaign, [President Bush] asked a civil and caring question, as one parent to another.

Will mistook the hostility of the president’s disingenuous question, which was nothing more than an attempt to force an intransigent Webb to submit to the protocol of their power arrangement–to knuckle under–sharpening his attack with the indecency of bringing the man’s son (who, it shouldn’t be lost on us, was carrying a rifle and facing peril under the command of President Bush) into it. It was about as civil and caring as a mafia boss asking a recalcitrant union leader “how’s the family?”

We should be able to discount personality, seeing as it’s not only subjective but subject to the artistic mythologizing so nauseatingly on display in the current campaign. We’d all like to think our mature and advanced democracy guards against the vanity and jealousies of petty men–with the outsized power of the executive branch, make that one petty man–but the Bush administration is depressing evidence that personality and temperament are as operative as ever. And this year we choose between aged choleric and youthful melancholic. I don’t know what is more depressing, the dismal choice or the fact that the latter is clearly superior. If irreconcilable misanthropes had slogans mine would be: Refuse to Choose.

The Falling Sky’s the Limit

It’s remarkable how shameless our political leaders are regarding their state of hysteria (of course it wouldn’t be hysteria if it wasn’t without shame and decorum) and not a little disconcerting, suggesting (but by no means proving) that their collective panic is warranted. Last Thursday’s convocation of politicians eager to impress upon the public how terrified they were (and by inference how oblivious they, tasked with overseeing the financial system, had been previously) was downright surreal. The sight of political leaders so disoriented they could barely prevaricate and dissemble inspires a mixture of revulsion and pathos, like seeing a turtle out of its shell. Less remarkable and more familiar is their lack of contrition regarding their decades of collusion that precipitated the crisis. First the combination of comedy and corruption that are the presidential tickets, the spectacle of the two mystified candidates scrambling to present competing facsimiles of leaderly competence, mimicking outrage while drawing on advisers complicit up to their elbows in the debacle, and now this, confirms it: the American political system has entered its late decadent phase.

The habitually ironic language Senator Schumer used to describe the reaction to Ben Bernanke’s fire and brimstone sermon can speak for the bewilderment of the nation as a whole: “History was sort of hanging over it, like this was a moment.” Sort of like a moment. Perhaps when it all hits the fan in earnest we can at least reclaim spoken language from its flaccid state. I do hope when I’m tied to a stake by some feral, post-apocalyptic tribe I don’t turn to see a fellow victim lamenting that it’s all kind of like something, really.

Some of the language used brings to mind another incidence of grandstanding hysterics, that precipitating the Iraq war. This crisis is real, of course, and the content of this tragedy less fictional, but the form is the same: a sudden threat is identified, extraordinary actions and powers are deemed necessary post haste. Drastic measures will be accomplished through the mixture of cowardice and corruption that is sometimes called bipartisanship; they will likely be difficult to unwind, if not permanent. Questioning the consensus is all but forbidden. Now, as then, the details are too grim for the tender public: Senators Dodd, Schumer, et al, would not disclose them Friday. Back then it was classified information that couldn’t be freely circulated; I could tell you but then I’d have to kill you. Now it’s I could tell you but it’d probably kill you.

You’ll recall the “crisis” precipitating the war also featured administration appointees briefing Congressional leaders and leaving no dry seat in the room. It makes me wonder what sort of prop Paulson might have used, a la Powell brandishing his vial of mock anthrax at the UN. Perhaps a toilet brush, to terrify them with the prospect of poverty and its indignities. As with the war, consequences for the powerful and responsible few will be deferred indefinitely, but will be immediate for the nation’s integrity, prestige and pocketbook. The war may have not been necessary (though this question, and its moral implications, have been flushed down a memory hole capped with the illusion of “success”–as if we’ve gone through it all to deliver Iraq and its oil wealth to an Iranian-allied Shi’ite government) but even so it can be seen as a consequence of an extravagant society overly dependent on oil–just as the collapse of our financial system is a consequence of our dependence on borrowed money.

But however dislocated our leaders are from their constituents, it’s still on us, the citizenry. The consequences of being a debtor nation have been well known, and one doesn’t have to understand the complexities of credit default swaps or tranches to understand he can’t borrow his way to wealth unless he plans on dying deep in debt. Our short-sightedness as a nation is the aggregate of our desperate decadence as individuals; no one seems to care anymore what will become of the world they leave behind (even as they flail away against mortality in the gym and in the plastic surgeon’s office, as if they’re going to live forever, and forever young). I’m sure someone has already used the metaphor, but as a nation we are a gambler on a losing streak, doubling down.

And out here in the provinces it all still seems so remote; nothing appears to have changed. Football was played on Sunday. The electronic menagerie of celebrity eavesdropping, reality television, the glib and soulless sitcoms; it all looks exactly the same. People are going about their business, carefree. Funny, I don’t feel insolvent. But I am getting a sinking feeling: who, after all, is going to pay for this all? I’m not talking about taxpayers, either, but our foreign would-be benefactors. Foreign money is already looking for other places to go and the economy, coming down from the false stimulation of the last tax rebate scheme, can be expected to produce lower tax receipts; two sides of a vice. Meanwhile, the bill grows; foreign investment firms with offices and the attendant exposure in the US are clamoring for inclusion in the bottomless bailout plan. Another busy-work stimulus scheme with which incumbents hope to arm themselves for the coming electoral carnage is in the works.

There is one possible consolation: an attack upon Iran is probably off the table in the oval office. Of course, with certain messianic factions that don’t concern themselves primarily with the health and viability of the US economy and the order that depends on it, and the fact that Israel and Iran themselves might not care that our schedule doesn’t permit another war at the moment, having their own ideas and requirements, makes me feel a little like one of those trembling pols I started out here making fun of.