| Viewing Single Post From: Musings of a Superfluous Man | |
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| Duke parent 2004 | Nov 10 2008, 07:27 AM |
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OF MICE AND CHILDREN The morning following Barack Obama’s victory in the presidential election, I received an e-mail from Frank, a friend a few years older than I. A graduate of an Ivy League university as well as a practicing lawyer for more than forty years, Frank could not contain his joy at the outcome of the vote. His note included these words of celebration from Le Monde columnist Robert Solé: Sorry. No column today. The keyboard is not responding. History is a page being turned. Three words on the screen: "Yes we can." While it is impossible to joke with genocide or disaster, it is equally impossible to joke with an event that makes you weep for joy. The first worldwide good news since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 needs more than a pirouette or an amused wink. At this moment - but for how long ? - we can say with far more conviction than on 11 September 2001 : we are all Americans. My friend is a decent man. Perhaps he knows me well enough to have bet that his touchdown dance would not draw a flag for unsportsmanlike conduct. In this wager, he was correct. But he would undoubtedly prefer drawing that flag to donning the jersey I’ve now set aside for him, a jersey that should be worn every four years by tens of millions of American voters on election day. Maestro, a fanfare, please, for Frank—the newest member of the Mickey Mouse Club. In concluding that innumerable voters are both perpetual children and credulous ignoramuses, I line up behind writers of distinction both here and abroad. In that latter group, Peter Hitchens (at http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2008/11/the-night-we-wa.html) has just put himself on the Obama enemies-list with these bons mots: . . . . . . . Anyone would think we had just elected a hip, skinny and youthful replacement for God, with a plan to modernise Heaven and Hell – or that at the very least John Lennon had come back from the dead. The swooning frenzy over the choice of Barack Obama as President of the United States must be one of the most absurd waves of self-deception and swirling fantasy ever to sweep through an advanced civilisation. At least Mandela-worship – its nearest equivalent – is focused on a man who actually did something. I really don’t see how the Obama devotees can ever in future mock the Moonies, the Scientologists or people who claim to have been abducted in flying saucers. This is a cult like the one which grew up around Princess Diana, bereft of reason and hostile to facts. . . . . . . . And lest anyone not gather what Hitchens really thinks, he adds for good measure: "If you can believe that this undistinguished and conventionally Left-wing machine politician is a sort of secular saviour, then you can believe anything." Closer to home, Gene Healy of the Cato Institute fesses up to remembering “the exact moment I realized there was something horribly wrong with the way Americans view the presidency.” That moment came as he watched the presidential debate of October 16, 1992. On stage were candidates Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, and Ross Perot. From the audience arose “a lefty right out of central casting—a social worker with a ponytail.” This fellow, a Denton Walthall, directed these comments to the three candidates: The focus of my work as a domestic mediator is meeting the needs of the children I work with . . . and not the wants of their parents. And I ask the three of you, how can we, as symbolically the children of the future president, expect the three of you to meet our needs, the needs in housing and in crime and you name it? Healy was appalled by the question, as he was by the failure of the candidates to suggest “even politely—that, hey, buddy, the president is not your mommy or daddy.” His meager consolation came later, as he imagined “how presidents of old might have responded to a grown man burbling about national needs and comparing Americans to children”: Andrew Jackson, who fought dozens of duels in his life, probably would have grabbed Denton by the ponytail and started pistol-whipping him right there on national television. Silent Cal Coolidge, one of our truly great presidents, would have taken a different approach. He would have just sat there, staring coldly at Denton and shaming him through the awkward, awful silence. For Healy, sense and salvation hardly lie with the Republicans and their friends. After all, John McCain “worships Teddy Roosevelt, who is perhaps the most ridiculous and obnoxious figure ever to occupy the Oval Office.” McCain bows to Teddy because he expanded the powers of the presidency and “nourished the soul of a great nation.” But as Healy reminds us, the Framers “never thought of the president as the man who could solve all of your problems, let alone save your soul.” As Alexander Hamilton noted in Federalist # 69, the president has “no particle of spiritual jurisdiction.” Although the American voter today has more ready access to information than ever before, he is increasingly incapable of digesting it and relating it to the principles of limited government that animated the Framers. Indeed, those very principles are unknown to countless Americans. Our schools bear much of the responsibility here for the generations of their charges who have never read a single one of the Federalist Papers--or who think that Franklin Roosevelt saved the republic. The spankings administered by Hitchens and Healy seem almost decorous next to those of their illustrious predecessors. Long before television and the Internet began pumping bilge by the boatload into empty minds, H. L. Mencken railed against the bumptious American politician, more often than not a demagogue “who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.” In his Notes on Democracy from 1926, Mencken elaborated on the pols and the idiots with a ferocity that, alas, could have been applied with cogency to the election just concluded: What [the masses] want principally are safety and security. They want to be delivered from the bugaboos that ride them. They want to be soothed with mellifluous words. They want heroes to worship. They want the rough entertainment suitable to their simple minds. All of these things they want so badly that they are willing to sacrifice everything else in order to get them. The science of politics under democracy consists in trading with them, i. e., in hoodwinking and swindling them. In return for what they want, or for the mere appearance of what they want, they yield up what the politician wants, and what the enterprising minorities behind him want. The bargaining is conducted to the tune of affecting rhetoric, with music by the choir, but it is as simple and sordid at bottom as the sale of a mule. It lies quite outside the bounds of honour, and even of common decency. It is a combat between jackals and jackasses. It is the master transaction of democratic states. Do not expect, dear reader, to hear anytime soon from any national political personage the following announcement: “Children must now leave the pool.” 
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| Musings of a Superfluous Man · DUKE LACROSSE - Liestoppers | |
12:55 PM Nov 29
