Barack Obama and the Politics of Character

I just finished watching the Democratic National Convention. I went to the New York Times website, and what was the headline? "Obama Takes Aim at Bush and McCain With Forceful Call to Change America." I hate American media. All of it. From Keith Olbermann and Sean Hannity to the New York Times and the New York Post. It's like they don't even watch the events! It's like they don't even listen! They're like those speech teachers you had in high school who would count "ums" and miss that you were speaking about something you really cared about. They don't know what journalism is. They've become a carnivorous, cannibalistic feedback loop that makes smart people think dumb things. And now, after Obama's speech was explicitly about a new kind of politics that is different from partisan bickering, the news outlet that is considered a flagship for liberal politics (forget what the conservatives said - I didn't even look) posts a headline that reflects only the attacks he has made on the other party. It's a business, it's a racket, and they don't get it. Think of them as Nike.

Barack Obama won my vote tonight. The moment came when he said "this election is about you." I'm a pretty politically aware guy. I like political theory. I like to think about the economy and about policy, about the various psychological media tactics that we should all see through, and that sort of thing, but Barack showed me something I just really hadn't thought of (or seen before) tonight. I hereby revise my stance on character voting. The content of a candidate's character does matter, and not just because it determines whether or not he'll carry out his policies. The reason is one for which Barack had to reach back into a bygone era - an era before the baby boomers and before cynicism. His bio film meant something more than just trying to add pathos to the convention - it showed why he appeals to the young and the old, but has a little trouble with the Republican boomers.

You see, before the boomers, there was the civic generation. My grandparents. This generation saw World War II in detail, having memories of a real threat to American freedom before America was a world superpower. They remember the rubber drives, Rosie the Riveter, heart-stopping news of the war, and the moral confirmation of our cause that came with the revelation of the Holocaust. This generation knew what it meant to sacrifice for their country, and they understood this country - not England or France or the Netherlands, but America - as simply their own team. We are not a fascist country and never have been. We have no legacy of Christendom or communism or monarchy to live down. We're the place people went when they were sick of all that and just wanted to live free and happy, able to love and to be loved ("...the soul's paradise" - John Winthrop).

That all changed with the boomers. That generation knew the disillusionment of Nixon, Vietnam, the Korean War, and marked itself by a doffing of all values and the rise of post-modern philosophy. They are, frankly, a ridiculous generation. They're like late Romans. They took their liberty for granted, and suddenly, the government by and for the people was "the man," and they had to stand against it. They're the reason so many of my peers are from broken homes and have no moral center. Their counterparts are the conservatives whose misguided attempts to reclaim "American Greatness" (whatever the hell that is) from them became McCarthyism, adventurism, the moral majority, and other ridiculous acts of tribalism meant more for the bolstering of one ideal than the preservation of that space of freedom that was America. But all this can be dismissed as ignorance.

So when a man with an immigrant father from a broken home stands up and speaks optimistically about the future, he's just doing what everyone in my generation does, and what our grandparents do, and what Americans always did. We're not cynical about anything that isn't already rooted in cynicism. George Carlin is for boomers. Americans like being the underdog - if there's one lasting archetype in our country, that's it. The trick is to get "the man" as a concept out of the way. So how does this change the mind of an amateur political theologian?

Because Americans actually do look to their leaders for moral guidance. The giant gaping hole in the west - ask any college philosophy major - is value. We don't know where to get them, and if we're supposed to make them up, we don't know where to begin. What until this point seemed like nothing but extraneous emotional manipulation in Barack's speeches was absolutely nothing of the kind. Compare it to Ronald Reagan's moral pronouncements. Compare it to Abraham Lincoln's moral judgements. Barack reminds me of every do-gooder I met in college who would go out into inner city Chicago and feed the homeless, talk to gay prostitutes, play with kids from homeless families, and then come back to Wheaton and try to worship God. The man is 47 years old. He's been in the biz for a while, and while they are few, I have met people who keep their zeal for doing good in the world beyond their entry into the work force. But the key is not that he's good, and not that he's making good policies, but that he's running as that guy, not just as a platform. He's running as a leader, not just as a checklist. He's a good person. That matters because national unity is not nationalism. Common purpose is not mindless allegiance. Unity is mutual agreement that this space on earth is more than a nation-state. It's a new kind of politics. It only makes sense to me, further, if there's an old kind, but I suppose that point would take some making, and I don't want to get into it right now.

That's why he speaks about hope. It's not a political meta-narrative, like I thought it was. It's what Americans used to do that they aren't used to doing anymore. The stupidity of American partisanship couldn't last long among kids who didn't see anything evil about their hispanic friends, who didn't see why unbelieving gays shouldn't have civil unions, who didn't see why you should die on the hill of abortion legislation instead of fighting the winnable battles of reducing abortions - which save more lives anyway. What does the media talk about? ... I'm not going to rehash it. Turn off the TV, America. Don't look for reasons to be angry. Look for ways you can do something useful.

I have one caveat for the nominee (as if Barack would read my blog). Please, please, please remember Jon Edwards, Ted Haggard, Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon, and the endless list of hypocrites that grows longer with every passing month. And consult with Billy Graham not on the evangelical vote, but on his policy on elevators. Billy Graham never gets on an elevator with a woman alone. Why? Is he sexist? No, it's a part of a rigid ethical code that he took on when he shouldered the responsibility of public life and public morality. Barack, this election may be about us, the electorate, but that makes you a mirror. Don't crack it with bad decisions. Be honest Abe and cherry-tree-chopping George Washington. Be another tall, skinny do-gooder in our legacy. Because I don't want my kids to have the option of cynicism.

What, Exactly, Is A Hillary Supporter?

Many of Hillary Clinton’s supporters, in a bout of drunken loyalty to a politician (heaven only knows how that happens) are threatening not to support Barack Obama in his bid for the White House, and even to support John McCain. Where do I even begin? It was a running joke throughout the “bitter” (newsword!) “struggle” (another newsword!) for the nomination that Clinton and Barack agreed on so many policies that they had trouble distinguishing their positions from one another. Remember how showing contrast actually became a talking point for them? I mean, unless people are concerned about experience more than the candidate’s political ideology – as if competence meant the same thing to each party – I don’t understand how there is any real reason at all for a Hillary supporter to vote against Barack. Really, is experience as a tax-cutting, big-stick-wielding Republican equivalent to experience as a money-spending, air-cleaning Democrat?

But then I read a little more of the comments this fiasco is generating, and I realized that the problem is nowhere near that substantial. It has to do with people feeling that Hillary was treated unfairly by the media. Now, just to be clear, a public opinion poll is not a magic measurement of all the positive and negative things people say about a candidate – it’s a representation of how many people have decided to support one candidate or the other. So the only way media bias can affect a nomination is if it’s actually fooling people into believing something that is not true about a candidate. Right?

So what they’re really saying is, “Just enough people were lazy enough not to look into each candidate’s qualifications that the nomination went to someone who wouldn’t have won if everyone wasn’t so gullible.” Now, how is that a complaint about fairness? To me, that doesn’t sound like it has anything to do with the media, ultimately. It sounds more like Hillary supporters are just mad at Barack supporters for supporting Barack, with the corollary that many who support Barack (just enough to beat Hillary) have been fooled into it instead of actually having reasons for thinking he’s a better candidate. For this to be proven false, we don’t really have to counteract any of the media narratives about Hillary. We just have to show that Barack supporters are actually enthusiastic for Barack while knowing everything about Hillary that the average Hillary supporter knows. That isn’t hard – the average Hillary [still] supporter thinks she lost because of media bias!

Why, then, is there any such thing as a person who continues to support Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama when she is no longer (for all practical intents and purposes) being considered for nomination? Perhaps it’s that age-old liberal tendency to be condescending and ignorant at the same time. I wonder what the spiteful Democratic bumper stickers will look like when John McCain becomes President and starts provoking Russia, Iran, and China while cutting big-business taxes to stimulate the economy? How about “Don’t Blame Me, I Did What She Told Me To.”

Because It's Important

At the risk of being a one-issue voter, I would like to note the significant absence of a certain issue from this Presidential race. Perhaps it’s because I’m not one of those average “folks” that candidates talk about (a word that enters their vocabulary when they announce that they’re running) who appear to be “tired of” and “fed up with” a lot of things we didn’t know we were tired of or fed up with, but what ever happened to that whole President-as-self-made-dictator thing? The expansion of the executive branch by Presidential mandate is not an expansion of George Bush’s power, but of the power of the office. One of the most important issues to me is whether either candidate has plans to reduce this branch of government back to constitutional standards. Here’s why it’s important:

For character voters (did you see the way he snubbed our troops!? He must be so elitist!), this tells us whether the candidate has enough integrity to lead this country. I cite the example of George Washington, whose decision to step down at the end of his term as President was arguably the founding act of our nation, and the reason for the stability of our democracy. These are the conventions that, no matter what legal loophole may be exploited to break them, must be preserved at all costs precisely because it shows one’s faith in our system, as opposed to one’s national agenda. Talk about your transcendent challenges. This is what makes America America, and why countries like Kenya (three Presidents in half a century) may never achieve stability.

It is also vital to restore the voter’s confidence in the government. Over the past eight years, the Bush administration has done the most damage to this nation not merely through making bad decisions on a legitimate political level, but through pushing the boundaries of constitutionality in such a way that our government appears not to have any internal accountability whatsoever. The President’s approval rating is in the toilet not because people simply disagreed with him politically (this country is nowhere near 70% Democrat) but because he had violated standards that allow the government to function, and done things (wiretapping, war sans congress, outing secret operatives, human rights violation, torture, a-legal prison facilities, retroactive motives for conflict, and the list goes on and on) that are not just illegal, but smack of an entirely different political system altogether. The Democrats made a fatal error when they took over Congress in 2006 and then merely opposed Bush ideologically, as if he had said something offensive! No, that’s not why they were elected at all. Why, after everything that has happened, would that be the response of any patriotic politician – even Republicans? American “folks” are fed up with Washington because it has made itself out to be totally impotent in the face of bullies who are actually interested in running the country. This administration ignores the judiciary as if this were the time of Andrew Jackson. It goes to war as if its platform was manifest destiny. It breaks the law like Richard Nixon. Then it recreates history to justify itself like we were some fragile communist state. Why isn’t this the Bush we’re fighting against? Bush’s policies on energy and economics, if public memory permits me to move back before this race started, were pre-9/11 concerns. The actions that defined his Presidency were those that overreached his power in the wake of Sept. 11, resurrecting the politics and rhetoric of the Cold War to create a war that has dragged this country down in every possible way: the level of political discourse, the stability of the economy, international perception, the internal balance of power, and even the flagrant violation of our own Constitution. What can Americans do about it? Absolutely nothing at all! What have the other branches of government done about it? Absolutely nothing at all! Voter confidence has been shattered. Voter interest, however, has not.

This is why John McCain and Barack Obama need to address the Bush we all know instead of this Snidely Whiplash character for whom we have a vague dislike, and who must be wrong on whatever it is they’re disagreeing with him about at the time (those legendary “failed policies of the Bush administration”). I am not talking about failed policies. The true test of which candidate will truly break from the Bush administration is who will break with the true legacy of the Bush administration: tyranny. Gas prices may be high, the war may still be expensive, and the economy may actually be in recession, but the rest, thanks to our remarkably inept Democrats, is not yet history. Let’s hope that it is not also our future.

Why Georgia Helps McCain

As an American Person, often told what I am supposed to be sick of by candidates responding to polls, I am personally sick of totally irrelevant politics. Candidates, their surrogates, and the media need to raise the level of discourse in this country not because boring accusatory nonsense is hard on the ears (which it is), but because the world is not waiting for us. The conflict between Russia and Georgia managed to totally crush the spitball-politics of Obama and McCain for a moment, but then, in a magnificent media coups d’etat, the Atlantic Monthly managed to completely usurp the important thing (civilians being killed, nations bullying one another, not to mention the Olympics being held in a country with a dismal human rights record, and rising violence in Afghanistan) with – guess who! – Hillary Clinton. The real piece of news here is not that the Clintons are megalomaniacal, back-biting aristocrats – who doesn’t know that? – but that the media is no longer capable of delivering real, substantive news, and will vacate the premises at the first available scandal, no matter how petty or redundant.

I refuse to believe that the American electorate is as unintelligent as the news media implies that we are by its condescension. I haven’t met a single person who cares more about celebrities, political “upheaval” (not real, but fabricated through narrative), or invasive personal segments than about peaceful resolution to international conflict or salvaging the economy. People may gravitate towards those stories in the same way that I’ll gravitate towards cake before veggies, but in the end, it’s the substance we’re looking for.

I looked up the responses of our two candidates to the conflict, and without imbuing them with my own subjective judgments (as tempting as it is), I’ll just note the facts. Obama basically said the two nations should stop fighting, sit down, and talk it out, condemning Russia’s violation of Georgia’s sovereignty, calling the situation “volatile” and recommending that we “work with” the UN Security council somehow to solve the problem. John McCain gave us a historical background on the conflict, displayed a high level of knowledge about the situation on the ground, and came through with a factually-based condemnation of the conflict that resonated with similar condemnations from the EU (echoing their belief that such conflicts are out-of-date in this century). He even gave us both a political reason (democracy in a former Soviet state) and an economic reason (a pipeline for oil) that we should agree with him. He also made the credible threat that these sorts of conflicts would deteriorate Russo-American relations, and that threatening global stability would only hurt Russia’s standing in the international community, and recommended that NATO should convene to revisit the possibility of Georgian membership – as unlikely as that is, it seems to be the right thing to do. He even commended French President Sarkozy for his visit to Moscow.

Okay, here’s the subjective part. Which of these men most resembles Bush right now with regard to foreign policy? I am strongly against neo-conservatism in America, which is the closest we’ve ever come to real fascism. I don’t consider myself leftist either, because, quite frankly, they have their own totalitarian pretenses with regard to the privatization of religion and established secularism (with their stupid accusation that the neo-con cooption of American cultural evangelicalism is somehow a fundamentalist takeover of government – give me a break). So is it a choice between hawkish nationalism and the death of my civil liberties? With these speeches, I think we’re starting to see something new. McCain is clearly competent and serious in the international arena, which is more than you can say about Bush. All his stupid campaigning aside (let’s not pretend he’s the only one who does it), this was a good response to the conflict. Obama, however, is giving us a Mike Huckabee moment, where instead of saying what we need to hear, is telling us what we want to hear (one often masquerades as the other, with him). He sounded like a peacenik college student. Yes, Russia violated Georgia’s sovereignty; thank you for your insights, sir. Yeah, that’s bad, and we should probably do some nebulous international thing to solve it. Instead of his initial “why can’t we all get along,” Obama actually changed his stance to specific condemnation of Russia after McCain and Bush came out against them.

So who’s supposed to be four more years of international blundering again? I’m supposed to say “the Republican, of course,” but that’s just clearly not true. Bush failed precisely because he was elected to be a Republican, and instead, gave us eight years of violent, egregious abuse of executive power according to the whims of power-hungry advisors. In other words, he was not nearly Republican enough. It was the incompetence and dishonesty of the man, not the ideology, that has done so much harm. Obama seems sincere enough (you can never tell), but he lost this round. I don’t want “common sense” in complex international politics. I want competence. As Jon Stewart put it (and I paraphrase), I don’t want someone I can relate to; I want the leader of the free world to be embarrassingly superior to me.

Hitchens on Morality... Finally

Today I saw on YouTube the interview with Christopher Hitchens that I was beginning to think would never take place – and I strongly suspected him of never picking on anyone his own size until this point.  The show was Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson, and this man brilliantly took Hitchens to task for the point upon which he seems unable to come up with a rebuttal: the source of atheist morality.  On the one hand I was disappointed, because I like Hitchens for the most part, and do not like to see him act either dishonest or to misunderstand a point, but on the other hand I was gratified that I had not misunderstood Hitchens in not conceding this to him.

            The constant refrain of the atheist challenged by this question is that atheists may act just as morally as any religionist, if not more so.  This, however, completely avoids the question, which is not “whether” but “whence.”  Hitchens freely admits that he does not know why he has a moral impulse, except through positing some socio-evolutionary theory that the species would not survive (or would be very much less happy) without it.  This is about as much as his audience will get out of him, I fear, because he then proceeds back to his original point for the remainder of his interview, reiterating 1) his misconstrual of the religious position that we somehow divine morality from God’s existence, and 2) his boring, repetitive assertion that there are sins no atheist is capable of justifiably committing, which is simultaneously an ad hominem attack on the religious (“I’m more moral than you, so listen to me”) and an appeal to a fictitious moral foundation or system upon which he refuses to elaborate beyond its supposed universality.  In other interviews, Hitchens has laughably referred to the “morally normal,” as if a social average were all that is required for moral consistency or (the term is unavoidable) truth.

            For a man who so rigorously asserts (I will not say defends) the atheistic affection for the “noumenous” and the meaningful, Hitchens is remarkably weak in answering (or comprehending?) this question.  No one is saying that a human being cannot experience meaning if they do not believe in God.  Nor are we saying that God imparts meaning supernaturally to mankind through some material process with an equivalent naturalistic explanation.  Nor, further, are we saying that religion is often misused to create evil in the world, or even that men are not allowed to condemn evil based on their own moral outrage instead of some codified standard.  Note: when someone tries to make this point, Hitchens is fond of saying he has been granted many concessions, but in reality, it just takes this long to unravel as many ridiculous mischaracterizations of the very terms of the argument.  Rather, the religious contention is that there exists an aspect of human experience that is made up entirely of value (if we are going to be realistic instead of idealistic, we will say that this is most of human experience), and furthermore, that this value evaporates (obviously!) when placed in a causal chain of events, as it always does no matter what you are talking about.  Lewis makes this point in Miracles, Kant makes it in the Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals, Descartes, Darwin, everyone seems to recognize this point.  Atheism is nihilistic and meaningless to the religionist insofar as it is purely naturalistic.  There is always Nietzsche’s necessary revaluation of all value, but Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris do not subscribe to his thought or anything like it.  They simply maintain that they will act meaningfully whether they can justify it or not, and that meaning has inexplicably escaped the razor they have applied with supposed devastation religion.  They must all stop being offended (as Christians learned long ago they must do to debate honestly) and start doing some metaphysics, or this will all backfire on them.

            It must be accepted or refuted, as Michael Polanyi so magnificently articulates in Personal Knowledge, that science is a tool of the consciousness and cannot be said to give rise to it without tautology.  It is given for anyone who is, in a word, self-aware that you cannot see those things that make up your conscious experience simply by looking into a mirror – no matter how penetrating, detailed, or exhaustive the image may be.  Why?  Because a human being is more an event than an object, and to put it very simply, because science has constraints, and can only overstep its bounds through a negative form of what Kant calls “speculation.”  It cannot even, as Dawkins likes to say, make the claim that something metaphysical is “very very unlikely” unless it first mischaracterizes the metaphysical as somehow physical and causal.  And unless Hitchens will grant that there is such a thing as experience that does not fall into this causal realm that is both valid and real, he cannot without contradiction say that he has anything but a nostalgia for the noumenous.

A Humble Reply to a "Shocking Message"

When you type “sermon” into YouTube, the first video to pop up is a message from Paul Washer to a youth conference in Birmingham, Alabama. In the margin, where YouTube keeps the related videos, there was a program opposing Washer’s message to Joel Osteen’s. I was hooked before he even began. As he took the stage, I skipped on over to Wikipedia to see what sort of denominational background Washer had, and I was very disappointed to see that he was Southern Baptist. I doubted that I was going to get the Gospel that Osteen hides from the world.

For the record, I was wrong. I was pleasantly surprised to have one good thing to take away from Washer’s sermon: that it is through faith in Jesus Christ that those who are powerless in their sins are saved. Amen, brother Paul. But as Baptist preachers are wont to do (and this is why I am emphatically not Baptist), Washer absolutely saturated his message with pharisaical, unbiblical legalism (even rebuking those who use the term “legalist” for people like Washer) that was supposed to convince us of our unrighteousness and our need for salvation. Nothing gets my goat more than selective readings of Scripture that are framed specifically as non-selective readings of Scripture. Washer quotes the famous passage of the separation of the sheep and the goats, placing emphasis on the fact that it is by their fruits that you shall know false prophets. Not believers. Prophets. Prophets who lead men astray, so that in the last day Jesus will not know them, though they prophesied in His name. But it is certainly clear from elsewhere in Scripture that you shall know Christians by their fruits, but these are accompanied by long lists of Christian virtues, the greatest of which is love. They are known by the fruits of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control), and by their clothing of the naked, their feeding of the hungry, their visiting of the prisoner, their care for the sick. Baptists often smuggle in the sort of ridiculous guilt-mongering for which Jesus condemned the Pharisees – those who heap great burdens on others which they themselves cannot carry. Why do they preach only half of the Gospel? Why, in his constant reiteration of the narrowness of the path does Washer not mention that Paul’s flesh was at war with his Spirit? That Jesus loves us even when we cannot escape from our sins? Has Washer read James but not Romans 7? Has he read Galatians and not 1 Corinthians 13? Does he stop at the end of Romans 7?

The Bible makes very scant mention of modesty and no mention of drugs other than alcohol. I hate it when people tell me to go read the Bible for myself when they aren’t referring to it. 1 Timothy 2:9 is the passage where Paul entreats the women of a particular congregation to dress modestly. Should they? Yes! Furthermore, they should not dress with exquisite finery in order to draw attention to themselves, but with good works that give glory to the God they profess. There is a lot that is not in the Bible that can be said for dressing modestly, but the Rev. Washer makes it sound as if people who dress in a way he interprets as “sensual” (find that word in reference to clothing in the Bible for me – or his ridiculous “body-framing” example) are somehow not Christians – and are in fact condemned to Hell because their fruits show their true colors! Where on Earth has he gotten this? From the selective reading of Scripture (having clearly never read Song of Solomon, or Jesus’ command to men not to look with lustful intent upon a woman) hung heavily with puritanical Baptist values. He condemns people for taking drugs and being at youth group at the same time. Do we want drug abusers to leave youth group and find their hope elsewhere? Of course not! Unless you’re a devil! Find me the passage where drug use is prohibited – and please be contextual, not misusing passages about adultery – and I will at least understand his condemnation of it as sin instead of hopeless addiction, but the banishment of the sinner? A teenage sinner no less? Is this truly the mind of Christ, or the mind of self-flagellation?

Washer pays lip service to the sovereignty of God over man’s salvation, and to man’s powerlessness in sin, but the other 98% of his message consists of continual rebuke in which man (youth, in reality) is supposed to compare himself – not to God, but to Southern Baptist morality. Were man to compare himself to God, and to attempt to obey Jesus’ command to be perfect as our Heavenly Father is perfect, we would pay attention to the great majority of commands completely overlooked by the good Reverend, those that boil down to loving God and loving others – loving others, moreover, who do not love us, those who hate us, those who kill us. That is imitating the love of Christ. Are we to hate sin? Yes! What is sin, Paul Washer? And how did Jesus respond to sin?

I don’t doubt Paul Washer’s sincerity for a moment. I have known many sincere Christians who hate what God loves – themselves. There is a kind of negative idolatry to introspection so intense that one never has a chance to see the grace of God, and to go further up and further into Him. You have not moved from anthropocentrism into theocentrism if you continue to think of nothing but your own depravity and its avoidance. The Bible calls us not to wallow in self-pity, but to throw off everything that hinders, and the sin that so easily entangles, and to run with perseverance the race marked out for us, as did our ancestors in the faith. Yes, leave sin behind – real sin, not made-up sins – and see that it is God who has saved you. Reverend Washer, you may think that while we were yet in sin, God hated us, but I am convinced that neither life nor death, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor Baptist preachers, nor guilt, nor third world jungle churches, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.