After America

CELEBRATE YOURSELF

Appearing at the University of Denver in 2010, the talk-show host Dennis Prager was asked to identify the single greatest threat to the future of America.¹³ Several enthusiastic members of the audience bayed “Obama!” and Mr. Prager found himself obliged to correct them: “No, it’s not Obama,” he said. “It’s not. If, God forbid, President Obama came down with an illness nothing would change. Nothing.”

This is correct. Barack Obama is a symptom rather than the problem.

He didn’t declare himself president; America chose him. That’s what should worry you, not whether he was born in Mombasa and had his minions fake a Hawaiian birth certificate. That just gets you off the hook: aw, gee, we were duped. No, you duped yourself, America. That’s the problem. Mr. Prager explained that the single greatest threat facing the nation was that “we have not passed on what it means to be American to this generation…. A society does not survive if it does not have a reason to survive.” For Prager, small government is a moral question: We give far more to charity per capita than Europeans do. Why? Are we born better? No. The bigger the government the worse the citizen. They are preoccupied in Europe with how much time off: Where will they vacation? When will they retire? These are selfish questions, these are not altruistic questions. So the goodness that America created is jeopardized by our not knowing what we stand for. That’s our greatest threat. We are our problem.

Instead of teaching “what it means to be American,” we teach anything but.

We are obsessed with identity, but any identity other than “American”—female, gay, African-American, Muslim-American, Undocumented-American. At American universities, women take Women’s Studies, Latinos take Latino Studies, queers take Queer Studies. For many Americans, the preferred academic discipline is navel-gazing, sometimes literally: people of girth take Fat Studies. The best way to celebrate diversity is by celebrating yourself, and the best way to celebrate yourself is without anyone else getting in the way. And why wait till college? In New York, gay, lesbian, and transgendered schoolchildren can attend Harvey Milk High.¹⁴ Are there many transgendered 13-year-olds, even in Manhattan? Well, it’s about every student’s right to a “non-threatening learning environment,” and, if he doesn’t actually learn anything in the non-threatening learning environment, he’s still better off than if he’d been in the non-learning threatening environment of most New York high schools.

In all its shallow obsession with sexual and racial politics, the ever more leisurely vacuity of education also puts a question mark over identity in a more fundamental sense. In January 2009, Canada’s Globe and Mail (which is like the New York Times but without the jokes) chose to contrast the incoming U.S. president with, er, me. “He belongs to a demographic—it made his win possible—that doesn’t even get the problem with a black, a woman or a gay president,” wrote Rick Salutin. “They don’t clutch old identifications with race or ‘the west.’ They glory in ‘hybridity’…. For another demographic, this shift induces panic. They worry about ‘shriveled birth rates’ in the United States and its ‘enervated allies’ (Mark Steyn); they mourn the decline of ‘the last serious western nation.’”¹⁵

Crumbs. I wasn’t aware I was an entirely different “demographic” from Barack Obama. We’re more or less the same generation, but plainly the president stands for hope and the future and I represent the past and fear.

As for “not getting the problem,” a lot of those black voters who turned out in huge numbers for Obama in California stayed in the polling booth to vote down gay marriage:¹⁶ the rainbow coalition shimmers beguilingly but dissolves on close contact—and that’s before you ask the shy Muslim girl in the corner of the classroom if she wouldn’t be happier at Lesbo High.

Still, in a broad sense Rick Salutin is correct: the demographic that is the change it’s been waiting for doesn’t want to be seen “clutching old identifications.” What a yawneroo that’d be.

For decades, western elites have been bored by their own traditions and fetishized the exotic. Obama was both the beneficiary of this syndrome and its apotheosis. He was living his own COEXIST sticker: his parents were Kansan and Kenyan, as if paired by an alphabetically minded dating agency; he was Hawaiian, and Indonesian; for white liberals he offered absolution from racial guilt, but he wasn’t one of those in-your-face types like the Reverend Al and the Reverend Jesse yelling grievance jingles all day long; he was a community organizer from the mean streets of Chicago, yet he was also by some happy if vague process an alumnus of half the schools in the Ivy League, and he had the great good fortune not to live in any of the “communities” he “organized” but instead in the more salubrious Hyde Park, a community organized by John D. Rockefeller’s money; he embodied “change,” but he peddled the same reassuringly shopworn bromides (“America, this is our moment”) whose woozy evasions liberals chose to regard as the second coming of Cicero; he was kinda Christian (albeit of the paranoid, neo-segregationist, Afro-nationalist branch) but sorta Muslim (from a Jakarta madrassah, but don’t worry, not one of the heavy-duty kind); he had a white grandmother but also an undocumented auntie served with an unenforced deportation order. If that’s not the all-American resume for the twenty-first century, what is?

After the inauguration, my old pal Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, tweeted ecstatically: “What a speech!! Speaking as citizen of the world that was exac what I wanted to hear from an Amer Pres’t.”¹⁷

What that seems to boil down to is an Amer Pres’t who isn’t hung up on being Pres’t of Amer: that Obama can do. “People of the world,”¹⁸ he droned to his audience for his famous Berlin speech, sounding as if his spacecraft had just landed from Planet Hopechangula and you earthlings had no choice but to submit to his awesome power. In postmodern terms, he’s not as far gone as Michael Ignatieff, leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in Ottawa. Previously a professor at Harvard and a BBC late-night intellectual telly host, Mr. Ignatieff returned to Canada in order to become Prime Minister, and to that end got himself elected as leader of the Liberal Party. And, as is the fashion nowadays, he cranked out a quickie tome laying out his political “vision.” Having spent his entire adult life abroad, he was aware that some of the natives were uncertain about his commitment to the land of his birth. So he was careful to issue a sort of pledge of a kind of allegiance, explaining that writing a book about Canada had “deepened my attachment to the place on earth that, if I needed one, I would call home.”¹⁹

My, that’s awfully big of you. As John Robson commented in The Ottawa Citizen, “I’m worried that a man so postmodern he doesn’t need a home wants to lead my country. Why? Is it quaint? An interesting sociological experiment?”²⁰

Indeed. But there’s a lot of it about. Many Americans quickly began to pick up the strange vibe that for Barack Obama governing America was “an interesting sociological experiment,” too. He would doubtless agree that the United States is “the place on earth that, if I needed one, I would call home.”

But he doesn’t, not really: it’s hard to imagine Obama wandering along to watch a Memorial Day or Fourth of July parade until the job required him to. That’s not to say he’s un-American or anti-American, but merely that he’s beyond all that. Way beyond. He is, as John Bolton says, post-American.²¹ In his own book on the president, Dinesh D’Souza argues that Obama is defined by his father’s anti-colonialism.²² Speaking as an old-school imperialist, I find him exactly the opposite: in his attitude to America, Obama comes across as a snooty viceregal grandee passing through some tedious colonial outpost. He’s the first president to give off the pronounced whiff that he’s condescending to the job—that it’s really too small for him and he’s just killing time until something more commensurate with his stature comes along. When he lectures America on the Ground Zero mosque or immigration, he does not speak to his people as one of them.

When he addresses the monde, he speaks as a citoyen du for whom the United States has no greater or lesser purchase on him than Papua or Peru.

There is an absence of feeling for America—as in his offhand remark to Bob Woodward that the United States can “absorb” another 9/11.²³ During the long Northern Irish “Troubles,” cynical British officials used to talk off-the-record about holding casualties down to “an acceptable level of violence,” but it’s eerie to hear the head of state take the same view—and about a far higher number of fatalities.²⁴ Ask the 3,000 families who had a huge gaping hole blown in their lives whether another 9/11 is something you want to “absorb” rather than prevent.

But why be surprised at the thin line between Obama’s cool and his coldness? Jeremiah Wright (his race- baiting pastor), Van Jones (his Communist “green jobs” czar), William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn (his hippie- terrorist patrons) are not exactly stirred by love of country, either.

Nor, to be honest, are America’s desiccated media—although they know enough to understand that you have to genuflect in that direction once in a while: Would it kill you to wear the stupid flag pin? The rubes’ll lap it up.