One of the things I find frustrating about Our Only President is how often he says things I agree with. I found it particularly frustrating in 2000, when nearly every major address was two-thirds stuff I wouldn’t mind saying myself. The problem is that I think about half the time he’s simply mouthing stuff he has no interest in at all, and about half he is stating some goal with which I agree, and leaving out the path to get there, having chosen some path that is, in my eyes, far more likely to leave us further away from the goal, or on occasion to get closer at the expense of some other goal I place an even higher priority on.\n
Ech, what a sentence. F’r’ex, as a candidate, Our Only President often said that one of the highest priorities of his administration was an educational system that Leaves No Child Behind, because it is morally incumbent on us as a society, and particularly as a capitalist democracy, to give every child the opportunities that education provides. I agree, but it was clear that his administration wouldn’t do anything like that. I couldn’t tell, at the time, whether he was just lying to hide his plan to destroy public education in this country or whether he somehow genuinely believed that draining educational resources to comply with ever more testing that doesn’t evaluate either teaching or learning would be a good path to the goal. Come to think of it, I still can’t tell. Anyway, the bits with shared goals turned out not only to have different policies attached but a cabal of dishonest and incompetent cronies attached who could make a hash of anything. Just for fun.\n
Anyway, Our Only President gave a fascinating and (I think) moving speech<\/a> the other day, as he was inaugurated into a second term. Again, I think that part of it is lies and part actual shared goals, and it’s too depressing to figure out which. Still, I can’t deny that if Ted Kennedy gave this speech, I would have been cheering. Of course, if our lion had given that speech, it would have been written far more to my taste; I agree with the inestimable Andrew Cline that there was a lot of bad writing in it<\/a>. Even so, I can’t quite call it a bad speech. First of all, it’s the kind<\/I> of inauguration speech I like. Inaugurations are different, nigh on unique, and I think that they really should avoid policy details and present a simple vision of the President wants to do for the country in four years. More than that, what sort of country he wants America to be in four years. It’s a vision speech, a chance to get us all agreeing on the goals and then work together to hammer out our policy disagreements with our eyes on the prize. Now, Our Only President went further in the future and further afield, but he presented a vision of the future, and it’s a compelling one.\n At the heart of that vision is a sense of America’s role in the world. From a shining city on a hill, he calls to us to be father and mother to the world, to make the world over in our image. And, he admits, not only in our image as we are, but in our image as we want to be. “America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.” As a nation, we will thrive only insofar as we can embody our beliefs, because then the world will emulate us rather than rival us. “In a world moving toward liberty, we are determined to show the meaning and promise of liberty.” What is that meaning? The list is, more or less, “dignity and security of economic independence”, “integrity, and tolerance toward others, and the rule of conscience in our own lives”, “service, and mercy, and a heart for the weak” and an end to “the habits of racism”.\n Digression: I actually really like the phrase “the habits of racism”; stamping out racism itself is a matter for the heart and the family, and must take generations, but stamping out the habits of racism, if no easier, is at least something we can do as a society. It also, I think, points at the insidious habits I have myself without (often) thinking about them, and the similar habits that keep cropping up and form a barrier not only to the marginalized and the persecuted but to anyone seeking to change the inequities of the status quo. And, I think, it helps to point out that Our Only President, for all his flaws, does seem to genuinely ‘get it’, at least personally, on that front. He appears to be as comfortable with African-Americans and Latinos who share his views as with whites; his arrogance is essentially color blind. This doesn’t translate into policies that would extend that color blindness to institutions and systems everywhere, but it is worth noting. End Digression.\n We’re not just going to be good role models, of course. We’re going to provide both carrots and sticks, we’re going to judge outlaw regimes, tyrants and “governments with long habits of control”. It’s a tough job, but a good one, and as he says, “The difficulty of the task is no excuse for avoiding it.” And I agree. I’d put a lot more emphasis on the importance of living up to our own ideals ourselves and less on judging how well other people have done it, but in fact fighting tyranny of whatever stripe is a goal I share with Our Only President.\n The problem, though, is when he says things like “all the allies of the United States can know: ... we rely on your counsel”, which is on the face of it preposterous coming out of his mouth. He relies on no-one’s counsel but his own cabal of incompetents and crooks. The whole point of the Coalition of the Willing was that we didn’t need to take counsel with anyone who wasn’t willing to agree with us. More important, when he makes his claim to fight tyranny everywhere, he very clearly is not speaking about China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia or even Libya. So his words are at odds with his deeds, and pretty blatantly, too. I think newly-confirmed Secretary Rice will have her hands full explaining to everybody that he meant only good things for them.\n More important (to me) he also clearly doesn’t intend to put action to his words about economic security, integrity, and concern for the weak. He certainly has shown no interest in “sustain[ing freedom] by the rule of law and the protection of minorities” much less “secur[ing rights] by free dissent and the participation of the governed”. The speaker is part of his rhetoric, and in this case works against it. And, of course, the incompetence and dishonesty of his cronies is so overwhelming that even if I could believe he wanted, say, freedom for the residents of Iraq, they are likely to actually get poverty, civil war, and oppression.\n I will, though, before I finish, make a more general complaint about the language of the piece, which I found profoundly conservative. That is, the language complacently accepts What Is (or What Was, or What We Like To Think Was) as Divinely ordained and incapable of improvement. He preposterously and ahistorically brags that “From the day of our Founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth.” Um, no, not every<\/I> man, and certainly not every woman. He claims democracy as “the honorable achievement of our fathers”; I would call it, as he later does, “the unfinished work of American freedom”. “We go forward with complete confidence”, he says. I beseech him to think he may be wrong.\n Further, he assumes that America’s “deepest beliefs” are his own. Over and over, he talks about America’s belief, America’s resolve, and America’s ideals. America will do this, America will not do that. He claims the voice of America for his own: “Today, America speaks anew to the peoples of the world.” America sees you, America will walk with you, America proclaims liberty. He is, in his mind or at least in his rhetoric, America. And what’s good for America is good for him. And vice versa.\n I’ll finish here with his own questions, which I think are questions his administration will have to answer: “Did our generation advance the cause of freedom? And did our character bring credit to that cause?”\n Thank you, One of the things I find frustrating about Our Only President is how often he says things I agree with. I found it particularly frustrating in 2000, when nearly every major address was two-thirds stuff I wouldn\u2019t mind saying myself….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2593"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2593\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17280,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2593\/revisions\/17280"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"