Fun with Indignation
Blogging is a funny thing. I don’t know if it’s the most context-dependent form of writing, but it’s pretty damn context-dependent. And ironically, too: because one day you write a line and it’s as portable as an iPhone, it needs no context to travel, and travel it does. Usually this is okay. Even when it attracts criticism. But sometimes a line or a post pulled from a blogger’s long stream of context — buried, alas, in his or her archival scrolls — becomes the kind of thing that can shape a blogger’s public image in spite of that context. Or even in contradiction to it.
So to put my beef with world citizenship talk in context — a context to be titled “It’s Not Wrong Insofar as Obama Said It, Obama [and Kennedy, Reagan, Paine, Diogenes, whomever] Is Wrong Insofar as He Said It” — I think it’s worth providing a little summary of my remarks on Obama this campaign season. For the record…
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…no way is Obama the “smart, contradictory person…more in tune with our times” because his father was Kenyan. I’d say he’s that way because of a complex combination of his traditions, virtues, and memories. Just like McCain, who’s considerably less smart and contradictory and tuneless than Obama…
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It’s possible, I think, for conservative Protestant intellectuals to agree with Daniel that Obama’s version of Christianity isn’t the model while still appreciating the kind of path he took to get there.
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Early in this campaign, I criticized Obama pretty relentlessly for trafficking in therapeutic politics. Strangely, as the season has drawn out and criticism of the man has mounted, I’ve found the Obama behind the bromides to be far more compelling and defensible, a remarkable portrait of how aristocratic virtues might thrive once again in the soil of the democratic soul. If only he were right on the issues…
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Yet what inspires revolted resentment from me in Wright inspires appreciation and instinctive affinity coming from Obama himself. Obama has had to cultivate and maintain his aristocratic qualities — the casual ease with which he has trained and mastered his ambition, the cool sit-down delivery, the catlike indifference that Nietzsche would say comes from Obama’s good digestion — without breaking his ties to what he recognized as his tradition, a tradition that features Rev. Wright right at its center.
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Were I going to endorse Obama for the whole enchilada, instead of only, as I have, for the Democratic nomination, I’d make an argument I haven’t heard yet so will try out here. […] Obama is going to be the softest landing out of power that the Republicans are likely to get in the next 50 years. To blow this opportunity is to invite a world of hurt down the road. Yes, he’s a very liberal dude. But he’s not going to rub anyone’s face in the road-appled dirt….
Lovers and loathers of boilerplate wingnuttery, take note.