The Whirling Sound of Planet Dickens
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: January 14, 2012
In death, Charles Dickens still keeps his greatest secret to himself — the essence of his energy. None of the physical relics he left behind betray it. The manuscripts of his novels — like “Our Mutual Friend” at the Morgan Library — look no more fevered or hectic than the manuscripts left behind by other novelists.
Two memorable characters from Charles Dickens, Micawber and the young Copperfield.
The handwritten words on the page, round and legible in blue ink, are the marks of a mind that has already settled itself to composition.
Dickens, who was born 200 years ago, wrote a long shelf of novels, 14 in all, not counting “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” which lay half-finished at his death. They sit plump and bursting with life, spilling over with the chaos of existence itself. It’s easy to imagine writers working the way Dickens’s prolific contemporary, Anthony Trollope, did — steadily, routinely, knocking off his 2,000 words a day until, by the end of his life, he had written 47 novels. But this is not how Dickens wrote.
Find the tumultuous heart of your favorite Dickens novel, the place where 19th-century London seems to be seething, smoking, overcrowded, in a state of vulgar contradiction. Then imagine Dickens working in the midst of it — a small, brisk figure rushing past you on a dark and dirty street. He is lost in a kind of mental ventriloquism, calling up his emotions and studying them. Every night he walked a dozen miles, without which, he said, “I should just explode and perish.”
Under the pseudonym Boz, he wrote, “There is nothing we enjoy more than a little amateur vagrancy,” walking through London as though “the whole were an unknown region to our wandering mind.” Yet there was nothing remotely solitary about Dickens. One person who saw him in the highest spirits at a family party wrote that he “happily sang two or three songs, one the patter song, ‘The Dog’s Meat Man,’ and gave several successful imitations of the most distinguished actors of the day.”
It’s a wonder Dickens didn’t explode and perish long before his death in 1870, at age 58. Quite apart from the act of composing his novels, he was a whirlwind, living a life that is nearly unmatched in its vigor. He had one entire career as a magazine editor, another as an actor and manager of theatrical productions, still another as a philanthropist and social reformer. The record of his private engagements alone — dinners, outings, peregrinations with his entourage of family and friends — is exhausting to read. The novels stand out against the backdrop of hundreds of other compositions, all of them written against tight deadlines.
Dickens’s energy, which he made no effort to husband until he was nearly dead, was inexplicable. Call it metabolic if you like. Perhaps it was a reaction to the uncertainties of his childhood and the shame of his days as a child laborer, when he knew that as a precocious young entertainer he was already a spectacle well worth observing.
He was driven by gargantuan emotions, and the ferocious will needed to keep them in check, to release them in the creation of characters he loved more than some of his children. He could drive himself to anguished tears while writing the death of Little Nell, in “The Old Curiosity Shop.” And yet he could also coldly disown anyone who sided with his wife, Catherine, when they separated, including his namesake son.
Even Dickens didn’t understand his energy. He grasped that there was a wildness in him, and so did nearly everyone who knew him. When Dostoevsky met Dickens in 1862 — a meeting that is hard to imagine — Dickens explained that there were two people inside him, “one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite.”
Out of these two people he constructed his universe of characters, good and evil. Dostoevsky’s comment is laconic and ambiguous. “Only two people?” he asked. Dickens’s public readings, which began in 1858, drew tens of thousands of people in England and America. They came not only to see the author himself but also the people who inhabited him — Scrooge and Pickwick, Micawber and Mrs. Gamp.
Those characters, and dozens more, still live with all their old vitality. And though we feel the unevenness of Dickens’s novels more plainly than when they were appearing in monthly parts, it’s easier now to see that the unevenness in most of them is symptomatic of his overpowering energy.
The man himself was uneven and could not be beaten into consistency any more than he could beat every one of his novels into perfection. The fact is that Charles Dickens was as Dickensian as the most outrageous of his characters, and he was happy to think so, too. Soon after the publication of “A Christmas Carol” in 1843, he wrote of himself to a close friend: “two and thirty years ago, the planet Dick appeared on the horizon. To the great admiration, wonder and delight of all who live, and the unspeakable happiness of mankind.” Planet Dickens feels as real as it does to us because he stalked the world around him.
And when he finally settled at his desk, he was still driving himself through a world of his own invention, peopled by characters waiting, as he said, to come “ready made to the point of the pen.”
Monday, January 16, 2012
Jean Edward Smith - Grant
This is the best current biography of Ulysses S. Grant of which I am aware. The book makes me realize more than ever that we owe our country to Lincoln, Sherman, & Grant. Maybe to Grant more than anybody else. Without these 3 men, perhaps Grant most of all, the Confederacy would have succeeded and the United States as we know it today would not exist.
Jean Edward Smith is one of the foremost historical biographers of our time. A few years ago I read his biography of FDR and I see that he has a forthcoming work on Eisenhower.
It's good to see that in recent years there has been a scholarly reevaluation of Grant's presidency. For decades he had been viewed as a bad President. The scandals that occurred during his administration are still there, but how much blame can be ascribed to Grant? He was loyal to a fault to his friends, and that's the worst thing that can be said about him.
Grant was apparently a failure in life except that he was a brilliant soldier. He had a genius for leading men into battle. He has to be considered to be one of the great military leaders of all time. No doubt the North would have lost the war were it not for Ulysses S. Grant.
One big thing I learned in this biography is how progressive Grant was. He fought for Reconstruction and by the end of his administrations, he alone was fighting for the rights of the freedmen in the South. He wanted peace with Native Americans rather than war. If Grant were alive today, he'd be a Democrat.
I also learned that he might have been the Republican presidential nominee in 1880 were it not for the ham-handed mistakes of his backer Roscoe Conkling. What difference would this have made in American history? I do not know.
Grant lived his last days in unending pain from throat and mouth cancer. He finished his acclaimed memoirs literally the day before he died. Having lost all of him money when his investments failed thru fraud, he was forced to finish him memoiors in order to financially take care of his family.
Jean Edward Smith is one of the foremost historical biographers of our time. A few years ago I read his biography of FDR and I see that he has a forthcoming work on Eisenhower.
It's good to see that in recent years there has been a scholarly reevaluation of Grant's presidency. For decades he had been viewed as a bad President. The scandals that occurred during his administration are still there, but how much blame can be ascribed to Grant? He was loyal to a fault to his friends, and that's the worst thing that can be said about him.
Grant was apparently a failure in life except that he was a brilliant soldier. He had a genius for leading men into battle. He has to be considered to be one of the great military leaders of all time. No doubt the North would have lost the war were it not for Ulysses S. Grant.
One big thing I learned in this biography is how progressive Grant was. He fought for Reconstruction and by the end of his administrations, he alone was fighting for the rights of the freedmen in the South. He wanted peace with Native Americans rather than war. If Grant were alive today, he'd be a Democrat.
I also learned that he might have been the Republican presidential nominee in 1880 were it not for the ham-handed mistakes of his backer Roscoe Conkling. What difference would this have made in American history? I do not know.
Grant lived his last days in unending pain from throat and mouth cancer. He finished his acclaimed memoirs literally the day before he died. Having lost all of him money when his investments failed thru fraud, he was forced to finish him memoiors in order to financially take care of his family.
Sunday, January 15, 2012
The New Debate About Capitalism
by Gary HartPresident, Hart International, Ltd.
GET UPDATES FROM Gary Hart
The New Debate About Capitalism
Posted: 1/12/12 07:14 PM ET
The current Republican nomination contest has revealed serious confusion over the nature of our economic system. Very conservative candidates are attacking Governor Romney because his experience at Bain Capital involved buying companies with borrowed money, firing their employees, then selling them for a profit. Many, though not all, of these companies then went bankrupt, and Mr. Romney and his partners made millions. Sounding very much like Democrats, Mr. Romney's opponents are highly critical of this kind of capitalism.
Traditional capitalism was based on the idea that business people would invest money, usually borrowed, to establish a business, hire people, and make and sell things. Risk was involved, but jobs were created and profits were made. Traditional Republicans, including those now attacking Mr. Romney, still believe, as do most Americans, that this is the way our economic system should work.
The confusion within the ranks of capitalism is stimulated by the shift in our economy from making and selling things to manipulation of money. The rise of the money culture began a couple of decades or more ago and involves mergers and acquisitions, venture capitalism, leveraged buyouts, workouts and turnarounds, currency speculation, and arbitrage. While the money culture was booming, traditional capitalism based on manufacturing was declining. The national government had to intervene to save what was left of the American auto industry.
The money culture led directly to the housing bubble and subsequent economic collapse in 2008, from which we are still struggling to emerge. Unlike traditional capitalism, it is oriented toward the short term, not the long term, and toward quick profit, not productivity. If tens of millions of dollars can be made in bundling high-risk mortgages and collateralized debt obligations in a few months, why go to the trouble of building a factory, hiring and training workers, and producing a product that is competitive in world markets with profits emerging sometime down the road?
The Tea Party blames our government for this situation, and Occupy Wall Street focuses on the money culture (Wall Street). The government did not create the money culture. And public deficits, so much the focus of the Tea Party, arise from insufficient revenues to pay for the programs, including Social Security and Medicare, that most Americans, including Tea Party members, want. The money manipulators, now the focus of Republican candidates, manage to find intriguing ways, including off-shore bank accounts, to avoid paying fair taxes.
All of this is pretty well-known. What is surprising is that it is now being discovered and strongly criticized by Republican leaders who, up to now, have been silent on this transformation of American capitalism. While struggling to convince the American public that Barack Obama is a socialist, it is very easy to overlook the drift of our market economy away from its traditional roots into something resembling a high-risk, high-rollers', fast-shuffle casino that produces nothing except massive incomes for one-percent insiders. Republican leaders are now welcome to the struggle to return our market economy to its true purpose and original intent.
GET UPDATES FROM Gary Hart
The New Debate About Capitalism
Posted: 1/12/12 07:14 PM ET
The current Republican nomination contest has revealed serious confusion over the nature of our economic system. Very conservative candidates are attacking Governor Romney because his experience at Bain Capital involved buying companies with borrowed money, firing their employees, then selling them for a profit. Many, though not all, of these companies then went bankrupt, and Mr. Romney and his partners made millions. Sounding very much like Democrats, Mr. Romney's opponents are highly critical of this kind of capitalism.
Traditional capitalism was based on the idea that business people would invest money, usually borrowed, to establish a business, hire people, and make and sell things. Risk was involved, but jobs were created and profits were made. Traditional Republicans, including those now attacking Mr. Romney, still believe, as do most Americans, that this is the way our economic system should work.
The confusion within the ranks of capitalism is stimulated by the shift in our economy from making and selling things to manipulation of money. The rise of the money culture began a couple of decades or more ago and involves mergers and acquisitions, venture capitalism, leveraged buyouts, workouts and turnarounds, currency speculation, and arbitrage. While the money culture was booming, traditional capitalism based on manufacturing was declining. The national government had to intervene to save what was left of the American auto industry.
The money culture led directly to the housing bubble and subsequent economic collapse in 2008, from which we are still struggling to emerge. Unlike traditional capitalism, it is oriented toward the short term, not the long term, and toward quick profit, not productivity. If tens of millions of dollars can be made in bundling high-risk mortgages and collateralized debt obligations in a few months, why go to the trouble of building a factory, hiring and training workers, and producing a product that is competitive in world markets with profits emerging sometime down the road?
The Tea Party blames our government for this situation, and Occupy Wall Street focuses on the money culture (Wall Street). The government did not create the money culture. And public deficits, so much the focus of the Tea Party, arise from insufficient revenues to pay for the programs, including Social Security and Medicare, that most Americans, including Tea Party members, want. The money manipulators, now the focus of Republican candidates, manage to find intriguing ways, including off-shore bank accounts, to avoid paying fair taxes.
All of this is pretty well-known. What is surprising is that it is now being discovered and strongly criticized by Republican leaders who, up to now, have been silent on this transformation of American capitalism. While struggling to convince the American public that Barack Obama is a socialist, it is very easy to overlook the drift of our market economy away from its traditional roots into something resembling a high-risk, high-rollers', fast-shuffle casino that produces nothing except massive incomes for one-percent insiders. Republican leaders are now welcome to the struggle to return our market economy to its true purpose and original intent.
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy---The Movie
Having tried three times to read the book and not being able to finish it, I was glad to see the movie. Spy novels are not my forte. I finally decided that in the book the densely layered plot wasn't worth my struggle to finish it. Overall the movie is pretty good.
The movie is completely plot driven with no special effects and minimal music. Hurray!
I already knew who the mole was so the ending was anti-climactic. Still I enjoyed it.
The movie is completely plot driven with no special effects and minimal music. Hurray!
I already knew who the mole was so the ending was anti-climactic. Still I enjoyed it.
Friday, January 13, 2012
"Lefty" From a Strange Source
Gingrich, Romney, and the Morality of Capitalism
by Jonathan Cohn
Gingrich, Romney, and the Morality of Capitalism Republicans v. the Unemployed
I finally got around to watching “When Mitt Romney Came to Town,” the propaganda film about Romney’s work at Bain Capital. It’s even more remarkable than advertised. The film, paid for by the Super PAC supporting Newt Gingrich, doesn't merely stake out territory that's to the left of the Republican mainstream. It also stakes out territory that's to the left of the Democratic mainstream.
At the risk of simplifying things a bit, a rough consensus about the economy has prevailed among both Democrats and Republicans for some time. It's the idea that, fundamentally, capitalism works – that, except in cases of obvious market failure like health care or environmental degradation, we’re all better off if the free market is allowed to operate without substantial interference. Capital should flow to the most profitable investments, labor should be flexible to allow the greatest efficiency, and so on. That’s the way to create the most wealth for society and, ultimately, creating the most wealth will benefit the most people – even if, in the process, some people lose their jobs or struggle in other ways.
Within this consensus, the major debate has been over treatment of the victims of this “creative destruction.” Should government intervene extensively, as Democrats prefer, by redistributing income through the tax code and building a strong safety net? Or should government do the absolute minimum, as Republicans prefer, on the theory that taxes and public programs only hold back the market's wealth-creating abilities. In other words, the focus was on dealing with the by-products of capitalism, rather than tinkering with the machinery itself.
“When Mitt Romney Came to Town” pretends, very early on, to affirm that consensus: Its first line is "Capitalism made America great." The implication is that the film is an attack on Romney's work at Bain, not capitalism itself. But the rest of the movie telegraphs a rather different message. It never grapples with the question of whether Bain’s actions made the economy more efficient (which, by the way, they may have) because it doesn't appear to consider that question relevant. Instead, it focuses on a purely moral issue: Is it fair to make huge profits by downsizing and outsourcing, as Romney and Bain frequently did.
The film's answer is apparent in many places, among them a montage of quotes from from displaced workers:
“It all ends up back at greed.”
“No matter how much they already had, they could never get enough money.”
“What do you get out of treating people like this?”
“He is there for the almighty dollar.”
Once upon a time, arguments like that were pretty common in conventional American politics. Liberals, particularly those in and around the labor movement, openly questioned the morality of business practices. Although (mostly) they didn't want to end capitalism, they were not shy about trying to control and redirect it. But with the decline of the labor movement and centrist reorientation of the Democratic Party, that language and that message have largely fallen out of style, with only outliers like Michael Moore making it loudly and consistently.
Perhaps that's starting to change, thanks in no small part to Occupy Wall Street and, now, supporters of Newt Gingrich. Yes, that's an ironic development. It's also an overdue one. The lefty critique may have flaws, but it also improves our political conversation.
by Jonathan Cohn
Gingrich, Romney, and the Morality of Capitalism Republicans v. the Unemployed
I finally got around to watching “When Mitt Romney Came to Town,” the propaganda film about Romney’s work at Bain Capital. It’s even more remarkable than advertised. The film, paid for by the Super PAC supporting Newt Gingrich, doesn't merely stake out territory that's to the left of the Republican mainstream. It also stakes out territory that's to the left of the Democratic mainstream.
At the risk of simplifying things a bit, a rough consensus about the economy has prevailed among both Democrats and Republicans for some time. It's the idea that, fundamentally, capitalism works – that, except in cases of obvious market failure like health care or environmental degradation, we’re all better off if the free market is allowed to operate without substantial interference. Capital should flow to the most profitable investments, labor should be flexible to allow the greatest efficiency, and so on. That’s the way to create the most wealth for society and, ultimately, creating the most wealth will benefit the most people – even if, in the process, some people lose their jobs or struggle in other ways.
Within this consensus, the major debate has been over treatment of the victims of this “creative destruction.” Should government intervene extensively, as Democrats prefer, by redistributing income through the tax code and building a strong safety net? Or should government do the absolute minimum, as Republicans prefer, on the theory that taxes and public programs only hold back the market's wealth-creating abilities. In other words, the focus was on dealing with the by-products of capitalism, rather than tinkering with the machinery itself.
“When Mitt Romney Came to Town” pretends, very early on, to affirm that consensus: Its first line is "Capitalism made America great." The implication is that the film is an attack on Romney's work at Bain, not capitalism itself. But the rest of the movie telegraphs a rather different message. It never grapples with the question of whether Bain’s actions made the economy more efficient (which, by the way, they may have) because it doesn't appear to consider that question relevant. Instead, it focuses on a purely moral issue: Is it fair to make huge profits by downsizing and outsourcing, as Romney and Bain frequently did.
The film's answer is apparent in many places, among them a montage of quotes from from displaced workers:
“It all ends up back at greed.”
“No matter how much they already had, they could never get enough money.”
“What do you get out of treating people like this?”
“He is there for the almighty dollar.”
Once upon a time, arguments like that were pretty common in conventional American politics. Liberals, particularly those in and around the labor movement, openly questioned the morality of business practices. Although (mostly) they didn't want to end capitalism, they were not shy about trying to control and redirect it. But with the decline of the labor movement and centrist reorientation of the Democratic Party, that language and that message have largely fallen out of style, with only outliers like Michael Moore making it loudly and consistently.
Perhaps that's starting to change, thanks in no small part to Occupy Wall Street and, now, supporters of Newt Gingrich. Yes, that's an ironic development. It's also an overdue one. The lefty critique may have flaws, but it also improves our political conversation.
Romney's Lies
by Paul Krugman
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
January 13, 2012, 9:00 am
Untruths, Wholly Untrue, And Nothing But Untruths
I was deeply radicalized by the 2000 election. At first I couldn’t believe that then-candidate George W. Bush was saying so many clearly, provably false things; then I couldn’t believe that nobody in the news media was willing to point out the lies. (At the time, the Times actually told me that I couldn’t use the l-word either). That was when I formulated my “views differ on shape of planet” motto.
Now, however, Mitt Romney seems determined to rehabilitate Bush’s reputation, by running a campaign so dishonest that it makes Bush look like a model of truth-telling.
I mean, is there anything at all in Romney’s stump speech that’s true? It’s all based on attacking Obama for apologizing for America, which he didn’t, on making deep cuts in defense, which he also didn’t, and on being a radical redistributionist who wants equality of outcomes, which he isn’t. When the issue turns to jobs, Romney makes false assertions both about Obama’s record and about his own. I can’t find a single true assertion anywhere.
And he keeps finding new frontiers of falsehood. The good people at CBPP find him asserting, with regard to programs aiding low-income Americans, that
What unfortunately happens is with all the multiplicity of federal programs, you have massive overhead, with government bureaucrats in Washington administering all these programs, very little of the money that’s actually needed by those that really need help, those that can’t care for themselves, actually reaches them.
which is utterly, totally untrue. Administrative costs are actually quite small, and between 91 and 99 percent of spending, depending on the program, does in fact go to beneficiaries.
At this rate, Romney will soon start lying about his own name. Oh, wait.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
January 13, 2012, 9:00 am
Untruths, Wholly Untrue, And Nothing But Untruths
I was deeply radicalized by the 2000 election. At first I couldn’t believe that then-candidate George W. Bush was saying so many clearly, provably false things; then I couldn’t believe that nobody in the news media was willing to point out the lies. (At the time, the Times actually told me that I couldn’t use the l-word either). That was when I formulated my “views differ on shape of planet” motto.
Now, however, Mitt Romney seems determined to rehabilitate Bush’s reputation, by running a campaign so dishonest that it makes Bush look like a model of truth-telling.
I mean, is there anything at all in Romney’s stump speech that’s true? It’s all based on attacking Obama for apologizing for America, which he didn’t, on making deep cuts in defense, which he also didn’t, and on being a radical redistributionist who wants equality of outcomes, which he isn’t. When the issue turns to jobs, Romney makes false assertions both about Obama’s record and about his own. I can’t find a single true assertion anywhere.
And he keeps finding new frontiers of falsehood. The good people at CBPP find him asserting, with regard to programs aiding low-income Americans, that
What unfortunately happens is with all the multiplicity of federal programs, you have massive overhead, with government bureaucrats in Washington administering all these programs, very little of the money that’s actually needed by those that really need help, those that can’t care for themselves, actually reaches them.
which is utterly, totally untrue. Administrative costs are actually quite small, and between 91 and 99 percent of spending, depending on the program, does in fact go to beneficiaries.
At this rate, Romney will soon start lying about his own name. Oh, wait.
Sunday, January 8, 2012
The Anti-Obama Cult
PartySunday, Jan 8, 2012 8:00 AM 10:18:17 CST
The anti-Obama cult
In the GOP’s hatred of the president, the rote ravings of True BelieversBy Gary Kamiya
On Wednesday morning, I opened the New York Times to read that president Hu Jin-Tao had denounced the West for launching a culture war against China. “We must clearly see that international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic plot of westernizing and dividing China, and ideological and cultural fields are the focal areas of their long-term infiltration,” Hu pronounced in “Seeking Truth,” a Communist Party magazine. “We should deeply understand the seriousness and complexity of the ideological struggle, always sound the alarms and remain vigilant, and take forceful measures to be on guard and respond.”
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Was it really possible that such wooden slogans were still being used by the leaders of the country with the most dynamic economy on earth? “We should deeply understand”? “Always sound the alarms”? Those antique phrases sounded like they’d been torn from a poster that had been pasted up during the Cultural Revolution and somehow never taken down. It seemed that not that much had changed since soon-to-be-Chairman Mao was writing tomes rejoicing in titles like “To Be Attacked by the Enemy Is Not a Bad Thing but a Good Thing” and urging the members of the party to cut off the head of imperialist snakes. A belief system as nutty as Maoism took a long time to get out of a nation’s system. I pitied the poor 1.3 billion Chinese, living in a country so insecure, so adolescent, so in thrall to authoritarian nationalism, that its politicians felt impelled to keep the cult alive. Thank God I’m an American, I told myself. We have plenty of cults, but at least they don’t get involved with our national politics.
Then I watched Michele Bachmann’s withdrawal speech.
Bachmann’s speech was a religious testimony, informing us that on the evening of March 21, 2010, she had a divine revelation. OK, she didn’t use the word “divine,” but that was basically the idea. You see, her holy revelation started with the Founding Fathers. And for Bachmann, Washington and Jefferson, if not literally angels, are flying around in their neighborhood.
“Entrusted to every American is their responsibility to watch over our Republic,” she began her speech. “You can look back from the time of the Pilgrims to the time of William Penn, to the time of our Founding Fathers. All we have to do is look around because very clearly we are encompassed with a great cloud of witnesses that bear witness to the sacrifices that were made to establish the U.S. and the precious principle of freedom that has made it the greatest force for good that has ever been seen on the planet.”
The “great cloud of witnesses” is a biblical term. By invoking it, Bachmann moved the Founding Fathers into the company of the prophets. And then she related her own humble journey to join the saved souls atop that great cloud – an epic quest that was spurred by the near-miraculous intercession of a painting of the Founding Fathers signing the Constitution.
“Every schoolchild is familiar with this painting,” Bachmann said. “But I’ve been privileged to see it on a regular basis, doing my duties in Congress. But never were the painting’s poignant reminder more evident than on the evening of March 21, 2010. That was the evening that Obamacare was passed and staring out from the painting are the faces of the founders, and in particular the face of Ben Franklin, who served as a constant reminder of the fragile Republic that he and the founders gave to us. That day served as the inspiration for my run for the President of the United States, because I believed firmly that what Congress had done and what President Obama had done in passing Obamacare endangered the very survival of the United States of America, our Republic.”
Bachmann closed her sermon by saying, “I look forward to the next chapter in God’s plan.”
Of such blinding revelations, religions are made. And cults.
The Republican hatred of Obama has become a cult. It is typically dressed up with the trappings of Christianity, but the cult does not reflect the teachings of that Jewish heretic known as Jesus of Nazareth — unless you believe, as Bachmann appears to, that defeating “Obamacare” is an essential part of the Lord’s master plan for the universe. (Personally, I would have thought that the great soul who reached out to the poor, the sick and the despised would have preferred universal healthcare over a system devoted to swelling the profits of those modern-day money-changers known as insurance companies, but what do I know?) But that is not to say that the version of Christianity embraced by many members of the anti-Obama cult does not play a key role in the movement, in ways we shall presently explore.
The anti-Obama cult is based on an irrational, grossly excessive fear and hatred of something the cult members call “big government” or “socialism,” and an equally irrational worship of something they call “freedom” or “liberty.” The fear and hatred of big government is irrational and excessive because Obama’s innocuous heathcare bill, the passage of which cult members like Bachmann see as the beginning of the end for America, is far less momentous as a piece of “social engineering” than Social Security, Medicare, welfare or progressive taxation.
We already live in a world where government intrudes on our freedom in a multitude of ways. Moreover, other enormous, impersonal forces, mainly corporate ones, constrain our liberty even more directly. Many of the “average Americans” the cult members claim to be speaking for lost their life savings when the bubble caused by an orgy of unregulated financial speculation burst – a far greater infringement on their “freedom” than being required to carry health insurance.
As for Obama himself, he is a bland left-leaning centrist, a slightly more liberal clone of moderate Republicans like Dwight D. Eisenhower, and his “socialist” policies are part of a long American tradition that goes back to FDR.
Why, then, did the anti-Obama cult suddenly take over the entire Republican Party?
The main reason, I believe, is that the American right was backed into a corner and had no other card to play. The disastrous presidency of George W. Bush revealed the complete bankruptcy (literally) of the two core right-wing nostrums, “freedom” (good) and “big government” (bad). “Freedom” had led to the biggest meltdown since the Great Depression. And big government – which was greatly expanded by Bush, to the deafening silence of the soon-to-be-anti-Obama fanatics – had done nothing to prevent it. In the wreckage left by Bush, there was nothing for the right to do, if it wanted to live to fight another day, except deny causality (and reality) and demonize Obama. By naively reaching out to Republicans, Obama let them get away with this, and squandered a teachable moment that could have changed the face of American politics.
The right survived. But defending this indefensible position squeezed its core beliefs into a kind of black hole, a blank spot of pure resentment, devoid of content, where the laws of logic did not apply. (According to Wikipedia, “Black holes of stellar mass are expected to form when very massive stars collapse at the end of their life cycle.”) As a result, “freedom” and its evil twin, “big government,” became metaphysical concepts, so elastic and amorphous that they could mean anything or nothing. They have come to play the same role in right-wing discourse as “the bourgeoisie” and “the workers” do in Marxism – they’re catchalls that can be plugged into any situation.
Thus, “big government” mostly means “giving money to undeserving people with dark skin” – a core GOP belief, central to the party since Nixon’s Southern Strategy, that Rick Santorum was rash enough to articulate. But it also has a cultural dimension in which it means pointy-headed elites who look down on “real Americans.” And trickiest of all, it also has a personal dimension in which it means anything that limits individual freedom — which explains the appeal, to those Republicans and independents who are genuine and consistent libertarians, of Ron Paul. (It is because “freedom” does not actually mean anything in the orthodox right-wing universe that non-libertarian conservatives like Romney, Bachmann, Santorum and the rest can advocate for intrusive drug laws, anti-gay laws and massive military budgets, while wrapping themselves in the mantle of “liberty.”)
Because “big government” does not have a fixed meaning, attacking it can simultaneously serve as a rallying cry for racial resentment, an impassioned demand for personal liberation and a marker of class- and region-based solidarity. This is why when the Republican candidates inveigh against big government, which they do approximately every time they open their mouths, their rants have all the weird, malevolent imprecision of a Stalinist attack on “running dog lackeys of the bourgeoisie.” They are the ravings of True Believers, of cult members.
Also lurking in that black hole was the one right-wing card that Bush did not destroy, because it is indestructible — the “culture war.” The far right’s free-floating hatred of America’s liberal, secular culture waxes and wanes, but it never goes away, and it is responsible for the rise of Rick Santorum, the GOP’s latest Dispose-a-Candidate. For Santorum, sinful modern life is to blame for everything, and it is our duty to always sound the alarms and remain vigilant against it. Thus, when the Catholic Church’s pedophilia scandal broke, Santorum blamed, not the church that covered it up or the individual priests who disgraced themselves and abused their position, but – Boston.
He wrote:
“When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm. We must clearly see that international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic plot of liberalizing and dividing America, and ideological and cultural fields are the focal areas of their long-term infiltration.”
OK, I borrowed that last sentence from the quote by Comrade Hu, but you have to admit it tracks pretty well with the thoughts of Chairman Santorum.
The implosion of right-wing ideology and the persistence of the culture war toxin might have been enough by itself to create the anti-Obama cult, but two other factors also played a role. The first was his race. For many right-wingers, Obama was a foreign object, whose unexpected entrance into the body politic activated their immune systems – hence the “birther” movement and other bizarre right-wing obsessions. Whether the right’s aversion to Obama constitutes classic racism is a Talmudic question; what is undeniable is that his race activated a horde of (literally) white cells, rushing to expel the invader. Like organisms, cults always delineate themselves by drawing sharp lines between Us and Them.
The second reason involves Christianity. As Michele Bachmann’s speech demonstrated, for many devout right-wing Christians, there is no real difference between politics and religion. If religion is the uppermost thing in one’s life, if Jesus is with one every minute of every day, then it is easy to see how a true believer like Bachmann could come to see preserving her vision of the Republic as a semi-sacred trust, and defeating “Obamacare” as an essential part of that godly mission. Moreover, devoutly literalistic Christians tend to divide the world up into Good and Evil, with the founding dyad of God and the devil lurking in the background; it is not too much of a stretch to say that for many right-wing Christians, Barack Obama is at least of the devil’s party, if not Beelzebub himself.
Let me make it clear that I am not arguing that Christianity itself is a cult, or that Christians (or adherents of any religion) are inherently drawn to cultlike thinking. I am simply making the case that the right wing’s irrational hatred of Obama is cultlike, and that the literalist Christian faith of many right-wing opponents of Obama, including many of the GOP presidential candidates, clearly plays a role in their extreme beliefs.
To be sure, much of the anti-Obama cult is just Machiavellian politics. You hunt where the ducks are, and the ducks in this case are loons. It is extremely unlikely that Mitt Romney stares at a painting of Ben Franklin every day and has celestial visions of turning back Obama’s satanic plan to destroy America — which is precisely why the True Believers can’t stand him. But things have gotten Chairman Mao-y enough in the Republican Party that Romney has been forced to do his best to pretend he is a card-carrying member of the People’s Glorious Tea Party, Determined to Kill All Wriggling Socialist Snakes. Whether a fake cult member will prove more attractive to Republican voters than the genuine article will determine who will face Obama this fall.
The anti-Obama cult
In the GOP’s hatred of the president, the rote ravings of True BelieversBy Gary Kamiya
On Wednesday morning, I opened the New York Times to read that president Hu Jin-Tao had denounced the West for launching a culture war against China. “We must clearly see that international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic plot of westernizing and dividing China, and ideological and cultural fields are the focal areas of their long-term infiltration,” Hu pronounced in “Seeking Truth,” a Communist Party magazine. “We should deeply understand the seriousness and complexity of the ideological struggle, always sound the alarms and remain vigilant, and take forceful measures to be on guard and respond.”
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Was it really possible that such wooden slogans were still being used by the leaders of the country with the most dynamic economy on earth? “We should deeply understand”? “Always sound the alarms”? Those antique phrases sounded like they’d been torn from a poster that had been pasted up during the Cultural Revolution and somehow never taken down. It seemed that not that much had changed since soon-to-be-Chairman Mao was writing tomes rejoicing in titles like “To Be Attacked by the Enemy Is Not a Bad Thing but a Good Thing” and urging the members of the party to cut off the head of imperialist snakes. A belief system as nutty as Maoism took a long time to get out of a nation’s system. I pitied the poor 1.3 billion Chinese, living in a country so insecure, so adolescent, so in thrall to authoritarian nationalism, that its politicians felt impelled to keep the cult alive. Thank God I’m an American, I told myself. We have plenty of cults, but at least they don’t get involved with our national politics.
Then I watched Michele Bachmann’s withdrawal speech.
Bachmann’s speech was a religious testimony, informing us that on the evening of March 21, 2010, she had a divine revelation. OK, she didn’t use the word “divine,” but that was basically the idea. You see, her holy revelation started with the Founding Fathers. And for Bachmann, Washington and Jefferson, if not literally angels, are flying around in their neighborhood.
“Entrusted to every American is their responsibility to watch over our Republic,” she began her speech. “You can look back from the time of the Pilgrims to the time of William Penn, to the time of our Founding Fathers. All we have to do is look around because very clearly we are encompassed with a great cloud of witnesses that bear witness to the sacrifices that were made to establish the U.S. and the precious principle of freedom that has made it the greatest force for good that has ever been seen on the planet.”
The “great cloud of witnesses” is a biblical term. By invoking it, Bachmann moved the Founding Fathers into the company of the prophets. And then she related her own humble journey to join the saved souls atop that great cloud – an epic quest that was spurred by the near-miraculous intercession of a painting of the Founding Fathers signing the Constitution.
“Every schoolchild is familiar with this painting,” Bachmann said. “But I’ve been privileged to see it on a regular basis, doing my duties in Congress. But never were the painting’s poignant reminder more evident than on the evening of March 21, 2010. That was the evening that Obamacare was passed and staring out from the painting are the faces of the founders, and in particular the face of Ben Franklin, who served as a constant reminder of the fragile Republic that he and the founders gave to us. That day served as the inspiration for my run for the President of the United States, because I believed firmly that what Congress had done and what President Obama had done in passing Obamacare endangered the very survival of the United States of America, our Republic.”
Bachmann closed her sermon by saying, “I look forward to the next chapter in God’s plan.”
Of such blinding revelations, religions are made. And cults.
The Republican hatred of Obama has become a cult. It is typically dressed up with the trappings of Christianity, but the cult does not reflect the teachings of that Jewish heretic known as Jesus of Nazareth — unless you believe, as Bachmann appears to, that defeating “Obamacare” is an essential part of the Lord’s master plan for the universe. (Personally, I would have thought that the great soul who reached out to the poor, the sick and the despised would have preferred universal healthcare over a system devoted to swelling the profits of those modern-day money-changers known as insurance companies, but what do I know?) But that is not to say that the version of Christianity embraced by many members of the anti-Obama cult does not play a key role in the movement, in ways we shall presently explore.
The anti-Obama cult is based on an irrational, grossly excessive fear and hatred of something the cult members call “big government” or “socialism,” and an equally irrational worship of something they call “freedom” or “liberty.” The fear and hatred of big government is irrational and excessive because Obama’s innocuous heathcare bill, the passage of which cult members like Bachmann see as the beginning of the end for America, is far less momentous as a piece of “social engineering” than Social Security, Medicare, welfare or progressive taxation.
We already live in a world where government intrudes on our freedom in a multitude of ways. Moreover, other enormous, impersonal forces, mainly corporate ones, constrain our liberty even more directly. Many of the “average Americans” the cult members claim to be speaking for lost their life savings when the bubble caused by an orgy of unregulated financial speculation burst – a far greater infringement on their “freedom” than being required to carry health insurance.
As for Obama himself, he is a bland left-leaning centrist, a slightly more liberal clone of moderate Republicans like Dwight D. Eisenhower, and his “socialist” policies are part of a long American tradition that goes back to FDR.
Why, then, did the anti-Obama cult suddenly take over the entire Republican Party?
The main reason, I believe, is that the American right was backed into a corner and had no other card to play. The disastrous presidency of George W. Bush revealed the complete bankruptcy (literally) of the two core right-wing nostrums, “freedom” (good) and “big government” (bad). “Freedom” had led to the biggest meltdown since the Great Depression. And big government – which was greatly expanded by Bush, to the deafening silence of the soon-to-be-anti-Obama fanatics – had done nothing to prevent it. In the wreckage left by Bush, there was nothing for the right to do, if it wanted to live to fight another day, except deny causality (and reality) and demonize Obama. By naively reaching out to Republicans, Obama let them get away with this, and squandered a teachable moment that could have changed the face of American politics.
The right survived. But defending this indefensible position squeezed its core beliefs into a kind of black hole, a blank spot of pure resentment, devoid of content, where the laws of logic did not apply. (According to Wikipedia, “Black holes of stellar mass are expected to form when very massive stars collapse at the end of their life cycle.”) As a result, “freedom” and its evil twin, “big government,” became metaphysical concepts, so elastic and amorphous that they could mean anything or nothing. They have come to play the same role in right-wing discourse as “the bourgeoisie” and “the workers” do in Marxism – they’re catchalls that can be plugged into any situation.
Thus, “big government” mostly means “giving money to undeserving people with dark skin” – a core GOP belief, central to the party since Nixon’s Southern Strategy, that Rick Santorum was rash enough to articulate. But it also has a cultural dimension in which it means pointy-headed elites who look down on “real Americans.” And trickiest of all, it also has a personal dimension in which it means anything that limits individual freedom — which explains the appeal, to those Republicans and independents who are genuine and consistent libertarians, of Ron Paul. (It is because “freedom” does not actually mean anything in the orthodox right-wing universe that non-libertarian conservatives like Romney, Bachmann, Santorum and the rest can advocate for intrusive drug laws, anti-gay laws and massive military budgets, while wrapping themselves in the mantle of “liberty.”)
Because “big government” does not have a fixed meaning, attacking it can simultaneously serve as a rallying cry for racial resentment, an impassioned demand for personal liberation and a marker of class- and region-based solidarity. This is why when the Republican candidates inveigh against big government, which they do approximately every time they open their mouths, their rants have all the weird, malevolent imprecision of a Stalinist attack on “running dog lackeys of the bourgeoisie.” They are the ravings of True Believers, of cult members.
Also lurking in that black hole was the one right-wing card that Bush did not destroy, because it is indestructible — the “culture war.” The far right’s free-floating hatred of America’s liberal, secular culture waxes and wanes, but it never goes away, and it is responsible for the rise of Rick Santorum, the GOP’s latest Dispose-a-Candidate. For Santorum, sinful modern life is to blame for everything, and it is our duty to always sound the alarms and remain vigilant against it. Thus, when the Catholic Church’s pedophilia scandal broke, Santorum blamed, not the church that covered it up or the individual priests who disgraced themselves and abused their position, but – Boston.
He wrote:
“When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm. We must clearly see that international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic plot of liberalizing and dividing America, and ideological and cultural fields are the focal areas of their long-term infiltration.”
OK, I borrowed that last sentence from the quote by Comrade Hu, but you have to admit it tracks pretty well with the thoughts of Chairman Santorum.
The implosion of right-wing ideology and the persistence of the culture war toxin might have been enough by itself to create the anti-Obama cult, but two other factors also played a role. The first was his race. For many right-wingers, Obama was a foreign object, whose unexpected entrance into the body politic activated their immune systems – hence the “birther” movement and other bizarre right-wing obsessions. Whether the right’s aversion to Obama constitutes classic racism is a Talmudic question; what is undeniable is that his race activated a horde of (literally) white cells, rushing to expel the invader. Like organisms, cults always delineate themselves by drawing sharp lines between Us and Them.
The second reason involves Christianity. As Michele Bachmann’s speech demonstrated, for many devout right-wing Christians, there is no real difference between politics and religion. If religion is the uppermost thing in one’s life, if Jesus is with one every minute of every day, then it is easy to see how a true believer like Bachmann could come to see preserving her vision of the Republic as a semi-sacred trust, and defeating “Obamacare” as an essential part of that godly mission. Moreover, devoutly literalistic Christians tend to divide the world up into Good and Evil, with the founding dyad of God and the devil lurking in the background; it is not too much of a stretch to say that for many right-wing Christians, Barack Obama is at least of the devil’s party, if not Beelzebub himself.
Let me make it clear that I am not arguing that Christianity itself is a cult, or that Christians (or adherents of any religion) are inherently drawn to cultlike thinking. I am simply making the case that the right wing’s irrational hatred of Obama is cultlike, and that the literalist Christian faith of many right-wing opponents of Obama, including many of the GOP presidential candidates, clearly plays a role in their extreme beliefs.
To be sure, much of the anti-Obama cult is just Machiavellian politics. You hunt where the ducks are, and the ducks in this case are loons. It is extremely unlikely that Mitt Romney stares at a painting of Ben Franklin every day and has celestial visions of turning back Obama’s satanic plan to destroy America — which is precisely why the True Believers can’t stand him. But things have gotten Chairman Mao-y enough in the Republican Party that Romney has been forced to do his best to pretend he is a card-carrying member of the People’s Glorious Tea Party, Determined to Kill All Wriggling Socialist Snakes. Whether a fake cult member will prove more attractive to Republican voters than the genuine article will determine who will face Obama this fall.
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