Barack and Britney

I have neither read nor watched any "news" in about 5 weeks, and I was reminded this week of why this abreviated abstinence surely added years to my life.

The one bit of "news" I have been privy to recently is that John McCain made an ad linking Barack Obama and Britney Spears, deriding them both simply as "celebrities" who might make you want to throw your underwear on the stage but who you should not want to be in charge of bombing Iran.

Really? There are so many ways to dissect this phantasmagoric culture-fuck that I hardly know where to begin.

Firstly, I guess it's refreshing that the ad didn't subtly apply that, if Brother Obama were elected, he would deflower our precious and pure nubile womenfolk. This may be due in part to the fact that Britney Spears is about as pure as and nubile as a truck-stop bathroom.

The relative chastity of our favorite daughters aside, I am serious when I say I applaud the lack of overt "Obama's gonna pimp out our women" ads. We have made progress in this regard, at least; nobody's making ads with Barack Obama filling in for Willie Horton. The fallback strategy, however, is bizarre in the extreme.

John McCain isn't saying we need to save our Britneys from Barack; he's saying Britney is Barack! Welcome to post-racial America, which is less racist but every bit as idiotic as the prior iteration.

It has been rather fascinating to witness how Hillary Clinton, and now John McCain, have gone to great pains to paint Obama's infectious popularity as being ipso facto evidence of his lack of real leadership qualities. Surely one cannot be both popular and wise!

What a dismal worldview this is; it leaves no room for likeable people that are actually worth knowing. If one is interesting, inspiring, in touch, he must necessarily be illegitimate, naive, perhaps even devious, nay, treacherous.

The problem with this argument, and the reason Senators Clinton and McCain are having a hard time refining the rubric of this narrative, is that it implies a rather dismal view of the intelligence and judgement of the American people.

Their argument says, essentially, "If the American people are intoxicated by a politician, that obviously means that said politician is a demagogue and a charlatan." The inescapable implication, of course, is that American voters are saps, which is true, but which must not be spoken in polite company (and if Presidential Candidates know anything, it's Political Correctness and Polite Company).

But to equate Barack Obama speaking to hundreds of thousands of Europeans, who would have stoned and spat upon our current president had he ever dared venture into public in a European capital, with a pop star whose claim to fame is the infrequency with which she wears underwear is....well, it's so pathetic that it's not even worth getting into a high-brow dissection of the thought process that went into it.

McCain, it is now manifest, is desperate. He should not feel feel desperate, however, as desperation implies some sort of control over one's destiny which is perceived to be slipping out of reach. John McCain, however, never had control over anything.

McCain's lack of control is one of the most interesting things about this election, and it is a thing that could be rather liberating if the candidate himself accepted it. Put simply, this election has absolutely nothing to do with John McCain.

This election is a referendum on Barack Obama, and nothing more (as if that were not enough). John McCain is a brave man and a relatively decent man, but that is totally immaterial to the parameters of this election.

Americans will vote on whether or not they are comfortable with Obama. If they are not, it would make no difference who Obama's opponent was unless Obama was running against a darker-skinned person, perhaps even a woman, a lesbian, an atheist, a communist, or a Muslim (surely, several million voters are convinced that Obama is one of these things).

I am always one to look for historical precedent, and the one I am drawn to is the 1960 election. As with all historical analogies, the incongruities far outnumber the parallels, but it one sense, I think the comparison is apt.

The 1960 election pitted John Kennedy against Richard Nixon. Nixon was the sitting vice-president, and though still in his 40's, he was not the candidate of "change". He was a known quantity, promising to do nothing much more than not rock the boat.

Kennedy, however, was different. His youth, his religion, and his inner circle all represented dramatic change in the context of his times.

That election, accordingly, was nothing more than a referendum of whether people were okay with a young, roguish (read: scumbag), Catholic, openly intellectual (unlike today, when candidates are pressured to dumb down) candidate. Poor Dick Nixon, who was a far wiser man, indeed a great man, man than mainstream American thought acknowledges, got lost in the shuffle.

It isn't that Nixon in '60 and McCain in '08 are utterly predictable automatons; they are both strong candidates in their own right. But, due to the nature of their respective opponents, Dick and Mac found themselves in elections in which they wasted their time by even bothering to campaign.

This leads to the question: when the establishment candidate realizes that his only chance at winning is to make voters scared of endorsing his "radical" opponent, how does the establishment candidate react?

Well, Dick Nixon reacted by visiting all 50 states (back in the age when a round trip to Alaska was a week long, semi-dangerous proposition and an utter waste of time in terms of vote-gathering). Nixon took his case to the people in a way that no presidential candidate had done before.

Nixon fought hard (and, objectively speaking, won that election), but he never attacked Kennedy by comparing him to Elvis or to James Dean. There was never any commerical implying that, since Kennedy's wife was so hot, he must be a halfwit.

Yet that is what McCain, or at least his campaign (and does this man not put the "pain" in campaign?) has stooped to. No one likes a hater. Barack Obama has many manifest weaknesses that McCain could tastefully and constructively adress and exploit, but he seems not to know how.

And do you know why? It isn't just because Obama's a celebrity; it's because of how Americans, even stodgy old Johnny Mac, apparently, behave around celebrities. Utterly intimidated, relived of your senses, so flustered and disoriented that your own value escapes you, and you are left with nothing but envy. And, not to get all Yoda with it, envy leads to hate.

The Pyhric Pinnacle

The adulating fascination with Winston Churchill among contemporary American "leaders" (it is far more apt to simply call them "power holders") is a disquieting exercise in supremely selective memory and overarching ignorance that should trouble all who value history as well as all who value the future which, barring narcissists and nihilists, includes all of us.

We tend to remember Churchill as the man who saved democracy, but let us consider that one could walk from Baghdad to South Africa 1939 without leaving British-controlled soil and simultaneously without walking upon soil whose tillers enjoyed the right to vote for their decision-makers.

It is utterly impolitic in the United States to imply that Hitler was anything short of the most evil and murderous man to ever live and that, had he not been crushed without regard to the cost, "we'd all be speaking German". The inconvenient truth, however, is that we sided with the wrong butcher. And it was Churchill, who some call "The Man of the Century", who was more responsible for this butcher's bill than anyone else.

Great Britain declared war on Germany when Germany insisted on re-taking historically German territory from Poland, an anti-Semitic dictatorship with which Hitler had vainly attempted to forge an alliance. Poland refused to negotiate with Hitler because, and only because, Great Britain promised the Poles protection.

For simple physical and logistical reasons, this protection was an utterly hollow promise, sort of like Bolivia pledging to go to war for the territorial integrity of Oklahoma, and though the bloodiest war in the history of the world was begun to "save" Poland, Poland spent the next 50 years under a tyranny....wait for it....worse than Hitler's.

Hitler was a hater. He hated many things. Among the things he did NOT hate were the British Empire and the United States. Among the things he DID hate were, of course, the Jews, but his most visceral ire was reserved for the Bolsheviks.

Hitler recognized and vowed to protect the British Empire and the Catholic Church, but he identified the Soviet Union as a cancer on civilization that must be lanced. And, since the Reich was on the geographical front line against the promised global Marxist revolution, he aimed to crush it in its crib. He did not ask for help. He asked simply to be left alone.

Again, is it heretical in our current paradigm to imply that Hitler's aims were in any way limited or rational because, among other reasons, the means which the United States and Great Britain used to defeat Germany were neither limited nor rational. American pilots killed more Germans in one night, on several different nights during the war, than the Luftwaffe killed during all of its "terror bombing" of England.

Faux-scholars, and legitimate ones as well, point to Mein Kampf as the blueprint for Hitler's intentions. They are right, of course, but only selectively so. Hitler promised to reverse the Carthaginian and unjust "peace" imposed on Germany after World War I, he promised to drive the Jews out of Germany, and he promised to crush the Soviet regime.

He accomplished these first two tasks largely without resistance from the West. When he embarked upon the third undertaking, however, the West attacked. Even though any even lukewarm proponent of protected religion and basic human dignity would have rejoiced at seeing Stalin on the wrong end of a sword, the West attacked as Hitler began his assault on the greatest mass murderer in history.

On September 1, 1939, Hitler and Stalin both invaded Poland. Great Britain declared war on Hitler. Why? And at what cost? Poland lost a greater percentage of its population in World War II than any country had lost in any war in prior human history. Then it was pimped out to a full half-century of tyranny and foreign occupation. Good thing the British guaranteed Poland "protection", huh?

Let us have no illusion about Hitler. He was a son of a bitch, he was a racist, and he planned to take over Eastern Europe. But, more importantly, let us have no illusions about Stalin. He was perhaps history's preeminent son of a bitch, and he DID take over Eastern Europe, but he did so with the blessing of the world's only democracies, including our own.

Let it be said: the cost of crushing Hitler was to resign the nations the West claimed to aim to "save" to a fate even worse than what Hitler had in store.

It has perpetually been in vogue to denounce Neville Chamberlain for his "appeasement" of Hitler at Munich, just as it has been in vogue to see Winston Churchill as a man ahead of his time, as the man who alone understood the danger of Nazism and held the line against all odds during those long and lonely years of 1940 and 1941, when a cigar-chomping, brandy-swilling imperilast and first-degree racist, Winton Churchill, single-handedly staved off the extinction of Western Civilization.

But what did Chamberlain give up? At Munich, Chamberlain allowed Hitler to claim the Sudetenland. The Sudetenland was a nearly universally German region of Czechoslovakia, a nation created out of thin air 20 years prior. More than 90% of Sudetens voiced their desire to return to Germany. Was this appeasement, to return confiscated property to its historical owner?

Fast forward six years, when Churchill allowed Stalin to claim an entire half of the European continent, none of which had been historically Russian, and none of which had voiced any desire to be governed from Moscow. How was this not "appeasement"?

Chamberlain gave a million Germans back to Germany. This is the perenially-cited definition of "appeasement". Churchill gave tens of millions of Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Ukranians, Albanians, Bosnians, Macedonians, Serbs, Croatians, Bulgarians, Romanians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Germans, and assorted others to the greatest mass murder who has ever lived.

All this, after declaring a war which led to 50 million deaths and the ruin of the British Empire, a war declared to protect the very countries which were so casually signed off to a half century Soviet tyranny before said war was even over.

Much as the Americans in Iraq (a country created in large part by Mr. Churchill....thanks again, Winston), Churchill seemed utterly seduced by the temptation of employing apocalyptic levels of organized violence against an unarguably distasteful man.

He butressed this all-too-human impulse, and herein lies the key, by an incomprehensible disregard for the fact that there would be a day after, and that the day after was as much as responsibility of willing belligerents as the war itself.

As Americans, we have an understandable inability to empathize with the rational interests of landlocked states surrounded by hostile powers with military parity. States like Germany. States like the Soviet Union during the Cold War. States like contemporary Iran.

As a result of this geographic blessing, the most divine accident, we are blind to the realities that such states face. This is not meant as an apology for Hitler, of course. But neither should shoddy scholarship be allowed to serve as an apology for Stalin.

It is as simple as this: the West had two odious choices in 1939. Should we side with Hitler or with Stalin when they inevitably clash? Instead of choosing to let the despots bleed each other and undermine their tyrannies, the West subsidized and bled for the worse of the two.

In the 1980's, the West had a similar choice. Iraq and Iran were facing off along similar fronts. Iraq was the Germany. The state to the West, the bulwark protecting a certain secular region from an insidious and expansionist ideology from the East. Iraq was a brutal, vaguely fascist state. Not an appealing actor, but who was the enemy?

The enemy was Iran. Iran was the Soviet Union. The state to the East, a relatively new revolutionary experiment which promised to export its ideology around the world. Clearly, this was the more threatening enemy to the West. And the West acted accordingly, if amorally, by aiding and arming Saddam Hussein for forming the military barrier against the latest expansionist ideology.

How far have we fallen? There are never perfect choices, but we seem preordained to follow Churchill into the moral morass of claiming to exalt certain immutable values as a matter of principle while simultaneously making such poor and naive decisions that we end up facing both possible enemies rather than siding with one in a way that would lead to a lasting peace.

If we study each of the two two cases above, Hitler vs. Stalin and Hussein vs. Khomeini, and we ask which dictator we have ended up funding only to end up fighting, the answer is, tragically, and in both cases.....both.

The Death of Decency

"Our world is morally upside down. We preserve nature but abort babies. We have developed technology to build strong, solid houses, but we have weak, sick homes. We are smarter, but no wiser, and we know more but understand less. We go faster, but we get nowhere. We have conquered space, but our habits have conquered us. We rescue the whales, but neglect and abuse our own children. At the root of it all is materialism."

"That Americans inhabit a less contemplative and judicious society than they did just four decades ago is arguable only to the ever-expanding group of infotainment marketers who stand to profit from the videoization of everything. The greater accessibility of information through computers and the internet serves to foster the illusion that the ability to retrieve words and numbers with the click of a mouse also confers the capacity to judge whether those words and numbers represent truth, lies, or something in between. These effects are especially deleterious in a culture with an endemic predilection for technological answers to non technological questions and an endemic suspicion of anything that smack of intellectual elitism."

The above quotes are written by a fundamentalist evangelical and a secular humanist, respectively. They are rare in their insight, and in the fact that they tell the same truth, however the two authors may despise each others' worldview. Above all though, such coherent and articulate critiques are the exception in our coarse and vulgar culture today.

As a historian, I'm not one to fall prey to willfully ignorant romanticizing of the past, but there are certain things that were better back in the day. Primary among these things are the ways we communicate with each other, and the type of communications we expect from our leaders.

It's not that politicians haven't always sniped at and insulted each other. But they used to do it with class. Winston Churchill was a pro at the cleverly crafted dis. Here are some classics:

"With a few more brains, sir, you could be a halfwit"

"Sir, you never open your mouth without subtracting from the sum of human intelligence."

And, of course: "In the morning, madam, I will no longer be drunk, but you will still be ugly."

Now, we have the immortal words of Dick Cheney: "Go fuck yourself."

The above is just a lighthearted example of the larger point: if we don't even expect our leaders to speak like intelligent human beings who care about language and ideas, why we would expect it from anyone else?

Boy George has, of course, elicited heaps of scorn from eggheads everywhere for his torturous syntax. What I think is much more relevant than his blunders, though, are the things he means to say. Primary among these is the use of the word "folks".

Mr. Bush will speak of everyone, everywhere, as folks. He will refer to the folks at FEMA, or the folks in New Orleans, or the folks in Baghdad, or the folks at NASA. In some ways, this is.....well, its folksy. In other ways, though, its rather disconcerting. The idea that the people raped by the hurricane are indistinguishable from the people tasked to save them? No offense, but I don't want "folks" running our government.

Consider:

Friends, Romans, folks

Of the folks, for the folks, by the folks

We shall bear witness that these folks shall not have fallen in vain

How wrong do those phrases sound? Pretty wrong, no? This idea that the president of the United States is just one of the folks is not populism; it is abdication of responsibility. It is as if an elementary school teacher thought of himself as just another member of the class. Who would that benefit?

It is this leveling-off tendency, this suspicion of intellectuals (only "liberal" intellectuals, of course), this hostility towards science and provable facts, that has permeated everything we are exposed to. Both the Bible-thumpers and the Bible-haters have much to complain about.

If there is any "ism" that will dominate American thought in the future, as expressed by our pop culture, it is nihilism. The rejection of the knowable, of the preferable, of the very idea of morality, is proudly evincing itself all around us.

Let me put it this way: some women may have once dressed in manners that uncouth and ribald men may have called "slutty". Now, some women dress in form-fitting shirts that have "SLUT" or "PORNSTAR" printed proudly across the chest. It was once scandalous to show a husband and wife sharing a single bed on TV. Now, it would be scandalous for any two adults on TV to be a monogamous married couple.

Since I'm still a bit too young to be a cranky old man (although 29 is the new 79) I really do think I'm onto something here. I think our culture is sick, and I think we polish the brass on the Titanic with fairy tales about our manifest goodness and delusions of grandeur.

But what is it that we really export to the world? Is it democracy? Or is it Girls Gone Wild? Is if free trade? Or is it Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Is it erudite and measured debates among free and informed citizens? Or is it an endless parade of blowhards screaming at each other about fags and flags? Is it Christianity? Or is it bottomless materialism? Is it freedom? Or is it nihilistic hedonism? Sometimes I think I'd hate us too.