Senator Obama, It’s Time to Come Clean
It was a crisp, fall evening in October, 2000. My U-10 soccer team, The Blue Vipers, were up against the perennial city champs, the Boys Club Hardrollers. They were a juggernaut–I swear some of their players had stubble and drove themselves to the match. I could go on and on about how they illegally recruited by grabbing up the best players from across the city, but that would make me seem small and petty. After all, it’s only a game, right? Right.
We took it to them, though, and at the half, we were leading 2-1. The lads were a little shocked at their success and so was I. But I didn’t tell them that. Everything was going according to my well-conceived match plan as I started my half time pep talk. Knute Rockne would have been proud.
“You see?” I exhorted. “They put their boots on one foot at time just like you do. Nobody thought you had a chance against this team–especially them. Now they’re scared and on the run. Let’s keep doing what we’re doing and go out there and finish the job!”
And then the kicker: “Can we beat this team? I said, can we beat this team?”
Everyone is unison: “YES. WE. CAN!”
Well, actually we couldn’t. They came back and beat us 4-2. But that’s not the point.
The point is: Senator Obama, it’s time to come clean.
18 Comments
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Mike the Eyeguy
And that goes for Deval Patrick, Cesar Chavez and Bob the Builder too.
This isn’t about delegates and nominations and elections and such. It’s about me and the Blue Vipers getting what’s coming to us–attribution. And respect.
tarwater
I have to defend Mr. Obama a bit here. I think there is much to be concerned about regarding his positions, but I don’t fault him for this minor misstep.
What may have legs are Michelle Obama’s comments:
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/jpodhoretz/2541
I for one am enormously proud of America.
Yes we can be arrogant, and often are. Yes we have a few major flaws (after all democracy is morally neutral). And yes I think the West is in decline, even serious decline (and here I agree with Newman, and his 18 propositions, that it is Liberalism that is the culprit: http://home.comcast.net/~icuweb/c035011.htm).
I am a medievalist and think we have a great deal to learn from our fathers.
Nevertheless is has been a great experiment, and America has been, and is, a great country.
I could never, EVER, imagine myself making the comment she made; it is a window into the depths of her soul, and one I don’t care for at all. Especially in the intimate council of the Leader of the Free World.
JRB
Perfect, Mike. Alert Cindy McCain, and she’ll exact revenge for you.
I think the West is rocketing skyward in its ascendancy and getting better all the time. For instance, a black woman, just a few generations removed from the 15th and 19th Amendments to the Constitution of the United States and just one generation removed from the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, will be able to vote for her mixed-race husband, the son of immigrants, a skinny kid with a funny name, to become First Lady of this fair land. That’s not medieval; that’s reason for fresh pride as we pitch forward on the historical arc toward justice.
That makes me proud, prouder than I ever have been of this noble nation-state.
Mike the Eyeguy
I didn’t care much for her comment either. But then again, I would suspect that she was speaking out of the enthusiasm of the moment and used some ill-advised hyperbole. I would hate to think that every time I did such a thing (which is frequent) that those around me would consider my words “a window into my soul.” I would prefer that they give me the benefit of the doubt.
But then again, I’m not running for office, and we all know that such graciousness will not occur under such circumstances. She should guard her words more closely, and perhaps explain herself further.
tarwater
JRB,
You say, “That’s not medieval; that’s reason for fresh pride as we pitch forward on the historical arc toward justice.”
One is left with the distinct impression that you of course have no idea what I meant.
But on we go, you also say, “I think the West is rocketing skyward in its ascendancy and getting better all the time”. Heady stuff, that. I thought the Whig version of history utterly vanquished?
Plato taught us that justice divorced from the Good is not justice at all. Do you really think that our culture, that the West, is progressing towards the Good and the True? How can a society whose leaders, and leading halls of learning, are devoted to empiricism and philosophical materialism, and who cannot even agree that there is such a thing as Truth, possibly be grasping the nature of reality? Of what it means to be a human being?
Abortion on demand is ascending? (I can think of no greater injustice, not slavery, not racism) The dissolution of marriage and the destabilization of the family is ascending? The secularization of the University is ascending? The hookup culture of the young is ascending? The prospect of gay marriage is ascending? The abandonment of historical Christianity by the mainline communities is ascending? The prospect of Sharia law in England and Europe is ascending? The domination of philosophical materialism is ascending?
Shall I go on? I must! There was a time when theology was the Queen of the Sciences. She was the crown of the Academy; the capstone of a Liberal education based on the Trivium and Quadrivium and the goal of the West’s greatest citizens and statesmen. One merely thinks of Thomas, Albert Magnus, and on through to Erasmus and Thomas More all the way down to Pascal. (Give me one Thomas More to a hundred who pass today as statesmen). She has now been banished to an indigent hut. And who has taken her place? Darwin, Kant, Nietzsche, Freud, and all of their spawn. Do you think the Enlightenment was enlightening? Do you really think Kant, Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume, saw reality more clearly than Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, or Eliot? What do you think the west is ascending toward? If the Truth is light, then we are ascending into darkness.
And I agree with Tocqueville that as the religion of the American people goes so goes our democracy in the long run. And the religion of the American people is not trending towards Apostolic Christianity. The triumph of private judgment continues to undermine the reality that Truth is One. Look where the Historical-Critical method and the likes of Rudolph Bultmann has led Protestant Theology! Protestantism continues its slow demise into anarchy. The Episcopal Church has ordained an active and practicing gay man without batting an eye. There is no ground. The perspicacity of the bible is a myth. There is wild disagreement as to the meaning of most every word of Sacred Scripture. Ask this absolutely critical question and you get a thousand different answers: What is meant by “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you”? There is no ground. “Every Protestant, bible in hand, is his own Pope.”
Again, look back over the propositions of Newman and judge for yourself how far we have advanced down the road he described.
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
T. S. Eliot, Choruses from The Rock
Mike the Eyeguy
tarwater, I’m going to have to put you on a word diet.
Methinks you’re a “the glass is half empty” kind of guy. Suffice it to say–and I really do think it suffices–history and life are a mixed bag; wheat and tares existing side by side. It’s the way it’s always been, and the way it always will be until the eschaton.
If you’re going to go medieval, then you might as well go Full Monty. You can have your bubonic plague, full-scale blood-in-the-streets wars between Christians and burnings at the stake, but I think I’ll take a pass.
Conservatism, like anything potentially good, can become an idol unto itself.
tarwater
Mike,
Perhaps I am wrong about Ms. Obama. She didn’t appear to be speaking hyperbola though. Like I said, I just can’t imagine ever making such a statement. She is intelligent and articulate. I just think there is the possibility that she let an unsavory notion slip out. I also distrust explanations regarding these type things. Who can forget Bill Clinton’s, “That depends on what is is”. Uh, right. But I will listen with good will (like I said there are more important things already on the table). I was only trying to make the point that her misstep might be more than his. I am willing to let it go.
I also have a general disposition towards the halls of the Ivy League that makes me suspicious of the worldview that lies beneath the rhetoric of those that it produces. Most of their first principles are wrong. I read ‘God and Man at Yale’; and while a surprising number come out of that experience all the wiser for having wrestled with the enemy, most buy the party line. Even highly intelligent people buy the Enlightenment. Reason on its own leads to Nietzsche, or worse. John Paul II got it right in Fides et Ratio.
tarwater
Mike,
Well, perhaps, but Greek civilization vanished, and the Roman Empire vanished. We can at least fight the good fight.
All I said was that we have a lot to learn from our fathers. Where do I ever imply more than that? To expect the culture that arose from the Dark Ages to be perfect is unreasonable. But there are many great men who think the 13th Century the high water mark of Western Civilization. C. S. Lewis would be one.
JRB says we’re going up, I say we are going down. Of course there is always good and bad. My point is that the trajectory is away from the True and the Good. Are you saying the trajectory we are on is flat?
tarwater
Mike
You say, “Methinks you’re a “the glass is half empty” kind of guy.”
You mean a pessimist? Balderdash. All I am trying to do is speak the truth. What have I said that is untrue?
And why is JRB not a blind optimist, if history is merely a mixed bag how in the world can we be said to be ascending?
You say, “Suffice it to say–and I really do think it suffices–history and life are a mixed bag; wheat and tares existing side by side. It’s the way it’s always been, and the way it always will be until the eschaton.” One could really make the case that this is fatalism, especially if you think the trajectory irrevocably flat, though I really suspect you aren’t a fatalist.
Really, all in good cheer. What is better than a rousing, albeit hopefully civil, argument (not a quarrel)?
But if we don’t recognize the nature of our malaise, how can we possibly seek a cure?
JRB
Yes, it’s a mixed bag. I’ll take Martin Luther King, Jr. to you Aquinas and his note that history bends inevitably toward justice, by God. You enumerate lots of good stuff, and I hope you saved that comment or posted it from you dissertation because it’s really too good not to stand on its own somewhere.
Those folks and notions you mentioned are excellent and beautiful glimpses into humanity. They were, however, primarily ideas and notions, blessing just a few, elite, privileged thinkers. They were all good if their beneficiaries were European, male, monied, land-owning, title-holding or influential enough in the church, thence the academy, to enjoy some franchise or voice. Meanwhile, most human beings were scratching out survival in their nasty, brutish, short lives.
By all means, revel and celebrate their ideas, but do not laud their culture or society over ours. There is nothing new under the sun, and, I might say, nothing old either. Today, in the West, women, people of color, the poor, the diseased, the wretched masses have a franchise, a voice, an opportunity to thrive, whereas, in every other place and era, they were doomed by the station of their birth.
Also, the plague.
JRB
By the way, I love me some liberal arts. I’m a product of it, from a very conservative Christian institution. Nevertheless, in its heyday, the liberal university was cloistered to only those rich, white and male enough to enjoy its splendor. In fact, we are headed upward, as we advance to open those doors for every least of these who wants in. Now, true, the Church, The Church and the church have work to do yet; we are not perfected. Neither are we in free fall. I have blind (false?) hope, perhaps, because I do believe God when He says that His will is to reconcile us all to Him, by Christ. He says that His intent is to draw all things in Heaven and Earth under one head, that is, Christ. (How’s that for unity of truth?)
I do not think He will fail to have His way. Jesus already has seen to that business.
Mike the Eyeguy
“But there are many great men who think the 13th Century the high water mark of Western Civilization. C.S. Lewis would be one.”
Of course Lewis expressed such sentiments from the relative comfort of his 20th century English cottage. And he was certainly not above occasional excess in his love of medievalism; academics have a habit of romanticizing their particular area of study.
Call it a hunch, but I bet Lewis would have loved for Joy to have had access to early 21st century medical care rather than the cruder methods of the late 50s. I’m guessing that he would have been for such progression that would have benefited him and his beloved so greatly, and that he would have gladly eaten of such fruit born of the Enlightenment.
As for my “fatalism,” if that is so, then I am apparently in Very Good Company considering the source of the phrase “wheat and tares.”
“Do not say, ‘Why were the old days better than these?’
For it is not wise to ask such questions.”
Ecclesiastes 7:10
tarwater
JRB,
You say, “Those folks and notions you mentioned are excellent and beautiful glimpses into humanity. They were, however, primarily ideas and notions, blessing just a few, elite, privileged thinkers.”
Wow, how dismissive of mere ‘ideas and notions’ you are!?
Again: Ideas Have Consequences. Or have you never heard of Karl Marx, and a little idea he had? Or was he just an ‘elite, privileged thinker’? Or do you not know the connection between Darwin and Hitler? Or do you think Nietzsche’s ‘notions’ inconsequential?
The foundation of American government is the mere notion that “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Just ideas.
You think Hume’s Skepticism and Kant’s Idealism have had no concrete effect on the lives of the masses?
On the contrary, it is ideas that shape the way we live.
Are you aware of William of Occam’s nominalism and the impact it had on Luther and hence the direct path to Relativism? And while Luther’s ideas aren’t nearly sufficient to explain the Revolution, they are certainly necessary. Perhaps you have not attempted to trace it but I think it is pretty well established that the whole of theology in the West has been largely a comment on Augustine. And surely theology is more than a notion. In fact it has been said that every question is at bottom one of theology.
I can’t imagine how to conceive of Western Civilization without understanding Thomas’ role in it.
And by the way do you think the rise of Islam that we are currently witnessing is a bend ‘inevitably towards justice’?
For all of King Jr’s excellent qualities, he was not a first rate thinker. He was not a historian. And to make a comment that ‘history bends inevitably towards justice’ is to make a comment on the very nature of history. He is way out of his league. I said it before: the Whig interpretation of history is a fallacy, an illusion. Read Butterfield. Then read Cobbett on the Reformation. Then try Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars, which is the definitive history of the Reformation in England.
I have a question. You may not agree with the answer, but to make the effort to grasp the heart of it is to learn something important, at least it was so for me. Chesterton once said that “the Protestant patriot really never thought of any patriotism except his own. In that sense Protestantism is patriotism. But unfortunately it is only patriotism.” (see http://www.smart.net/~tak/Chesterton/conver3.html) What did he mean? Again, I am not asking whether you agree with him, but what did he mean?
Have you read Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences? It is a feast for the mind.
tarwater
Mike,
Of course the real question regarding the ‘wheat and tares’ comment is begged. I do not think it means what you think it means. I think it is not a comment on the trajectory or nature of history but a comment on the Church. And further that the comment makes no sense unless one understands ‘Ecclesia’ in the sense given by the Apostles and witnessed by the Fathers and the whole history of Christianity up until those who decided they had the authority to have a go at it on their own redefined it to suit their fancy.
Christ established a visible society in the earth, the notion of a merely invisible church is an innovation and not part of the deposit of faith. Jesus and the Apostles would be absolutely dumbfounded by the notion.
I don’t think the quote out of Ecclesiastes means what you think it does. It is the whole issue of Private Judgment. Why do you think you can come up with the meaning to that verse? Where is it in the Fathers? Where is it in Augustine? Or Thomas? The whole book of Ecclesiastes is notoriously ambiguous anyway. The Bible can be made to mean whatever you want it to mean. Again, see and read Newman. I think you would be challenged in a most wonderful way,
Mike the Eyeguy
tarwater, don’t you have some rockets to shoot off? 🙂
As for me, I have many, many patients to see today. Besides, we have veered far, far from the original topic of this post.
Cheers!
tarwater
Mike,
You say, “Call it a hunch, but I bet Lewis would have loved for Joy to have had access to early 21st century medical care rather than the cruder methods of the late 50s. I’m guessing that he would have been for such progression that would have benefited him and his beloved so greatly, and that he would have gladly eaten of such fruit born of the Enlightenment.”
Well I don’t see how this is pertinent. Of course the discoveries of Science have been benificial. But Science is amoral. Technology is amoral. It doens’t speak to whether we live well. I am also certain Lewis would have rather not fought in the horror of trench warfare which was a result of the advance of Science.
Besides, the foundations of Science aren’t the Enlightenment. Galileo long precedes Kant and the rest.
tarwater
Yes we have veered, but I hope not poorly or into petty territory, but to the question of ultimate things, which at bottom everything is.
Ciao
Mike the Eyeguy
Nice discussions, too–in their time and place.
So, here are the ground rules for the old blog which heretofore have never needed mentioning, but do now:
1) Keep it short. The more pithy, the better. “Brevity is the soul of wit.” And please don’t tell me I don’t know what that means either!
2) Stay on, or at least relatively near, the original topic of the post. No hijacking, please.