New blog of note - Heavy Metal Investor

I see that "Christopherus", an educator and thinker of some renown, has a new blog. He seems to be reading political and economic news with help of choice lyrics from heavy metal bands. His latest post will be of interest to fans of Thomas Sowell: Heavy Metal Investor: Photograph of the Anointed. Rock on, Christopherus!

Thomas Sowell on Intellectuals and Society

Last time I saw Sowell interviewed, I feared age was getting to him. Here he is with the Hoover Institute's Peter Robinson, showing all the characteristic charm of the relaxed California moralist, looking sharp as ever. Sowell's newest book on the problem of the intellectuals, on their all-too-common desire for power in tandem with their irresponsible detachment from, if not war against, reality, is the topic of discussion.

Tuesday Trek

After a refreshing day away from the computer, we take a brief hike through the headlines in search of interesting news stories lurking in the margins of history on a cold Tuesday morning.

Hood(lum): A Somali pirate being prosecuted in the Netherlands is compared to "Robin Hood" by his lawyer:

At a pretrial hearing in a heavily guarded court in Rotterdam, lawyer Willem Jan Ausma called his client, Ahmed Yusuf, a "Robin Hood." Speaking to reporters outside court, he said pirates "attack ships of rich countries to give the ransom to poor families."
He later told judges there were different types of pirates operating off Somalia's coast – those who gave ransom money to organised crime gangs and others "who just go to sea in the hope of getting something more than the fish that are no longer there."

The lawyer did not explain how the seven turks and one Azeri aboard the freighter his client tried to hijack may fit into his "Robin Hood" analogy; maybe they were the Merry Men..?

And speaking of merry, it seems that the Somali pirate may disagree with the tact his defense lawyer is taking, because he clearly hopes to be found guilty:

"For the first time in his life he has access to a real toilet. For the first time in his life he is in a safe environment," Ausma says about his Somali 'pirate' client.
Sure, 24-year-old Yusuf hasn't seen his family in more than four months. "But he intends to send for his wife and children as soon as he is released from prison. He knows he cannot easily be sent back to Somalia. He loves it here in the Netherlands."

The five Somali pirates are being tried in the Netherlands because of a technicality: the ship they attacked may have been sailing in international waters, but it was registered in the Dutch Antilles. A legal technicality of another sort may make such vessels targets of opportunity for these pirates in the future:

Dutch foreign minister Verhagen wants Somali pirates to be tried by a regional UN tribunal to keep them from applying for asylum in Europe.
...
Verhagen said prosecution should deter pirates, not encourage them with the prospect of starting a new life in the country that prosecutes them.

Maybe this explains the mysterious actions of the Dutch navy captain last April. After having his marines board a vessel that had been hijacked by nine Somali pirates, he freed the captured Yemeni sailors and then promply freed the pirates, as well. Rather than being "idiotic", maybe he merely considered his decision to be the lesser of evils.

Heroism: A 12-year old didn't set out to be hero when his class took a field trip to the Congaree River in South Carolina, but his quick-thinking initiative made him one, as he risked his own life to save a classmate from drowning:

"I was trying to hold her above water so she's shorter than me," says Taylor. "I have to save her, so that's all I was thinking through anything, I have to save her.
With unknown dangers ahead and his body numbing up in the cold water, Anthony stretched out his 5'7" frame and wedged his foot in the river's rocky bottom. It worked.
"Somehow I got a foothold somewhere and I grabbed her up," he says.
"If he didn't save me I probably would have died," Taylor says.
They were friends before, but they're even better friends now "because he saved my life," says Taylor. "I feel so awesome, I love him."

Holes: Thomas Sowell points out some of the pitfalls involved in increasing the television coverage of government proceedings in his latest article, "Photographic Fraud":

Some might argue that, in the absence of the cameras, many people might not know what is going on in Congress or in the courts. But being uninformed is not nearly as bad as being misled.
For one thing, it is much easier to know that you are uninformed than to know that you are being misled.
...
The more complex the issue, the more likely that understanding the context is vastly more important than seeing a picture and hearing sound bites.
Wars are especially susceptible to being distorted on camera. A dramatic event with emotional impact need not tell you what its military significance is. The viewer is able only to react emotionally, in circumstances where rationality can be the difference between life and death, not only for the combatants, but also for the societies from which they come.

Tuesday Stirrings

Sneaking peeks at stories outside the headlines on a rainy Tuesday morning.

Topiary: The fascinating link between gardening and governing.

“Gardening marks, as clearly as any activity, the joining of nature and culture. The gardener makes nothing, but rather gathers what God has made and shapes it into new and pleasing forms. The well-designed garden shows nature more clearly and beautifully than nature can show itself. And this can be a model of politics: people left to their own devices can run riot, make themselves and their environment "ruin'd" and "disorder'd"; properly governed, though, they can flourish, they can become their best selves and make the most of their environment.
…
We need governors as we need gardeners; but not all forms of government are equally wise or equally beautiful.”

Empathy: Thomas Sowell's latest column, Empathy vs Law:

"That President Obama has made 'empathy' with certain groups one of his criteria for choosing a Supreme Court nominee is a dangerous sign of how much further the Supreme Court may be pushed away from the rule of law and toward even more arbitrary judicial edicts to advance the agenda of the left and set it in legal concrete, immune from the democratic process.
Would you want to go into court to appear before a judge with 'empathy' for groups A, B and C, if you were a member of groups X, Y or Z? Nothing could be further from the rule of law. That would be bad news, even in a traffic court, much less in a court that has the last word on your rights under the Constitution of the United States."

Bon-Vivants: New study suggests the French sleep and eat more than anyone else.

Empowering: Mouth-controlled mouse for disabled computer users.

The device enables a person with no hands to operate a computer mouse with the help of his tongue.
…
"If a person loses their arms in a mishap, then this apparatus will enable them to operate the computer and help him earn a living…"

Initiative: Once again, courageous onlookers in Florida put themselves at risk in order to pull drivers from burning cars.

"Flames engulfed three vehicles, sending a column of smoke into the air that was visible for miles. As occupants of the vehicles tumbled from their vehicles, many people became involved.
...
'We pried the door of the truck open. Flames were starting to get bigger, and the guy couldn't get out. We pulled him out on the ground, but we were afraid he would get burned and we brought my truck up and put him in the truck.' "

Thomas Sowell recognizes where Obama can save the people money

One might think that after spending many tens of millions on his fairy-tale inauguration, at a time of great economic losses, Obama will be looking for ways to cut government costs. Thomas Sowell recognizes one redundancy:

Secret service agents may have been concerned (or appalled) when the Obamas got out of their limousine and started walking in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue. But anyone who might have tried to harm them would probably have been torn limb from limb by the crowd before anyone could have gotten there to arrest him.

However, this observation might put in doubt Sowell's best wishes for a renewal of normalcy:

Inevitably, much is being made of the fact that Barack Obama is the first black President of the United States.

He is indeed the first "African American" President, unlike the millions of other black Americans whose ancestors were here longer than millions of white Americans. By the time that there was a United States of America, most black Americans had never seen Africa and neither had their grandparents.
[...]
No doubt the race-hustling industry will continue, and no doubt their chief victims will be blacks, especially young blacks, who buy the paralyzing picture of victimhood and the counterproductive resentments which sap energies that could be better used to improve their own lives.

Now that we have the first black President of the United States, maybe we can move ahead to the time when we can forget about "the first" whatever to do what. There is too much serious work to do to spend more time on that.

But what we all need to recognize is that yesterday was a profoundly religious event for millions or billions of people who need a political religion because they often have no other (nor any secular anthropology) of great attraction to help them through the existential trials of human life. Obama's paradoxical fate is that he will only achieve greatness as a worldly president by transcending the dogmas of his own cultic religion, by recognizing and negotiating worldly realities with an eye to recognizing the possible road to greater shared freedoms - which entails (intelligent but still difficult) political risks and people's hard work - and not by focussing on his supporters' hopes that he is some kind of racial saviour. Real political innovators are likely to be scapegoated to some significant degree (blamed for "deepening" the "crises" that make change necessary and hence possible); historians will recognize this in the case of Iraq, if it turns out that after the horror a new page has been turned there, one on which Obama finds his place.

Taking A Second Look At Intelligence

Everything old is new again, to the new mind. I would expect that for as long as there have been leaders, there has been an accompanying argument about how to measure the intelligence of these leaders, and how to even agree on what is being measured when we talk about a leader’s “intelligence”.

The recent US presidential campaign brought forth many attempts to explore and possibly define terms we tend to view too narrowly, words with worlds of meaning behind them; for example, “expertise”, “intelligence”, and “wisdom”. It seemed to me that one common ingredient in these articles was the admonition to stretch the subject into a large enough frame so that the search for a mutually agreeable definition would be one that lassos a three-dimensional point of view, succeeding in seeing all that there is to see.

Thomas Sowell’s November 11 column, “Intellectuals”, is the latest article I was reading on this topic. Citing fellow columnist Bill Kristoff’s definition of an “intellectual” as “[someone] interested in ideas and comfortable with complexity," and as someone who "read the classics”, Dr. Sowell lists several political leaders who were painted as “intellectual” or “anti-intellectual” through superficial and selective observation. People saw only what they hoped to see, rather than what was truly there to be seen:

Historian Michael Beschloss, among others, has noted that [Adlai] Stevenson "could go quite happily for months or years without picking up a book."
…
As for reading the classics, President Harry Truman, whom no one thought of as an intellectual, was a voracious reader of heavyweight stuff like Thucydides and read Cicero in the original Latin. When Chief Justice Carl Vinson quoted in Latin, Truman was able to correct him.

Yet intellectuals tended to think of the unpretentious and plain-spoken Truman as little more than a country bumpkin.

Similarly, no one ever thought of President Calvin Coolidge as an intellectual. Yet Coolidge also read the classics in the White House. He read both Latin and Greek, and read Dante in the original Italian, since he spoke several languages. It was said that the taciturn Coolidge could be silent in five different languages.

Sowell’s short list brought back up to the surface some half-submerged early childhood memories of my own mother, after a hard day of housework, cooking, and child-rearing, curled up in her favorite chair to end her day reading Josephus on some occasions, Thomas Aquinas on others, and C.S. Lewis for the times when we kids had really wore her out and her mind needed rest. Who would have imagined that the quiet lady tending her garden on sunny days would study such books on rainy ones?

His examples also reminded me of another personal anecdote. Once upon a time I participated in a Toronto Scrabble tournament, where the money from my ticket of entry went towards a charity for literacy. There were to be four of us per table, and the enticement was that among the four we would get to play against a “Canadian Celebrity”. My ticket led me to the assigned table, and upon sitting down we all introduced ourselves to each other. First up was our “celebrity”, a novelist and journalist of many years experience. Next was a middle aged psychiatrist, followed by his wife, a magazine editor (names all withheld to protect the innocent.. :). Last in the group was myself, in my mid-twenties at the time, happily employed as a laborer in a warehouse, loading boxes onto trucks for a living. I was forthrightly excused from much of the rest of the ensuing conversation, as they discussed the books and articles and plays that they all shared common interest in, and the colleges and universities they had attended. At the appointed time, the game began, and guess who won.....? Me, the only one who hadn’t graduated from college or university. If they had bothered to ask me I could have told them that my family had played Scrabble together at least once a week from the time I could read to the time I moved out on my own, in fact it remained a fun family ritual we enjoyed whenever we found ourselves re-united at holidays and birthdays. I’ll forever smile at pairing the memory of the eye-rolling that greeted my introduction at this charity Scrabble game, with the incredulous looks in those same eyes when the final score was announced. “Why are you working in a warehouse??”, one of the losers couldn’t resist asking me after the game, as if such a position was an embarrassing curse, rather than a reasonable and honorable occupation.

That was a demonstrated lesson in humility that I go back to whenever I sense myself failing similar temptations to be presumptuous today; is my initial reaction really an informed one? What is involved in coming to an informed judgment about a problem that requires a decision? What is everything that should be observed, when I’m trying to size up a worthy applicant for my team at work, or who should be promoted, or who should be let go during the inevitable downsizing. What do I really know about this other person, and what is it that I believe without sufficient observation? What will I learn if I think about a situation a second time?

Presumptions seem to be as common a malady to the human mind as the common cold is to the human body. It’s a simple matter to look at something and presume that a first glance at a part is actually a complete scrutiny of the whole. It’s no accident that all great art rewards a second look, all great books offer renewed meaning through repeated reading, all great music grows on us as we dare add to our first impression.

Watching the anecdotal collection of Obama voters in the John Ziegler video that Truepeers wrote about this morning, there’s some good lessons for our side to learn from, as we watch confident people confronted with so much new information that it challenges their self-perceptions as “intelligent” citizens. What to do about the holes that such revelations bring about? Dismiss them, as the voters seem to do in this video, or struggle to embrace them, as we would wish them to? I concur, in principle, with a point that regular reader na makes in the comments thread: how much more successfully would John McCain supporters do in such a test of perception? Can it really be said that one side does indeed possess a more rounded understanding of what that long civic debate was meant to resolve? Does one side have the full picture and the other side have all the holes?

I think Ziegler's addition to the ongoing measurement of "intelligence" is to reveal how common an ailment it has become to not even know how to determine what we don't know. Evidently these voters don't spend a lot of time talking to people who disagree with their views, otherwise how else to explain that so much of this information was "news" to them, on the day of their vote? Is it really so humiliating to talk to someone who sees things differently than they do, and to ask them why that is? And how are they to handle the humbling that should come with the revelation that there is more to a subject than may at first meet the eye..?

Well, I'd like to think I know how I would handle it, because I undergo it each and every week, at our Thursday night gatherings in the Atrium of the Central branch of the Vancouver Public Library. We three Covenant Zone bloggers meet in front of the Blenz coffee shop from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm once again to debate the issues we blog about, wearing our blue scarves in solidarity with our French colleagues in France who, in their own way, try to test and sharpen their understanding of how they perceive the challenges of the world as they see it. We don't agree about much, which is what always makes it a learning experience.

Sufficiency of perception, achieved through the cultivation of the humility to observe the limitations of our understanding, and an appreciation (rather than dismissal) of the “holes” that allow for continued growth of that understanding; there’s my long-winded, three-sided contribution to the challenge of proposing a three-dimensional definition for intelligence.

After the ball

At our last Thursday meeting, Charles was remarking how if you look at the legions of young people who flock to Obama, what is remarkable are the faces that look as if this man is the last best hope for mankind (not his exact words, I hope i get the gist of the observation right, Charles): in our age when nihilism and relativism is preached in the classrooms, it's almost as if young people have gotten to the point where nothing good in the world can be believed, but Obama.

This led to a discussion of the likelihood of suicide rates going up in the Obama era as young people see their faith in The One come to terms with a human reality in which the Messiah has not yet returned to earth and we remain stuck with all the usual folly, and maybe worse.

McCain may still win, for all I know, and we can look forward, among other things, to Bush Derangement Syndrome taken to the nth degree.

The optimistic necessity about an Obama presidency is that given the current economic climate, and the nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, it is very likely to be a time of crisis and crisis spells opportunity for those who really know something of the need for new directions.

One new direction, it seemed to me at our discussion, is for someone who can effectively preach to young people, after Obama, the nature of real hope and change. Maybe Thomas Sowell is our man, for he sees right through the vanities of the young person:

Barack Obama has the kind of cocksure confidence that can only be achieved by not achieving anything else.

Anyone who has actually had to take responsibility for consequences by running any kind of enterprise-- whether economic or academic, or even just managing a sports team-- is likely at some point to be chastened by either the setbacks brought on by his own mistakes or by seeing his successes followed by negative consequences that he never anticipated.

The kind of self-righteous self-confidence that has become Obama's trademark is usually found in sophomores in Ivy League colleges-- very bright and articulate students, utterly untempered by experience in real world.

The signs of Barack Obama's self-centered immaturity are painfully obvious, though ignored by true believers who have poured their hopes into him, and by the media who just want the symbolism and the ideology that Obama represents.

The triumphal tour of world capitals and photo-op meetings with world leaders by someone who, after all, was still merely a candidate, is just one sign of this self-centered immaturity.

One of my insights into the eternal student was when he visited Iraq. Visiting with the Prime Minister of that country, the two men entered a hall of reporters for a photo op. As is the norm, there were two chairs for the men to sit in and put on a show of discussion. It was the mere visiting Senator from Illinois who made the ritual gesture of inviting the leader of Iraq to have a seat. A cocksure sign, but not exactly a sign of confidence in the guy who will be left holding the bag if Obama rushes too quickly to pull the troops out.

The Blind Faith Of Politics As Religion And... Romance?

Louis Farrakhan said the following at a February speech to a nation of islam convention...

“You are the instruments that God is gonna use to bring about universal change, and that is why Barack has captured the youth,” Farrakhan said. “And he has involved young people in a political process that they didn’t care anything about. That’s a sign. When the Messiah speaks, the youth will hear, and the Messiah is absolutely speaking.”

The person to whom Farrakhan was referring, made a campaign speech in New Hampshire this weekend, where he "humbly" vowed to change the world:

"I want you to believe," said the candidate, clad in an open-necked shirt and barn jacket. "Not so much believe just in me but believe in yourselves. Believe in the future. Believe in the future we can build together. I'm confident together we can't fail."

There was a carnival atmosphere among the crowd of some 4,000, who almost drowned Mr Obama out as he reached his crescendo and said: "I promise you. We won't just win New Hampshire. We will win this election and, you and I together, we're going to change the country and change the world."

After the event, a 69-year old supporter gushed: "We feel we're on the brink of a whole new life in this country".

Ain't that the truth...

Thomas Sowell's latest column helps to clarify the new trend, by revealing its roots in the most ancient of human behavior: love.

Telling a friend that the love of his life is a phony and dangerous is not likely to get him to change his mind. But it may cost you a friend.
It is much the same story with true believers in Barack Obama. They have made up their minds and not only don't want to be confused by the facts, they resent being told the facts.
An e-mail from a reader mentioned trying to tell his sister why he was voting against Obama but, when he tried to argue some facts, she cut him short:
"You don't like him and I do!" she said.

End of discussion.

Those last two sentences sum up what politics have become in the New Age of Obama. You can't get into a meaty political discussion without it turning into an attempt to convert someone to another religion, and they won't convert because they are, quite literally, in love with their candidate.

Well, just as true faith makes room to include doubts, true love involves truly seeing what one is looking at, warts and all. "Blind Faith" is to leave stuff out; true faith, like true love, keeps things in, good and bad, exhausting our reason and judgement by forcing us to constantly re-examine the good in light of the bad, our hopes in light of our doubts.

In his autobiography "Mark It And Strike It", comedian Steve Allen explained why his first marriage failed so miserably:

"We were in love with the idea of being in love, and not really in love with each other".

I think that's an even better way to summarize the 2008 US Presidential election.

Looking At The World Through The Eyes Of A Child

Another great column from Thomas Sowell this week.

It is hardly surprising that young people prefer the political left. The only reason for rejecting the left's vision is that the real world in which we live is very different from the world that the left perceives today or envisions for tomorrow.

Most of us learn that from experience-- but experience is precisely what the young are lacking. "Experience" is often just a fancy word for the mistakes that we belatedly realized we were making, only after the realities of the world made us pay a painful price for being wrong.

Those who are insulated from that pain-- whether by being born into affluence or wealth, or shielded by the welfare state, or insulated by tenure in academia or in the federal judiciary-- can remain in a state of perpetual immaturity.
...

Those of us who can recall what it was like to be an adolescent must know that growing up can be a painful transition from the sheltered world of childhood.

No matter how much we may have wanted adult freedom, there was seldom the same enthusiasm for taking on the burdens of adult responsibilities and having to weigh painful trade-offs in a world that hemmed us in on all sides, long after we were liberated from parental restrictions.

Should we be surprised that the strongest supporters of the political left are found among the young, academics, limousine liberals with trust funds, media celebrities and federal judges?

These are hardly Karl Marx's proletarians, who were supposed to bring on the revolution. ...

Sowell goes aphoristic

The reason so many people misunderstand so many issues is not that these issues are so complex, but that people do not want a factual or analytical explanation that leaves them emotionally unsatisfied. They want villains to hate and heroes to cheer-- and they don't want
explanations that do not give them that.
[...]
Now that the Senator with the furthest left voting record in the Senate and the Senator with the third furthest left voting are the Democrats' nominees for President and Vice President, there will be great expressions of indignation over being "negative" if anyone dares call them "liberals." Actually, leftists would be more accurate.

G.K Chesterton said: "I defy anybody to say what are the rights of a citizen, if they do not include the control of his own diet in relation to his own health." But California citizens and citizens of New York City have tamely accepted their politicians' decisions to forbid restaurants to serve certain foods, even when citizens want those foods.

The recent death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn should make us recall what he said when he was awarded the Nobel Prize: "The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles." What would a Barack Obama presidency mean, other than more concessions and broader smiles, while Iran goes nuclear?

Right after liberal Democrats, the most dangerous politicians are country club Republicans.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke says that what he admired about FDR was his willingness to experiment in order to help the economy. That experimentation helped prolong the Great Depression, since people tend to hang onto their money when the government creates uncertainty by constantly changing the rules.

At one time, it was said "The truth will make you free." Today, there seem to be those who think that rhetoric and hype will make you free. It might even be called the audacity of hype.

Thomas Sowell :: Townhall.com :: Random Thoughts

Heard today on CNN: "Hope is a great breakfast but a lousy supper."

Thomas Sowell Sinks Another Ship Of Foolish Thinking

In an earlier age, everybody knew that Poseidon shook the earth when the Greeks invoked his wrath, drowning sailors and sinking the ships of those who displeased him. Why else did these bad things happen?

"Someone" has to be responsible... things can't just happen, can they?

Covenant Zone's favorite economist Thomas Sowell floats another smart column today, offering a sharp navigation past the siren songs of those who would personalize nature on such economic issues as the current high price of gasoline:

The problem is not that supply and demand is such a complex explanation. The problem is that supply and demand is not an emotionally satisfying explanation. For that, you need melodrama, heroes and villains.

It is clear that many people prefer to blame President Bush. Others prefer to blame the oil companies, who have long been the favorite villains of the left.

Politicians understand that. Numerous times they have summoned the heads of oil companies before Congressional committees to be denounced on nationwide television for "greed," with the politicians calling for a federal investigation to "get to the bottom of this!"

Read it all.

A Covenant Thursday

If your not convinced that Evelyn Baring, Earl of Cromer was American you can meet us this evening at the Vancouver Public Library in the atrium outside Blenz coffee bar and explain me where I'm gone wrong in the head here. He seems to me to be a fine American, one I like immensely. Maybe you like him too, in which case you can join us for a brew and some chat. Or

If you're bookish, sit in and you can tell us about some fine writers and thinkers like Jonah Goldberg and Thomas Sowell. Join us at the Covenant Zone, we being the ones with blue scarves and Israeli flags on our caps. Let's find out how you feel about Section 13. How about Ezra Levant or Mark Steyn or the nearly worthless but not quite so Art Spiegelman? We meet at 7:00 and there's always much to talk about. We even talk about movies. Perhaps you've seen that latest foreign film, Fitna. Join us for a while under the lights.

And it is often light indeed. I, like Baring, am just loads of fun. The coffee's good, too.

What Black Conservatives are saying about Obama

While the story about Obama's church has been in the blogs for many months now, its eruption into the mainstream and Obama's handling of the issue (almost as if he never expected to have to address it, that he, or his church's racism, would be given a pass) is proving to be revelatory. Revelations, the stuff of history, always stem from the unfolding of events, and not directly from the prior facts that help constitute events.

But it is not to Obama's supporters that we can yet look for much lucid comprehension of what has happened the last few days in America. They are yet far too involved in their desires for that. I have found the following among the more interesting comments I have read today.

Thomas Sowell:

You can't be with someone for 20 years, call him your mentor, and not know about his racist and anti-American views.

Neither Barack Obama nor his media spinmeisters can put this story behind him with some facile election year rhetoric. If Senator Obama wants to run with the rabbits and hunt with the hounds, then at least let the rabbits and the hounds know that.

The fact that Obama talks differently than Jeremiah Wright does not mean that his track record is different. Barack Obama's voting record in the Senate is perfectly consistent with the far left ideology and the grievance culture, just as his wife's statement that she was never proud of her country before is consistent with that ideology.

Senator Barack Obama's political success thus far has been a blow for equality. But equality has its down side.

Equality means that a black demagogue who has been exposed as a phony deserves exactly the same treatment as a white demagogue who has been exposed as a phony.

We don't need a President of the United States who got to the White House by talking one way, voting a very different way in the Senate, and who for 20 years followed a man whose words and deeds contradict Obama's carefully crafted election year image.

Shelby Steele:

Mr. Obama's broad appeal to whites makes him the first plausible black presidential candidate in American history. And it was Mr. Obama's genius to understand this. Though he likes to claim that his race was a liability to be overcome, he also surely knew that his race could give him just the edge he needed -- an edge that would never be available to a white, not even a white woman.

How to turn one's blackness to advantage?

The answer is that one "bargains." Bargaining is a mask that blacks can wear in the American mainstream, one that enables them to put whites at their ease. This mask diffuses the anxiety that goes along with being white in a multiracial society. Bargainers make the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America's history of racism, on the condition that they will not hold the bargainer's race against him. And whites love this bargain -- and feel affection for the bargainer -- because it gives them racial innocence in a society where whites live under constant threat of being stigmatized as racist. So the bargainer presents himself as an opportunity for whites to experience racial innocence.

This is how Mr. Obama has turned his blackness into his great political advantage, and also into a kind of personal charisma. Bargainers are conduits of white innocence, and they are as popular as the need for white innocence is strong. Mr. Obama's extraordinary dash to the forefront of American politics is less a measure of the man than of the hunger in white America for racial innocence.

His actual policy positions are little more than Democratic Party boilerplate and hardly a tick different from Hillary's positions. He espouses no galvanizing political idea. He is unable to say what he means by "change" or "hope" or "the future." And he has failed to say how he would actually be a "unifier." By the evidence of his slight political record (130 "present" votes in the Illinois state legislature, little achievement in the U.S. Senate) Barack Obama stacks up as something of a mediocrity. None of this matters much.
[...]
Because he is black, there is a sense that profound questions stand to be resolved in the unfolding of his political destiny. And, as the Clintons have discovered, it is hard in the real world to run against a candidate of destiny. For many Americans -- black and white -- Barack Obama is simply too good (and too rare) an opportunity to pass up. For whites, here is the opportunity to document their deliverance from the shames of their forbearers. And for blacks, here is the chance to document the end of inferiority. So the Clintons have found themselves running more against America's very highest possibilities than against a man. And the press, normally happy to dispel every political pretension, has all but quivered before Mr. Obama. They, too, have feared being on the wrong side of destiny.

And yet, in the end, Barack Obama's candidacy is not qualitatively different from Al Sharpton's or Jesse Jackson's. Like these more irascible of his forbearers, Mr. Obama's run at the presidency is based more on the manipulation of white guilt than on substance. Messrs. Sharpton and Jackson were "challengers," not bargainers. They intimidated whites and demanded, in the name of historical justice, that they be brought forward. Mr. Obama flatters whites, grants them racial innocence, and hopes to ascend on the back of their gratitude. Two sides of the same coin.

But bargainers have an Achilles heel. They succeed as conduits of white innocence only as long as they are largely invisible as complex human beings. They hope to become icons that can be identified with rather than seen, and their individual complexity gets in the way of this. So bargainers are always laboring to stay invisible. (We don't know the real politics or convictions of Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan or Oprah Winfrey, bargainers all.) Mr. Obama has said of himself, "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views . . ." And so, human visibility is Mr. Obama's Achilles heel. If we see the real man, his contradictions and bents of character, he will be ruined as an icon, as a "blank screen."

Thus, nothing could be more dangerous to Mr. Obama's political aspirations than the revelation that he, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday -- for 20 years -- in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable. His pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is a challenger who goes far past Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson in his anti-American outrage ("God damn America").

How does one "transcend" race in this church? The fact is that Barack Obama has fellow-traveled with a hate-filled, anti-American black nationalism all his adult life, failing to stand and challenge an ideology that would have no place for his own mother. And what portent of presidential judgment is it to have exposed his two daughters for their entire lives to what is, at the very least, a subtext of anti-white vitriol?

What could he have been thinking? Of course he wasn't thinking. He was driven by insecurity, by a need to "be black" despite his biracial background. And so fellow-traveling with a little race hatred seemed a small price to pay for a more secure racial identity. And anyway, wasn't this hatred more rhetorical than real?

But now the floodlight of a presidential campaign has trained on this usually hidden corner of contemporary black life: a mindless indulgence in a rhetorical anti-Americanism as a way of bonding and of asserting one's blackness. Yet Jeremiah Wright, splashed across America's television screens, has shown us that there is no real difference between rhetorical hatred and real hatred.

No matter his ultimate political fate, there is already enough pathos in Barack Obama to make him a cautionary tale. His public persona thrives on a manipulation of whites (bargaining), and his private sense of racial identity demands both self-betrayal and duplicity. His is the story of a man who flew so high, yet neglected to become himself.

They're still offering Al Gore at 50-1.