DIVINING THINGS

In a New Republic piece dated July 18, Michael Sean Winters observes that “Obama has a Catholic problem”. I’ll pass over the tactics and numerics of voting demographics. Winters takes things a little deeper than what has been the disappointing norm for coverage, especially from a once-mature magazine such as TNR (about which Alas, but there’s little time to linger any longer; citizens who read are now doctors in a plague city). http://tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=f1c95dd6-6569-461e-a372-4b4e7f960dd3

He notes that during a proclaimed “values week” in early July Obama began tossing out Scriptural quotes and even went so far as to allow that “war, poverty, joblessness and homelessness, violent streets and crumbling schools – are not simply technical problems … they are moral problems”. Winters notes that there is a whiff of boilerplate in all of it.

I agree, and not because of any deep familiarity with the ins and outs of campaign dynamics. Rather, I note that nowadays – and for some decades past – no Democrat could deploy “moral” in any serious sense at all. To do so would be politically inadvisable, like pulling the pin out of a grenade and then sitting on it would be inadvisable.

There is no room for ‘morality’ because the political philosophy – so called – that the Identities embraced in the formative days of the ‘70s did not accept ‘morality’ as relevant to political power; indeed, ‘morality’ was considered to be a fantasy, and a nasty, oppressive one at that. For Nietzsche morality was simply a matter of what you yourself willed to happen, and the only great immorality was to stifle your will in deference to any ‘outside’ influence. For Foucault there was no ‘truth’ (let alone ‘Truth’) existing in some pure form ‘outside’ of the human dimension; ‘truth’ was merely an abstraction, a word to be used as a weapon by whomever wielded political power and authority. Truth was ‘constructed’, thus, by those in power (who always ‘oppressed’) and so the game plan of liberation had to be a ‘deconstructing’ of ‘truth’ and thereby of the oppressive authority of those who wielded political power.

Foucault left it at that, and didn’t pursue his line of thought through to its obvious consequences. For when deployed successfully, then the deconstructionist former oppressed would in short order become the wielders of political power and authority, and thereby ex officio become oppressors themselves. Of course, he couldn’t let himself follow through with that because his ‘philosophy’ would thereby have come full circle, back to its starting point, cutting the rug out from under itself before the creative destruction was fairly begun. How can you get anybody to risk all and undertake a revolution if all you’re promising them is that they’ll wind up being the very oppressors against whom you’re trying to get them to revolt? It’s not very catchy as a slogan – except to the type of persons who just like to be in power no matter what it takes. But to any sober mind it offers profound and meaty pause.

But then, when you’re up to things revolutionary, you’re not looking for sober minds. Except to get them out of your way. Siberia is an option – if you’re Russia. Shooting, otherwise, if you can get away with it. Keeping them away from microphones and cameras always. And the fewer of the oppressed who can think – or, better, read – then the better things will work out for your revolution. And as your almost ultimate gambit, you promise them that what you’re bringing will be soooo good, so purely and naturally and fantastically good, that there won’t need to be another revolution for a thousand years, and that as a token of your bona fides you’ll be happy to stay on top to make sure that there isn’t. Or – in a gambit whose very brilliance proves the existence of a demonic dimension in human affairs – you tell them all that your revolution, which should have happened a million yesterdays ago, will probably take a thousand years to complete, at which time you’ll be happy to step down, if folks want you to. Until then …

But on a deeper level Foucault also couldn’t escape from the stabbingly obvious point that if the only source of political authority is the fact that it is being held onto and wielded, then there’s no way to judge it. There’s nothing ‘outside’ the system to check it and balance it (so to speak). There’s no authority beyond the system, let alone – ummm, say – above the system, under which the system would stand to be judged. The system sort of justifies itself just by having power; no courts or judges (or Judge) necessary, thank ya vurrry mutch (although Foucault, being French, did not speak like Elvis or any Texan). It was all kinda self-regulating, like free market czars and commissars are today in the Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate sector – or, charmingly, F.I.R.E. (which is almost big enough now for one to be able to shout it in a crowded public space). That’s the nice thing about political power: it can be deconstructed, if enough folks have the chops, but it can never ever be ‘judged’.

So Obama can only go so far down the ‘Catholic’ road before he runs into a huge problem. The Catholic ‘genius’ was to insist that there was indeed a dimension above the dimension of human affairs, and that its principles could be incompletely but sufficiently grasped by mortals, and that those principles – coming as they did from Above and Beyond this vale of fog and tears – were the blueprints of human existence, individual and societal. And that any laws or plans or schemes or visions hatched on the human level had somehow to conform to those general but universal principles. Otherwise they wouldn’t be legitimate. Or – what the hey? – Legitimate, capital ‘L’.

So, for example, as Winters points out, the two biggies: “the inalienable dignity of the human person and the common good”. The former flows from the latter: if each individual human being is possessed of (or, say, “endowed by his creator with”) inalienable dignity, then any community of human persons would also possess an inalienable dignity. So far so philosophical. And genuinely American.

But now, once you are into the realm of universal principles (call them ‘the Verities’, for short) and the dignity of individuals, then while making some marvelous and genuinely Catholic noises, you are heading straight for the rocks of the Identities, those engines of an almost- Greek tragedy now besmashing the Democratic Party’s project. For if you admit that there are such principles that can stand in judgment over any merely ‘political’ or ‘earthly’ authority, then you’ve trumped the very authority that the revolutions of those assorted Identities claimed almost 40 years ago, when they themselves waved Foucault around like the hammers of Lenin and the scythes of Mao to deconstruct anything oppressive standing in the way of their liberation (like – say – ‘men’ or ‘Western civilization’ or any ‘constructed’ abstractions beginning with a capital letter like Truth or Justice or … how to put this delicately? … God).

So Obama, and his Party, in one of the hell-hottest ironies in American history, finds himself trying to rally and regroup his Party and the American people at a dire moment by reaching out for a matrix of ideas of proven cohesive value, that had been flung away precisely to appease and enable a welter of Identities now at the pinnacle of the Party’s public identity, whose very (and historically un-American) position requires that no such matrix exists.

Obama cannot now enlist the classic Verities without enraging, outraging, and de-staging his Party’s long-embraced Identities. The Confederates – and people say there isn’t a God and that He has no sense of humor! – towards the end when they needed all the troops they could enlist, sought to enlist – wait for it – slaves. To which one Southern general instantly observed, with lethal simplicity: “if slaves make good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong”.

So too: if the Verities are indeed true, then the Identities’ long and vastly corrosive march through American society and culture has been … not so true. In which case the tires – if not other parts – of the Identities will be kicked. And, as Foucault and Lenin and just about any other taker-over of worlds knew, ‘you don’t let them be kicking your tires with their minds or the whole thing is going to get stopped and you yourself are going to get stood up in front of a judge or the nearest wall’. Or words to that effect.

Oddly, while when it comes to getting some new thing that they claim is theirs, the Identities are more than willing to talk about building a new ‘boat’ because this one is starting to capsize, , yet they do not at all want any discussion of their prior ‘gains’ because the election is too important to start looking back at … stuff … or, really, to be doing any thinking at all. Can’t we all just vote Democratic and then we’ll get everything sorted out later? You can trust usssssss, can’t you?

I sort of wonder: is it possible that the Dems let things get so bad for so long because they knew – deep down in their inner cocktail parties – that they would never be able to explain to the whole People just how they let the common weal get so whacked over the past 40 years, and so the best thing to do would be to make a virtue of necessity, let the Republicans really really run wild with their hairless neocons and the Robber Baronets of the F.I.R.E. sector, until they got things so awesomely frakked up that the voters would welcome Dems back with no questions asked. About anything.

We are well-advised to watch more late-night tv movies: specifically, those B-horror movies of the pre-'70s where any half-pint, sugar-addled kid who’d been drinking out of a garden hose after falling off a bike he’d been riding without a helmet in the dark through the woods without a headlight, knew that if kindly Grandfather – call him FDR – returned to his Transylvanian farmhouse even one second after midnight, then he was no longer kindly old Grandfather no matter what he said, and should be staked or garlicked or holy-watered forthwith. Or get a crucifix shoved in his kisser. Now those be Kathlik noises!

But this is precisely what Obama cannot do. He cannot truly reach out to his Catholic demographic without making his revolutionary demographic verrrrry skittish. Like vampires around holy water just before sun-up.

Winters notes – ominously – that when questioned about healthcare, “Obama reverted to legalese, claiming healthcare was ‘a right’ instead of invoking the moral obligations Americans owe to one another as citizens and fellow human beings”. We didn’t get those ‘moral obligations’ as war booty from any country beaten in war; they came from a Western tradition that was strongly Christian (which is not at all the same as saying Fundamentalist; Fundoozies are to Christianity what SS troopers are to decent local traffic cops).

But what else can he do? Once ‘moral obligations’ are back on the national civic table then the Identities and the Robber Baronets and the preventive-war cheerleaders are all liable to judgment. And while the cheerleaders can’t be made to give all those frakked-up lives back, the Baronets might be made to give all the money back … so you can see what a job of work this is going to be.

Nor will the Identities go gently into that good night reserved for stupendously dubious ideas and shrewdly-spun card tricks. Of course, they might horse-trade in a kinda mature, democratic way, but that would be to betray the revolution – though they’d never put it quite like that. And they’d hafta give some stuff back – like maybe God. Eeeeeeeyyyyyyyyyew!

In fact, any nation that ever existed has always been liable to sins as awful as its lack of scruples would let it get away with, but vice always paid to virtue the compliment of hiding itself and even – on the off chance that there really is a God – restraining itself. But with the Identities’ embrace of Foucault ‘Virtue’ was deconstructed and with Reagan’s sweet nostalgia for MGM's America Greed was pronounced Good.

America became no place for a morally obligated People. And We did not remain one very long.

What now then?

MOYERS THREE

The last of the Moyers articles that caught my eye appears in “The Nation”, entitled “A New Story for America”, appearing in the issue of January 22 (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070122/moyers)

He quotes Ronald Reagan who in his 1980 speech to the Republican National Convention said “The major issue of this campaign is the direct political, personal and moral responsibility of Democratic Party leadership – in the White House and in Congress – for this unprecedented calamity which has befallen us.”

You’ve got to hand it to the Great Communicator. If he picked up anything from his days in Hollywood studios – and he picked up quite a bit – it was the requirement that a script get right to the point and that the character doesn’t wind up burning up viewers’ time (and precious film) rambling.

We can certainly entertain the assertions that he oversimplified and that he damn well meant to. He did both. It was his metier. But he also put into clear, simple language something fundamental that was hidden deep down the American spirit of his age, and something that – though hidden (as much by political correctness as by inattention) – was very very real.

In their sustained, deconstructive, revolutionary frenzy to rip open space for their assorted programmes and agendas, the revolutionaries of the Left had each ripped out major chunks of the American ‘story’. In fact, whether they knew it or not, or whether they thought it was worth thinking about or not, they wound up deconstructing the American ‘Story’ – the deep vision, however inchoately held – that sustained the identity of the American people.

Human beings need a Story. Call it a spiritual need or don’t, insist that some form of organized religion is essential to maintaining such a Story or don’t, but all human beings have an abiding need for a Story if they are to sustain with their lives a common culture and a civilization. Whether that Story gives the people less (the Egyptian) or more (the classic Western) authority, that Story still provides the unseen ground that anchors and gives Shape to and makes sense of all of their efforts and of their very lives. And those ‘lives’ extend both forward and backward in Time – encompassing forebears and descendants, and to greater or lesser extent horizontally – encompassing others of their society or their culture. Almost always, that Story also extends Beyond Time: not simply beyond the appearances and the surfaces of daily life to the deeper fonts of vital energy that well up from the roots of human being and doing, but also Beyond those humans and beyond human-being itself.

In their urgent haste to actualize their particular bit of the envisioned future ‘now’ if not ‘yesterday’, the assorted Revolutions could not only ill-afford the time necessary for wide public deliberation, but they could not afford the ‘judgment’ that any established ‘Beyond’ might pass – in the popular opinion – against their particular agenda. Thus it was that Theory sought to deconstruct any possible rivals or judges; not only was doubt derided as merely ‘backlash’ but doubt was amputated from any Larger authority. A perfectly understandable and hardly novel revolutionary tactic. And one that was reinforced by the stunning hubris of many of the revolutionaries who saw themselves as a vanguard, socially-redeeming elite waging ‘total war’ on benighted sheep-like masses of oppression who ‘just didn’t get it’ and who needed to be force-fed ‘it’ for their own and everybody else’s good. In the long-run of History they were certain, they would be judged as liberators.

And so the vital human and national edifice of Story came directly under sustained deconstructive attack. American society since almost its inception had been criticized – from within as well as without – for failing the ideals of its own Story, and that criticism became even more intense as the original appearances and structures of the Founders’ world changed in the 19th century and into the 20th. But in the mid-20th, precisely on the heels of the Glorious ‘65’s achievement in civil rights, enthusiasts adopted Theory to utterly delegitimize Story itself.

Reagan the trouper sensed this abyssal loss that so profoundly agitated so many people. Untutored in policy and Great Things, he was yet a man professionally and personally familiar with operations conducted on the vital if unseen ground of Story; the man and the hour, so to speak, met – and the man knew it. Here was the handle by which he could grasp the Presidency and the level by which he might move the people. Ensconced in the White House in the latter years of the 20th century (and of Communism, as it turned out), this ‘actor’ – this long-trained dealer in Story – was at home. And got right to work.

Unfortunately, but hardly uncharacteristically for an American, he was only on a nodding acquaintance with the Beyond, except as that Beyond revealed itself in the nation itself, in its history and its citizens and its fantasies. But in best American style he rolled up his sleeves and made do. It was almost enough. Not that he didn’t try.

A Story differs from a ‘story’ in that the Story is connected to some Beyond. This is what gives the Story its staying power, its teflon quality – if you will. It survives the slings and arrows of mere historical, ‘real’ developments because it exists in a realm Beyond them. People know that no matter what happens, the Story represents something more ‘real’ than the very palpable slings and arrows bethumping them. And thus fortified, they endure. And maybe even prevail.

Alas for the Democrats. In adopting the Identities and bringing them in from their assorted cold, dark nights, they wound up inviting the vampire of Theory in as well. And thus the Beyond had to go. And thus the Story had to go.

And that loss was instantly, if only viscerally, felt throughout the population. And Reagan sensed that with his tingly actor’s whiskers. Sure, a lot of lesser-motived folks also realized it: political operatives, corporate honchos, assorted fantasists, and all sorts of folk who made their daily bread by manipulating other folks, for their own or somebody else’s good. But for the our purposes here we’ll focus on Reagan. He was a canary in the mine – a very big and not altogether incapable canary. We didn’t notice the feathers because of all the flags or all the ‘politically correct’ opprobrium, although those occasional brown suits certainly prompted fleeting and uncomfortable thoughts of the animal kingdom.

Whatever went on around him – and some very baaaad stuff went on, either around him or through him – yet in his grasp on the profound human need for Story he was spot on. And the Democrats found that they weren’t; or – more accurately – couldn’t be. No one Story would hold all those teeming and squalling Identities together, and given the revolutionary agendas of their Outcome-oriented advocates, nothing so intangible as Story was desired from the Democratic pols anyway.

The People unStoried is not a pretty sight. Just as a child who grew up without Story is faced with a shrunken ‘world’ and consequently develops a shrunken ‘self’ (trapped in a Horizontal, without a Vertical and without an Interior) so too a People without a Story begin to lose Shape as if a trellis is suddenly removed from a large vine. And after a while, that People’s government begins to assume assorted deformed shapes as well.

This is no plea for a restoration of the Reagan-era nor of the Twelve Years recently ended but still so inescapably battened upon Us. But it is a sober realization that Story has been seriously damaged during the revolutionary renovations of the past three or four decades, and that the mere fact of their returning to majority status doesn’t mean that the Democrats are going to be able to adequately address this crucial lack. Not hardly.

To the right of Us, the far-too-large role of a hypertrophied government power and a mythic ‘Unitary Executive’; to the left of Us, a shrunken revolutionary agenda, still toxic in its tatters. All around us the twin spectres of Terrorism and Crime seeking to stampede us deeper into the market-basket of that government power and its corporate masters. But nowhere to be found is a Story that grounds us as a society and a civilization and as a People, nor as The People specifically raised up for this Republic by this Constitution and esteemed (until recently) as such by so many of the world’s peoples.

And far too many forces are quite used to working with (or around) a People thus enfeebled, thank you. A People that is on its way to becoming a ‘bunch’ or a ‘herd’ or a collection of ‘herds’ on a still-large ranch.

We have Us a world-class problem here. Ben Cartwright is not only gone, but he never actually existed in the first place. We cannot look to “the valley ranchers” to sort things out. Better it be realized that WE are the valley ranchers, and start holding meetings.

Time’s a-wastin’. Winter’s a-comin’. The neocon dudes and Fundy snake-oil sellers have set up their tables in the town hall, fronted by a bunch of cocky man-boys who never did a lick of honest work in their life. And if We don’t want the Army to run this town then We’d best attend to matters right quick. Or else this Story is going to have a very unhappy ending.
It ain’t much, but this is morning in America now. Then again, for persons modest enough to appreciate the Gifts of a Beyond, any day you can get up is a good day. Good enough anyhow.