As a confirmed and committed cynic, I must be high on President
Barack Obama’s enemies’ list. Certainly well ahead of the
prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. One of Mr. Obama’s first official
acts was to launch an undeclared war on cynics. The president has
demanded we shed our cynicism — which he calls “a sorry kind of
wisdom” — or suffer the consequences.
It’s easy to see why. “A cynic,” wrote Ambrose Bierce — another
damned cynic — “is a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things
as they are, not as they ought to be.” Mr. Obama wants us to
close our eyes and imagine how things might be in some glorious
future, after he and Hillary have sat down to tea with Chavez and
Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong-Il. After his Merry Bureaucrats have
robbed the rich and given what little is left — after
administrative costs — to the poor.
We cynics are in for four long years. Possibly more. Throughout
the long campaign season Mr. Obama castigated us mercilessly. We
weren’t just any old bad guys — we gave Osama bin Laden a run
for his money. “The biggest enemy I think we have in this whole
process…the reason I think it’s so important, is because one of
the enemies we have to fight — it’s not just terrorists, it’s
not just Hezbollah, it’s not just Hamas — it’s also cynicism,”
Obama
told an audience in March 2007. And month earlier he had
warned, “And in this mission, our rivals won’t be one another,
and I would assert it won’t even be the other party. It’s going
to be cynicism that we’re fighting against.” Sounds like the
whole might and power of the U.S. government and military
apparatus will be amassed against us cynics.
Obama’s abhorrence of cynics hasn’t mellowed even as his power
has swelled. Last week in his Inaugural Address he again lashed
out: “What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has
shifted beneath them — that the stale political arguments that
have consumed us for so long no longer apply.”
We are not just an enemy, we are a thick-headed, pea-brained
enemy. We cannot grasp the simple arc of history, which has left
conservatism and libertarianism and other false doctrines behind.
One has the image of Mr. Obama expertly gauging the direction of
the Winds of Change with his electronic anemometer, while we
cynics stubbornly insist on tossing a few blades of grass into
the still air.
DESPITE ITS ILL-REPUTE, cynicism has a long and illustrious
history. The Greek cynic philosophers, epitomized by that eminent
street person and dog impersonator Diogenes of Sinope, were
ill-tempered ascetics who believed in living a virtuous life in
harmony with nature. Diogenes lived in a barrel and roamed the
daylight streets of Athens holding aloft a lamp and informing
amused and disgusted passersby that he was “looking for an honest
man.” One story, doubtless like all the best stories apocryphal,
tells how he was visited — uninvited, it seems — by Alexander
the Great. Asked by the Emperor if he might grant him a favor,
Diogenes snapped, “Yes, stop blocking my sun.”
Cynics were also anti-authoritarian egalitarians who thought
Greeks should reject possessions, fame and wealth and chastised
those who wouldn’t go along. Obama’s supporters would have liked
the cynics as they were a blend of crazy homeless person and
virtuous scold. But what made the early cynic different from
today’s Blue State voter was his indifference toward his health,
and his belief that most suffering was caused by bad judgment,
and not by the policies of the Bush Administration.
Cynicism didn’t really get a bad name until the term took on its
opposite meaning. This happens more than one might think. “Awful”
and “terrific” are examples of words that mean the opposite of
what they once meant, i.e., full of awe and causing terror.
Anyway, by the late Renaissance, anyone who merely ridiculed
human conduct was a cynic. David Mazella, in The Making of
Modern Cynicism, says modern cynics inspire fear and
loathing because they envision a future without hope of
meaningful change. And nobody is more into meaningful change than
Mr. Obama and his Stepford followers. It doesn’t matter if that
change never comes about, as long as one remains eternally
hopeful.
It’s easy for rich and powerful people like the Obamas to avoid
cynicism. Bertrand Russell, a cynic with a foot in both classical
and modern schools, once wrote that the holders of power are not
cynical since they are able to enforce their ideals. Likewise,
the oppressed are not cynical, but filled with rage. It is rather
the modern intellectual who is cynical because he alone sees
things as they are and insists on telling the truth, consequences
be damned.
You see now why President Obama hates cynics. They distrust
politicians and are suspicious of big government. They don’t
share the mania for empty platitudes, clichéd sermons, and
repetitive chants about hope and change. (Prophetically, Lord
Russell noted that “modern cynicism cannot be cured merely by
preaching.”) What’s more, cynics have studied the dark history of
the human beast. All of which evidently makes cynics a greater
threat to modern society than terrorists.
Like the early cynics I am anti-authoritarian and pro-equality
(of opportunity, not of outcome). I don’t necessarily reject
possessions, fame and wealth, though I can see how one might get
that impression looking at me. I likewise believe most suffering
is caused by wrong-headed decisions. Most trusting Americans
would be angered and outraged if the president of the United
States compared them to terrorists. Not we cynics. There isn’t
anything this adminstration can say that will bother us.
All we ask is that Mr. Obama doesn’t stand in our light.
