Is this irony or what?
President Barack H. Obama went to the U.N. to announce it
is time for the U.S. to stop being smug, arrogant and
condescending about its international role, in a preachment he
delivered with a tone and manner that could only be described as
smug, arrogant, and condescending. He hardly came across as a
humble penitent confessing the conclusion of his agonizing
soul-searching, especially since the only souls he searched were
those of previous occupants of his office. He was content to
filet the soul of George W. Bush and serve it up in a bowl of
homily grits.
It bothers me some that our President sees in our history a
greater source of regret than of pride, but that bother I could
shirk with a shrug. What is truly nettlesome is that every word
in every sentence in every paragraph in every speech is trite,
hackneyed boilerplate Leftism 101 available at a university near
you. Not one solitary original insight eye-opened anybody. We
have heard this stuff ad nauseam and having this man of putative
brilliance recycle this pap is more than a bit disturbing.
Instead of boring into the yawning chasm between the competing
worldviews that define our time, he bored us into a chasmal
yawn.
What is Obama’s main point? He says the United States has
been too conceited in the past, needs to be more contrite in
future and cannot be the world’s policeman. For this I had to get
up early in the morning? What is new, even slightly new, in this?
It reminds me of W.C. Fields, whose doctor told him if he did not
stop drinking he had only six months to live. Twenty
hard-guzzling years later, he went to a different doctor who gave
him the same warning. “You must be a very masterful physician,”
Fields said. “Two decades after the fact, you confirmed precisely
the diagnosis of a top specialist.”
Throughout the 1970s we heard this refrain repeatedly. It
was posed as an argument to vacate Vietnam, to be polite to
Communists in Chile, to defer to Khomeini and his crazies in
Iran, to yield to Mugabe’s murderers in Rhodesia (now called Jim
Bob Something-or-other). Of those four examples, we stupidly
acquiesced to every one of those complaints or demands or
whatever they were, with the exception of Chile. The result?
Vietnam turned Communist and brutalized the lives of millions. At
least now it has normalized to some degree. Iran became a
madhouse and Zimbabwe a charnel house. Only Chile has been stable
and normal, affording full rights to its citizens.
Ronald Reagan became President in 1981, and all that did
was amplify this leftwing litany into a cacophony. Even NPR
raised its voices loud enough to be heard over the refrigerator
motor. The visionaries of the left have no hindsight, so the
killing fields in Cambodia and the farrago of fallout from the
disastrous '70s did not slow them down one stride — with the
notable exception of the recently departed Irving Kristol and a
few fine friends.
When Bill Clinton became President in 1993, that view was
again the official one. In his second term, Madeleine Albright
became Secretary of State, openly declaring then — as she did
again last week in a speech — that the United States should not
be the only superpower. If we are too strong the world lacks
symmetry, you see. But again, today our point is less the inanity
of all this, but the stupefyingly, stutltifyingly passé nature of
this set of ideas or sentiments whose time has long since come
and gone.
Perhaps originality is overrated. Perhaps we should go back
to old ideas. But if so, let’s not recycle failed ideas from the
last two centuries. Let’s go back to the oldest ideas of all,
ones that have stood the test of time. If we do that, we shall
discover that evil will always be present, that it will prey upon
the weak if it is not stopped by the strong, and that when the
virtuous are blessed with strength they are obligated to lead in
protecting the weak.
One postscript to Obama’s speech. After he said we cannot
be the world’s policeman, and other countries need to get into
the act, the Swiss complied. They arrested Roman Polanski for
something he did 32 years ago to a woman who is now a grandmother
and would like the case closed. I’m feelin’ safer already.
