Obama and Niebuhr

The New Neo Posted on by

In yesterday’s post on Obama’s reading habits, I requested that if anyone knew of an interview in which Obama was asked to talk in depth about a book or author he’s read, I’d like to be alerted to it. Commenter “dw53” obliged by pointing out that David Brooks once described a discussion he’d had with Obama about his fondness for the works of religious philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr.

Brooks was mighty impressed with what Obama had to say on the subject:

I was interviewing Obama a couple years ago, and I’m getting nowhere with the interview, it’s late in the night, he’s on the phone, walking off the Senate floor, he’s cranky. Out of the blue I say, “Ever read a guy named Reinhold Niebuhr?” And he says, “Yeah.” So I say, “What did Niebuhr mean to you?” For the next 20 minutes, he gave me a perfect description of Reinhold Niebuhr’s thought, which is a very subtle thought process based on the idea that you have to use power while it corrupts you. And I was dazzled, I felt the tingle up my knee as Chris Matthews would say.

It’s hard to know exactly what Obama said that was so dazzling. But since David Brooks has never written anything that indicates he’s any sort of deep thinker himself, perhaps the mere fact that Obama was familiar with the name “Reinhold Niebuhr” was enough to do the trick. Remember also that Brooks was the guy who fell in love with Obama at first sight (or first interview), on account of the latter’s sartorial splendor:

I remember distinctly an image of—we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant,” Brooks says, “and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.”

The whole thing reminds me of Daisy’s veneration for Jay Gatsby’s beautiful shirts—although even Daisy wasn’t silly enough to think that his lovely shirts qualified Gatsby to be president, much less a “very good” one. But this is the sort of thing that passes for thought in the MSM these days.

At any rate, it seems clear that Obama at least knows something about Niebuhr and has read at least some portion of his works. You might recognize certain commonalities from this description of Niebuhr’s philosophy by Wilfred McClay, a historian specializing in American intellectual history:

Obama’s not the first American president to declare his fondness for Niebuhr. Jimmy Carter notably did, both before and after his election. Some people think that the famous “malaise” speech had some Niebuhrian input…

Niebuhr remained a man of the left always. Maybe not enough left to suit some people, but he certainly was never a conservative. And he believed Christians were obligated to work actively for progressive social causes, for the realization of justice and righteousness, but they had to do this in a way that abandoned their illusions, not least in the way they thought about themselves. The pursuit of social justice would involve them in acts of sin and imperfection. Even the most surgical action, one might say, involves collateral damage…

Nobody can top Niebuhr for his anticommunism, but he also believed the United States resembled its antagonists more than it cared to imagine. He criticizes the communists for their philosophical materialism, but then points out that Americans are guilty of the same thing in practice…

[Its] tendency towards materialism was not even the greatest of America’s dangers. Even more perilous, he thought, was one of our principal points of pride, the entrenched idea that America has a providential mission in the world and [that] our nation is rendered uniquely virtuous and innocent by the blessings of history, locating the beginnings of it in the Calvinist Puritan tradition, and then the Jeffersonian tradition, which saw America’s as nature’s nation, free from the encumbrances of the old world…

I’m no expert on Niebuhr (haven’t read him myself). I’m not contending that he and Obama see exactly eye to eye on everything. And Niebuhr is known for holding views that allow both “progressives” and conservatives to claim him for their own. But there are enough resonances between Obama’s thinking and Niebuhr’s for me to believe that Obama has indeed actually read the guy (at least some of his works, anyway) and thinks highly of him. Obama’s staunch position against American exceptionalism has many philosophical influences—another noted theologian, Reverend Wright, being one of them. But Niebuhr is clearly another.

When Niebuhr indicated that people who want to do good must accept that “pursuit of social justice would involve them in acts of sin and imperfection” he may have merely meant that the perfect is the enemy of the good. But it’s a very slippery slope. For Obama, it seems to have been translated into the idea that the ends justify the means.

Full speed ahead on immigration reform?

The New Neo Posted on by

Our rogue Congress is readying its next attack on the American public, as “the overbearing majority” marches on.

This time, we have no illusions that anything as mundane as public opinion or the bill’s unpopularity will stop them. If they want to pass immigration “reform” badly enough, they will find a way, even if they have to break (or change) every rule in the book to do so.

Another jello interlude

The New Neo Posted on by

A couple was arrested and charged with tampering with Jello pudding packages, replacing the contents with sand and salt, and returning them for a refund. Larceny doesn’t get much more petit than this.

The question is: why Jello pudding? It does not seem to be a very cost-effective crime. When last I checked, the price of each box was under a dollar. Surely there must be a more efficient way to make crime pay.

Obama’s reading (and writing) list

The New Neo Posted on by

This WaPo article from last Sunday describes the reading habits of former presidents, including the much-maligned Bush who was apparently a voracious reader, and President Obama who sometimes mentions books he’s reading and is presumed to be one.

It’s always difficult to know whether a president is actually reading a book he says he’s reading, especially if the reading of said book would send some message the president wishes to convey. But the next time Obama mentions a book he’s reading or has read, I would dearly love to see the interviewer actually ask him a few penetrating questions about it and see what answers he gives.

Would they be very general—sort of like in a school book report when the student writes, “I liked this book; it was very good”? Or would they show that he’s actually read and thought deeply about it? My guess is that the man doesn’t read nearly as much as he claims he does, although perhaps that’s true of most politicians.

That’s not to say (as Bush’s critics falsely claimed of Bush) that Obama lacks the basic intelligence to do so. I have always believed Obama to be an intelligent man in the academic sense (yes, he was magna cum laude at Harvard Law, which does mean something), although certainly not the super-genius he’s purported to be.

It’s not been my impression that Obama is especially interested in most books, though, except for political strategy books, or books about other matters highly relevant to his goals and agenda. That perception of mine is based on his interviews; he almost never makes a literary reference in passing conversation, only when directly asked about his reading tastes, and then his remarks about the books he’s read seem to be rather general.

In researching this post, I kept coming up with articles such as this. They mention how obviously erudite and bookish Obama is (after all, he wrote the great Dreams From My Father!), and then deal with lists he’s provided of influential books in his life. But I haven’t yet found any links to an interview in which he’s asked more detailed questions, and discourses at length on just what passages he liked or what he thought was so fine about it. Perhaps such interviews exist; if so, feel free to provide a link in the comments section, and I’ll take a look.

What I found instead was the curious assertion that Obama didn’t really take up book reading until college. This is not usually the case for writers, and makes me even more suspicious of the provenance of Dreams. Speaking of which:

Apparently, Obama’s childhood was not particularly bookish but his love of literature was sparked at Occidental College in California where he admitted to reading “tons of books”. In December 1997, he even reviewed a book for the Chicago Tribune ”“ William Ayers’ A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of the Juvenile Court.

Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice would say (there, that’s a literary reference from one of my favorite works; it just slipped out. Book aficionados usually are first and foremost avid readers, ordinarily from early childhood, and we’re always quoting this and that author or poem.)

And now that I’ve said that, I’m trying to think of a good literary quote to end this post—and of course I’m having trouble doing so. So I’ve turned to trusty Google and I get this:

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read. ~G.K. Chesterton

[NOTE: The blogger “zombie” has done some research on that Obama book review of Ayers’s work. It’s not a full review, but was part of a feature in the Tribune called “Mark My Word,” in which “Chicago notables praise their favorite current books.” So we can conclude that, despite the fact that the Ayers book does not appear on any present-day list of Obama’s favorite literary works (pity, that), in the year 1997 it headed the pack.

Here’s the review in full, as far as I can see:

A searing and timely account of the juvenile court system, and the courageous individuals who rescue hope from despair.

I assume it was in the nature of an “you scratched my back, I’ll scratch yours” thank-you note to Ayers, although for what I can hardly say. Perhaps for the campaign kick-off party for Obama in 1995. Or maybe for the help in writing Dreams, if Jack Cashill is correct.

A guest blogger at Michelle Malkin’s dug up another nugget, this time from Ayers’s book A Kind and Just Parent itself. On page 82 Ayers wrote of his Hyde Park neighborhood [emphasis mine]:

Our neighbors include Muhammad Ali, former mayor Eugene Sawyer, poets Gwendolyn Brooks and Elizabeth Alexander, and writer Barack Obama.

At that point in time (1997), “writer” was certainly not Obama’s most salient characteristic—unless for some reason Ayers wanted to emphasize it. You can draw your own conclusions about that. But Obama had started his political campaign in 1995 (right around the same time as the publication of Dreams) and had been elected to the Illinois State Senate in 1996, before Ayers wrote A Kind and Just Parent. Obama’s biggest claim to fame at the time besides that was probably having been the first black president of Harvard Law Review.

At first, Obama’s book Dreams appears to have had only modest sales; it was long out of print until it was reissued in 2004 as a hot property in light of Obama’s Democratic Convention speech. What’s more, if you look at the notes here, all of the great praise of Dreams as a fabulous literary work seems to have come after its 2004 reissue (here’s the original 1995 NY Times review, which is mostly descriptive), and especially during the 2008 campaign when Obama was a celebrity and people were taking a look back at it. But Ayers knew about the book way back in 1997 and even characterized lawyer/activist/politician Obama as a “writer” and nothing else.

As I said, curiouser and curiouser.]

[NOTE II: Here’s an audio interview with Obama in 1995 on the publication of his book. It’s interesting that even in this interview he specifically mentions his grandmother as having had a fear of “black men on the street.” That’s the incident he cited in his famous post-Reverend-Wright race speech in which he used her as an example of bigotry. But if you look at the story Obama actually relates in his book, it is nothing of the sort: his grandmother mentioned being harassed by one particular aggressively panhandling man on the street, and it was Barack’s grandfather (and Frank Marshall Davis) who pointed out that the man was black and that the grandmother was racist in fearing him.]

It’s Earth Day! Let’s celebrate!!

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s the fortieth anniversary of Earth Day and the official website wants you to celebrate by being afraid, being very afraid:

Forty years after the first Earth Day, the world is in greater peril than ever. While climate change is the greatest challenge of our time, it also presents the greatest opportunity ”“ an unprecedented opportunity to build a healthy, prosperous, clean energy economy now and for the future.

Apparently they didn’t get the Climategate memo.

I remember the very first Earth Day, which despite the gloomy rhetoric I recall as a much lighter thing—filled with helium balloons and mellow crowds smoking grass on the grass.

Love that Peter Max-inspired lettering:

teachin1970.jpg

Paul Taylor and Esplanade

The New Neo Posted on by

I first saw the Paul Taylor Dance Company perform in 1970. I was immediately impressed, even though it’s a modern dance company and at the time I tended to prefer ballet. But Paul Taylor’s work had a unique set of characteristics that wowed me: wonderful music, powerful dancers, incredibly inventive choreography, contrasts of lightest light and darkest dark, an emphasis on the interrelationships between people, and even that rarest of commodities in dance—humor.

Taylor himself was a revelation. Dancers tend to be short and to look taller onstage. But he really was tall, and muscular like an athlete. When he wanted to (and every now and then he did want to, if it suited his dramatic purposes), he could walk onto the stage and not even look like the trained dancer he was—but like a regular Joe instead.

Taylor is still churning out dance works a few months shy of his eightieth birthday. His choreography doesn’t sound as though it would be extraordinary, and yet it is. Solid technique is present, to be sure. But mere steps and flash are never the point: movement is, and what movement expresses. If I write that in one of my favorite works of his—“Esplanade”—he eschews conventional dance steps and uses movements that derive almost entirely from natural everyday motions such as walking, running, and falling, it sounds boring. But Taylor transforms these steps into one of the most exhilarating and joyous dances ever created, one that at times exhibits an almost sublime tenderness, and at other times makes the audience gasp with its bold daring, lightning speed, and the dancers’ sheer physical power as they hurl themselves with reckless abandon into each others’ arms and then down to the floor and up again.

I’m visiting New York right now, and last night we went to see Paul Taylor 2 (Taylor’s chamber company) at the Joyce Theater. To my delight, “Esplanade” was on the program, and once again I thrilled to its timeless choreography, every bit as fresh now as it was the day it was created in 1975.

I always feel like apologizing when I post dance videos here. I’m glad to have them, of course. But they can only give the barest idea of the power of the thing itself in its live, three-dimensional, living and breathing onstage manifestation. The following You Tube clip shows rare documentary footage of Taylor himself dancing the work “Aureole” (see 2:32-2:39), and contains an excerpt from the exuberant aforementioned finale of “Esplanade” (minus Taylor; he retired from active performing in 1974, before the work was created), which starts at minute 3:49 and lasts until the video’s end:

This is pretty wonderful, too. It’s another video showing nearly the same excerpt from “Esplanade,” only this time much of it is filmed from the wings, offering a very different perspective:There was a question-and-answer session after the performance last night, and one of dancers described the way Taylor conducts auditions for his company. Taylor always first has the dancers walk across the floor, one by one, and then each must run. He is looking at their quality of natural movement; if that isn’t up to his standards, he’s not interested. After the walk/run he lets many of them go, and then works with the ones who are left, winnowing them down until the lucky dancer or dancers remain who will get the chance to dance his choreography onstage as members of his company.

I once took a master class from a group of Paul Taylor’s dancers back in 1970. As is often the case with such lessons, they taught us some excerpts from his works. I well remember how wonderful those little snippets felt to actually perform. There was a freedom and a sweep to them, a musicality and a sense that we were almost flying across the floor, dancing in a way that expressed the joy that can sometimes be found in dance—and in life.

Archie Bunker at the Tea Party

The New Neo Posted on by

From the start, the MSM has been determined to trivialize and/or demonize the Tea Partiers. Although the Tea Party movement has been consistent in focusing almost entirely on fiscal matters and small government, one of the most consistent and favored charges against them has been the race card.

So they have always been called bigots by the MSM. The original favored meme was that they are blue-collar, ignorant, unlettered, extremist, angry white male bigots. But just for variety—and as a result of a Times/CBS poll) the MSM has switched lately to accusations that they are privileged, well-educated, extremist, angry white male bigots. Make up your minds, MSM!

That original characterization of the Tea Partiers kept reminding me of something, though. Something very familiar, from the past. Who or what could it be?

And then I realized the answer: Archie Bunker, of the 1971-1979 TV show “All in the Family.”

Archie was created by noted liberal Norman Lear as a typical blue collar conservative, bigoted and narrow-minded and selfishly out to protect his own pocketbook. Archie was heavy and red-faced, and his speech was studded with mispronounced words and malapropisms.

Enlightened viewers were supposed to look down on Archie and his highly vocal racism—as well as all his viewpoints, expressed in his gritty New York accent. But Bunker was brillliantly played for laughs by liberal actor Carroll O’Connor, who somehow conveyed that you were paradoxically supposed to sort of like him too, because underneath all the bluster he had the proverbial heart of gold. O’Connor walked an exquisitely fine line in conveying both ideas simultaneously—very different from the undiluted rancor of today’s Tea Party critics towards members of the movement.

What’s more, the liberals on the show such as Archie’s foil and live-in son-in-law Michael Stivic (portrayed by Rob Reiner, another liberal in real life) aka “Meathead” were not portrayed as faultless, either. Those were the days.

I loved the show at the time. Glancing back via You Tube, I am surprised to find myself now thinking the old guy scored a couple of political points, too (although not the racist ones). Take a look for yourself at Archie expounding on gun control. When he makes his over-the-top suggestion on how to foil what were then known as airplane “skyjackings.” think of 9-11 and its aftermath, and note why there have been no airplane hijackings since Flight 93:

And now, here’s Archie on Democrats, speaking during the Carter years. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose:

[NOTE: Here’s an interesting factoid about O’Connor and the creation of the show:

Wanting a well-known actor to tackle the controversial material, Lear had approached Jackie Gleason and Mickey Rooney to play Archie; both declined. O’Connor accepted, not expecting the show to be a success and believing he would be able to move back to Europe. (In her book Archie & Edith, Mike & Gloria : the Tumultuous History of All in the Family, Donna McCrohan noted that O’Connor requested that Lear provide him with a return airline ticket to Rome as a condition of his accepting the role, so that he could return to Italy when the show failed.) Instead, the show became the highest-rated television program on American television for five consecutive seasons until the 1976-1977 season (the sixth season).]

Arizona continues to get tough

The New Neo Posted on by

First, Arizona passes a much-needed (and much-criticized) crackdown on illegal immigrants.

Now, is Arizona becoming a birther? Interesting:

[The law] would require U.S. presidential candidates who want to appear on the ballot in Arizona to submit documents proving they meet the constitutional requirements to be president.

Phoenix Democratic Rep. Kyrsten Sinema said the bill is one of several measures that are making Arizona “the laughing stock of the nation.”

Mesa Republican Rep. Cecil Ash said he has no reason to doubt Obama’s citizenship but supports the measure because it could help end doubt.

Note how the mere act of requiring candidates’ birth certificates to be produced has become, in many Democrats’ eyes, a cause for ridicule.