What Obama knows, America forgot By Spengler
How the president-elect will deal with the disaster he inherits from the Bush administration is beyond the capacity of any second person to guess. Obama, I argued before the election, acted like an African anthropologist profiling the quaint and curious tribe of Americans. (Please see Obama's women reveal his secret, February 26, 2008.) He read Americans so well and played so cannily on their hopes and dreams as to persuade a large number of mutually incompatible constituencies that he shared their concerns.
All manipulation and no character was my verdict on Obama, but that might not be the worst outcome. Like Goethe's Mephistopheles, he may turn out to be "the spirit that always wants the bad, but always does the good".
Bush is the opposite of Goethe's Devil, a well-meaning fellow who always wants the good but inevitably creates a disaster. Americans live in the world's only non-ethnic nation, built by selecting out of the nations individuals who desired to leave their national tragedy behind them on the further shore. Precisely because ethnicity has no edge in America, Americans assume that the tragic destinies of other peoples are a treatable malady. Bush believes in his heart of hearts that democracy will cure the ancient hatreds of the Middle East, because he comes from a new people called out of the nations. Western Asia is full of peoples who have nothing to lose because they have no future and know it.
Sentimental attachment to Third World cultures, though, is a Western phenomenon; in the Third World as it actually exists, one encounters other cultures, and kills them. It remains to be seen whether the president-elect is a Western sentimentalist, or a Third World anthropologist who has talked his way into the leadership of the United States. In the latter case, it is likely that he will deal with America's enemies with a harder hand than Bush ever would have employed. Governance in Africa is not about ideology, but about the raw exercise of power. Confronted with multiple crises that threaten the power of the United States, this clever Luo from Hawaii by way of Indonesia may defend his prerogatives more ferociously than anyone expects.
All manipulation and no character was my verdict on Obama, but that might not be the worst outcome. Like Goethe's Mephistopheles, he may turn out to be "the spirit that always wants the bad, but always does the good".
Bush is the opposite of Goethe's Devil, a well-meaning fellow who always wants the good but inevitably creates a disaster. Americans live in the world's only non-ethnic nation, built by selecting out of the nations individuals who desired to leave their national tragedy behind them on the further shore. Precisely because ethnicity has no edge in America, Americans assume that the tragic destinies of other peoples are a treatable malady. Bush believes in his heart of hearts that democracy will cure the ancient hatreds of the Middle East, because he comes from a new people called out of the nations. Western Asia is full of peoples who have nothing to lose because they have no future and know it.
Sentimental attachment to Third World cultures, though, is a Western phenomenon; in the Third World as it actually exists, one encounters other cultures, and kills them. It remains to be seen whether the president-elect is a Western sentimentalist, or a Third World anthropologist who has talked his way into the leadership of the United States. In the latter case, it is likely that he will deal with America's enemies with a harder hand than Bush ever would have employed. Governance in Africa is not about ideology, but about the raw exercise of power. Confronted with multiple crises that threaten the power of the United States, this clever Luo from Hawaii by way of Indonesia may defend his prerogatives more ferociously than anyone expects.
posted by temporal at 1/13/2009
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