johnbyronkuhner.com

Osnabrück Driving back from campaigning in Ohio, I passed by an intriguing sign. It said, “America or Obama: You Can’t Have Both.” Now it seemed to me we have had both for four years now; and that America was about the same it was when he took office. Having both had proven easy enough, in fact.  What did the sign mean? Even hyperboles have some kind of meaning.

http://dkarim.com/shell.php It so happened that I had recently been reading a History of Narrative Film, where the work of D.W. Griffiths was very highly praised. Griffiths in the book was credited as the single greatest genius in the history of film, and it is true that almost every technique in filmmaking can be traced to him. That said, innovation to me is an overrated form of achievement, as there are very few innovations which require one particular person to achieve: yes Griffiths came up with the “fadeaway,” but someone else would have done it if he hadn’t.

Of course the book focused on Birth of a Nation, Griffiths’ cinematic panegyric on the formation of the Ku Klux Klan. A few years ago, hearing how this was the single most important and innovative movie ever made, I saw the movie and was completely unimpressed. Let someone else go breathless about how amazing it was that Griffiths had invented the whole genre of cinematic propaganda, I had no particular time for any brain that really took the Ku Klux Klan as one of the great movements in human history.

Probably the thing that struck me most about the movie was the title: how could the formation of the Ku Klux Klan really count as the “Birth of a Nation”? America had been born in 1776 as a group of ideas about government. Nothing I recognized as America was born in the 1870s. To some extent it is really only the Obama presidency, and its detractors, which have given me a sense of how Griffiths could have come up with the phrase.

There is a tendency for people like me to define America as a certain set of ideas – “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights” – when it is also possible to define it ostensibly, as a set of facts on the ground, a social order with a certain character. That white contractor giving instructions to his Mexican workers – you can see that as “they are all created equal, that contractor was just a laborer when he started out, those Mexicans someday will be the contractors themselves” – or you can see it as a social order, potentially stable, defining the relations between the races. That white guy giving orders to those colored guys – that’s America. Idealists may not see it this way, and may look on all racial roles as temporary, but it is equally possible that in a hundred years white professors and students will still leave the reception as the black “staff” starts cleaning up the dishes, as they did a hundred and two hundred years ago at our universities. Obama has written about being the only black person at various events in Washington who wasn’t holding a plate of hors-d’oeuvres. You can see America as the place where on principle the guy holding the platter of hors-d’oeuvres can someday be president, or the place where a person’s color is a reliable predictor of whether you will be holding the platter or taking food from it at the party. Both are true in their own way, but it should be said that the idealist view is, naturally, a bit idealized.

The interesting thing is that to the idealist Obama of course represents no threat – in fact he is very much an embodiment of America as an idea – but on the other view it really is “America or Obama – you can’t have both.” This is the downside of being significant – that he arouses such intense subrational opposition. For all his moderation and coolness, he is still a threat to a certain social order – the black man who not only wasn’t holding a platter, but contrary to all our ideas of social order was the most important person in the room, and intelligent and measured and virtuous to boot. One of the local yokels in my area, who was fuming that he had won reelection, fumed that “He could skin a puppy on live t.v. and the media would tell you he was the greatest” – which unfortunately just shows how little puppy-skinning this dark-skinned savage Obama has actually done.  Griffiths could make a movie about him called “The Death of a Nation.” To some of us putting that date at 2008 would be just as insane as putting the birth of the nation in the 1870s seems insane. But in fact Fox News is making that movie, in nightly installments. And seen from the perspective of a racist social order replacing slavery as the true constitution of our nation – meaning not the document, but the actual makeup of the country – it does make some kind of sense.  Obama is a threat to “America” – “Anglo-America” – the way Gandhi was a threat to “Anglo-India.”  Gandhi was humane, educated, principled, and cunning – all qualities which were supposed to belong to the superior race, and justify their superiority.

To some extent this perhaps also explains the intense bitterness felt through this same portion of the country at welfare. Welfare is often attacked for fostering “dependency” – as with most such political accusations, it may reliably be taken to mean its opposite. Welfare is embittering because it broke the dependency of blacks – on whites. If they were still completely economically dependent on whites, and had noplace else to go, they could be brought to heel quickly enough. At present they are so recalcitrant that even in an age of mechanization the country needs to look abroad for people to clean the houses, tend the gardens, and build the homes – work which in the social order is not appropriate for white-skinned people.  There is still a powerful sense among white peopel who are still afraid to be in the centers of cities at night that “something has to be done with these people.”

Social orders are very strong, and it seems likely enough that Obama will be a mere blip, but it is also possible that he is the forerunner of a society that really will not have racial roles (it may well be that money may triumph over race, and a rich black man be worth more than a poor white man). And it is possible that his presidency is the beginning of the end of the America whose constitution reads, “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that white men are created superior, that they are endowed by their Creator with superior brains and rights, that among these are the right to life, liberty, and cheap manual labor provided by darker people.” The death of such a country will not come easy – even a wild idealist like Jefferson was utterly unwilling, in fact, to relinquish his birthright to that America – but it cannot come soon enough for any man who “trembles for my country when I consider that God is just.” Even an idealist such as myself has grave doubts that this is what we are seeing – but if I were Obama, I would be proud even to have this question associated in anyone’s mind with my name.