A way through the winter

From Agence-France Presse:

Nearly a year into his presidency, Barack Obama acknowledged Sunday that he at times is wracked by doubt and disappointment when his key agenda items are slowed by multiple hurdles.

"You know, folks ask me sometimes why I look so calm," Obama told several hundred worshippers from the pulpit of Washington's Vermont Avenue Baptist Church, where slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr once delivered a sermon.

The US leader is famous of his aura of unflappability in the face of crisis, but he acknowledged that there are sometimes roiling emotions beneath the surface.

"I have a confession to make. There are times when I'm not so calm. My wife knows. There are times when progress seems too slow. There are times when the words that are spoken about me hurt. There are times when the barbs sting. There are times when it feels like all these efforts are for naught," he added.

"Change is so painfully slow in coming. And I have to confront my own doubts."

But the president said it was his faith that gave him inner calm and peace and urged congregants at the church to find solace in theirs.

"So let us hold fast to that faith," Obama urged the congregation.

"Together, we shall overcome the challenges of the new age. Together, we shall seize the promise of this moment. Together, we shall make a way through the winter. And we're going to welcome the spring."

Backlash coming

Be afraid.

David Levine

I think this is my favorite drawing by David Levine, showing the Soviet spy and influential British art historian Anthony Blunt. As undergraduates at Cambridge during the early thirties, Blunt and his friends became communists out of concern for the oppressed and fear of fascism. Here you can see Blunt giving what looks like the black power salute with one hand while holding a cup of tea in the other. It captures the contradictions of Blunt and the Cambridge ring quite well. They were a group whose commitment to leftist politics led them to betray their country, yet they remained English snobs to the end.

Another favorite, no explanation needed.

According to an appreciation in the New York Times, Levine was fond of saying that Stalin and Trotsky had destroyed "a beautiful idea." 

For the most part, you'll find the people Levine depicted in their own idiom, their own clothes. Yet here we see Bertrand Russell dressed as a hippie. 

Andy Warhol as Alfred E. Newman.

It doesn't seem to be one of the commemorated examples of his work, but Levine's rendering of Ken Starr as an Ayatollah (at first I thought it was Starr as bin Laden) probably deserves to be recycled.

Here's how he depicted arch-reactionary prelate Pius IX.

Bobby Kennedy, chicken-hawk.

Totally Unacceptable

Some depressing news this morning - Obama came out with a statement last night proclaiming the near-miss terrorist attack over Detroit to be the result of a "systemic failure" in American security. The carping from our pseudo-conservative friends is working, apparently. And now Obama has to catch up to the problem before it leaves him behind. But he must not break a sweat in doing so. Perhaps this accounts for the measured response he's taken since Friday, traces of which remain in his most recent remarks: 

“A systemic failure has occurred, and I consider that totally unacceptable ... Had this critical information [regarding plans by Al Qaida's Yemeni branch to use a Nigerian in an airliner attack] been shared, it could have been compiled with other intelligence and a fuller, clearer picture of the suspect would have emerged ... The warning signs would have triggered red flags, and the suspect would have never been allowed to board that plane for America.”

Perhaps it's wishful thinking to suggest that Obama will manage to turn this situation to his advantage. He was very lucky that the bomb failed and one wonders what his enemies would be saying now had it succeeded. Still, if he is intellectually sharp enough to survive the experience of being president at all, then Obama would, at some level of his mind, have anticipated something like this happening, if not worse. Or perhaps he's so exhausted that all these bewildering events have reduced him to simply reacting. It will be interesting, and scary, to watch.

At any rate, it's also interesting to read this story in The Independent (London) which shows us some of the Internet postings by Mr. Abdulmutallab, the failed bomber. You can find them toward the bottom of the story, and they point to someone who's locked in a struggle against loneliness and sexuality. Never a good combination, but predictable enough given the incredible stupidity of his crime.

Here's a picture of the building in London where Abdulmutallab lived for three years while studying engineering at University College. According to the Independent, his flat is worth two-million pounds and located on what they describe as a luxury car-lined street in Marylebone. If you look next to the window on the right, you'll see one of those blue-plates that get affixed to London buildings of historical significance. I once saw one on a building where Alfred Hitchcock had lived. (Perhaps it was here on the Cromwell Road in Kensington, where the director is said to have lived during the thirties.) According to the BBC, the one here memorializes Sir Robert Mayer, the English philanthropist. 

Another question that this so-far modest debacle will affect: the closing of Guantanamo Bay. A few days before the failed attack, the Times had reported that funding problems would delay the shuttering of America's prison camp there until 2011. Is it too pessimistic to assume that it won't happen even by then?

Mr. Backlash '09

It will be hard to look back on this year without thinking of Glenn Beck. He nurtured and kept alive the ugliness and paranoia that Sarah Palin first conjured during the election of 2008 and that now seems poised for a great political victory in the coming Congressional elections. 

So this would seem to be the right time for a full consideration of Beck and his influence, but there's something about him that defies such consideration. "To write a serious critique of Glenn Beck is almost a waste of time," according to Thomas Frank. And in a way, he's being generous, since it's also a waste of time just to watch his show, as I discovered this summer when members of Congress were returning to their districts and confronting their constituents' angry protests against proposals to extend health care coverage to the uninsured. Since I found the whole thing ridiculous, and since the protesters seemed to be taking their cues from Beck's show, I began tuning in everyday at five o'clock on the TV in my office. I thought watching Beck while going about my other business would be fun in a perverse, cynical way. What I found instead was that watching Beck is indescribably boring. The show consists of nothing but the host spouting conspiracy theories that are more mind-numbing than laughably stupid, and the endless, repeated playing of video clips in which some official of the Obama administration is caught in a gaffe that reveals her secret Maoist agenda. Beck doesn't seem to have many live guests on his program and when they do appear they almost always take his side. Although his use of blackboards to sketch out various conspiracies provided a few chuckles and there was at least one instance of truly comic misspelling, I ended my few weeks as a loyal Beck-viewer feeling worn-down and depressed. The attempt to laugh at the enemy had failed. I also got very little of my regular work done due to all the agonizing over why it had failed.

Maybe it would be fine to dismiss Beck as stupid and mindless. Yet he is a central figure in the American political scene of the moment. If the kind of politics that Sarah Palin practiced in 2008 flourish in 2010, then it will be due in no small part to him. 

Perhaps the best way to think of Beck is as a "study in the pathology of cultural criticism." This is what one historian of modern Germany has done to explain how intellectuals and writers of the late nineteenth century set the stage for what was to come later. Much like Beck, the subjects examined in "The Politics of Cultural Despair" by Fritz Stern all "sought to become prophets who would point the way to a national rebirth." As Frank observes, Beck's routines are like violent mood swings that go from ranting about social ills to weepy expressions of "goo-goo civic togetherness in which we overcome various plots 'to keep us from uniting,' in which we get together and realize we 'are not alone.'" Like the inventors of what Stern calls the pre-Nazi "Germanic ideology," Beck leaps from "despair to utopia across all existing reality." 

Naturally, there's a huge difference between the subjects of Stern's scholarly work and Glenn Beck. The writers Stern wrote about, though demented, were real intellectuals of the pseudo-conservative revolution, whereas Beck is more like its rodeo clown. In our times, however, maybe the best way to understand him and where he's dragging us is to treat Glenn Beck as though he were a serious thinker. 

A Serious Fact

Max Weber, "Capitalism and Rural Society in Germany" (1906?):

"It happens nowadays in the civilized countries - a peculiar and, in more than one respect, a serious fact - that the representatives of the highest interests of culture turn their eyes back and, with deep antipathy standing opposed to the development of capitalism, refuse to cooperate in rearing the structure of the future."

Born Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti, Pope Pius IX (1792-1878) was the longest reigning Pope in Church history, serving a period of 32 years that began in 1846. 

In 1869, he convened the first Vatican Council, which announced the doctrine of papal infallibility. The dogma of the immaculate conception was also defined under Pius IX. 

In 1858, papal police acting on orders authorized by Pius IX abducted a six-year-old Jewish child called Edgardo Mortara from his parents home in Bologna. He was baptized without their permission and, at age 23, was ordained a priest in the Augustinian order. He adopted the spiritual name Pius and learned to speak several different languages while working as a missionary among German Jews.  

Mortara re-established relations with his family during his mid forties and attended the funeral of his mother (seated), which was led by the rabbi of Bologna. In 1897, he preached at Saint Patrick's Cathedral in New York, despite objections from the archbishop on the grounds that Mortara's campaign to convert Jews would embarrass the American church. 

 

The Mortara controversy was raised in 2000 when Pope John Paul II arranged Pius IX's beatification over the objections of Jewish groups and some of the descendants of the Mortara family. (Opponents of beatifying Pius also reminded the church that he had re-opened Rome's Jewish Ghetto after first closing it during the early, liberal period of his pontificate.)

In 1864, Pius IX issued an encyclical on the "Church in Bavaria" in which he observed:

If at any time whatsoever, then surely now in this most sad age, it is the duty of bishops to battle most strenuously against the enemies of the faith. Hence the bishops, relying on divine aid, must raise their episcopal voice and must preach the gospel to all. They must announce, teach, explain, and impress upon both the wise and the foolish, the eternal truths of our divine faith along with its doctrines and precepts. The bishops are also bound to explain and to show to both the highest princes and the government the deplorable evils and damage which affect the people and the princes themselves. This is the result of the present-day contempt of religion and of the spirit of unbelief rising from the darkness under the fallacious appearance of social progress; this, of course, harms the Christian and the civil government. Everywhere it daily grows stronger; it perverts and corrupts the minds and souls of men. 

Obama in Oslo

This is how the Independent (London) memorialized Obama's acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize prize today. It's pretty subtle, but I think a hayseed could figure out what the artist wants to say. In fact, it would be a good thing if more people in this country could see how Obama's Nobel has been received by the European press. They would learn that they aren't alone in having a low opinion of the president. Others share their view of him, if not for the same reasons, that he is a slight, speechifying phony. Perhaps this would make them feel better about the outside world, even if they still move their lips while reading the autobiography of Sarah Palin.