It Is Any Wonder We Have President Obama?

We had turned off BBC1’s Obama inauguration coverage within moments of first turning it on.  Why?  After tuning in and finding ourselves treated immediately to the studied observation “Dick Cheney is not liked by many Americans…”, we knew how they were going to cover it.  Hours of that just seemed too much to take.

For, after all, neither is (now) President Obama universally adored among Americans either.  That latter reality, however, didn’t seem to dawn on that BBC reporter.  But given (now) President Obama’s near universal adoration in Broadcasting House, it is perhaps understandable that BBC field correspondents cannot conceive how that could be even remotely possible.

So we clicked over to FNC, to get the American domestic version.  Surprisingly, we found their coverage was actually quite watchable.  That was a remarkable change for Fox, given that most of its programs in general are painful to sit through.

But once the “heavyweights” such as Chris Wallace and Brit Hume moved on, we found ourselves with Cavuto.  “Can’t he get to the point!?  Could he speak any slower!?  Does he think Americans are stupid!?” the wife lamented.  And then, finally, as the parade was in full-flow down Pennsylvania Avenue, our new president on the reviewing stand, we got Glenn Beck.

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And another program to make one wince has apparently been born.  The “I’m just an average guy who doesn’t know anything” shtick is old already.  Because if Mr Beck doesn’t, one wonders what in heaven’s name is he doing anchoring a TV news/current affairs talk show?  And why is Fox employing him?

Nevermind, for far worse was the content.  After Mr Beck loudly criticized Rev Lowery’s cagey “anti-white” slap slipped into the benediction, and we viewers heard of how Mr Beck is also appalled there is but one black depicted in statuary in the Capitol, in popped the National Review’s Jonah Goldberg and a less well-known conservative (I believe) academic whose name escapes me.

On the possible Obama economic policy, we were treated to an insightful discussion of the proper role of the federal government in the economy.  About that, presumably, as normal, Mr Beck doesn’t know anything.  Yet despite such ignorance, he promptly trotted out a quote from Thomas Jefferson’s first inaugural on “frugal” government, and a second from James Madison asserting that the federal government is not meant to become involved in “charity.”

Oh good, history time.  Mr Goldberg and the academic quickly also got involved in critiquing Herbert Hoover’s obviously horrific “progressivism,” noting that he actually wasn’t as conservative as Democrats subsequently tried to portray him.  (The fiends.)  Yes, we know that — especially, one might say, when compared to Madison and Jefferson.

For, although none of the “panel” thought to mention this small fact, conservatism “changes.”  But even more insightful, Mr Goldberg pointed out how American “progressivism” of the late 1800s and early 1900s was directly influenced by “progressives” (apparently lockstep) desire to emulate “Prussian statism.”  And “Prussian statism,” we were also told, aimed to control everything.  Thus there Mr Goldberg tried neatly and glibly to tie Herbert Hoover’s “left-wing” (he used that exact expression) Republicanism directly to incipient totalitarianism.

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Have you ever heard the like?  Worse, talk about tone deaf:  Americans are having trouble paying their mortgages now, and Mr Goldberg is ruminating on “Prussian statism.”

Fine.  So how about the same social improvement pressures as were appearing simultaneously in America and in every other industrializing state, taking the form of a vocal social democratic movement that helped push the Prussian monarchy and Junker elites to implement certain reforms in order to protect their “traditional” institutions?  Too complicated to delve into: Mr Beck has probably never heard of all that either.  And if Mr Goldberg has, he chose not to share any of that with the viewing audience.

Okay, so how about staying “American?”  How about how Jefferson and Madison presided over an American society that by today’s standards was totally impoverished, one in which most Americans never saw a federal official (aside from when perhaps mailing a letter)?  What about how that government had to be “frugal” because almost none of the population had taxable wealth, and open civil revolt would have likely followed it if were too heavily burdened?  That didn’t enter into the discussion either.

Also nothing about debtors prisons?  And how about later small happenings like the Civil War?  The Homestead Act?  Lincoln’s own “progressivism”?  The Industrial Revolution?  Mass post-Civil War immigration?  The beginnings of a widespread monied economy?  (In Jefferson and Madison’s time, actual cash was a scarce commodity: even they had little of it.)  The tenements?  Teddy Roosevelt?

WWI?  The beginnings of modern credit?  And what about the 1918-1919 worldwide influenza epidemic that killed millions?  What about the starvation that enveloped exhausted Europe?  How about battling that latter being how Hoover made his reputation:  a fed, healthy population was much less likely to succumb to bolshevism?

What about that communism’s concurrent rise in the U.S. during the later Depression, which saw the Party boast a couple of million members (and millions more “fellow travellers”) by the mid-1930s?  And what about Hoover as president early on, and to a larger extent FDR later, both understanding that in the newly industrial world in which much of the public had developed a degree of material comfort unheard of barely 100 years before, and had suddenly lost so much of it, that the failure to address their “rising expectations” having been abruptly dashed could well have led to the ruin of American democracy?  How about their (seemingly hard to argue with) understanding that the world of Madison and Jefferson simply was no more?

Eh, why bother considering any of that?  Looking for something other than muddled thinking is obviously expecting way too much.  Bringing in actually relevant wider facts that might help bridge together Jefferson/Madison and a Hoover and a Roosevelt?  Why do that? when leaving a gapping hole is easier, and you can just opine on . . . and bookishly decry, unexplored, “Prussian statism.”

And remember, again, Mr Beck, as he would probably freely admit, wouldn’t understand anyhow.  One thing he surely knows, though?  Gosh, but those Russians are always terrible, aren’t they?

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Brilliant though they were, Madison and Jefferson were not gods.  Accepting their fundamental economic relevance today without taking into account ALL the rest that has happened since they lived is intellectually ludicrous: it is akin to directly comparing one of Jefferson’s phaetons to the space shuttle.  In fact, neither ever saw a car, a plane or a train, barely experienced steam, never witnessed electricity as a routine, domestic power generator, and lived in a country that had not a single river bridged.  All those just for starters.

We forget other things, too.  Not only were Jefferson and Madison unwilling to see women vote, much less hold public office, but Jefferson was at best lukewarm about all public religious activities and Madison was outright opposed to government-paid military chaplains.  Towards the end of his life, Madison also supported the American Colonization Society’s desire to “return” freed slaves to Africa.

Interestingly, one doesn’t see Mr Beck and Mr Goldberg extolling those gentlemen’s views on those subjects.  And that is to say nothing of the elephant in the room: Jefferson and Madison were masters of hundreds of slaves.  That also makes them a tad different than the rest of us, and vastly more different than even MOST free people who walked the earth alongside themselves.

Had we lived in their Virginia, most of us would have worked for them (either for pittance wages, had we been lucky enough to, or as slaves), not been them.  Yet we should base economic policies today on their experience of a world in which pathetic, often truly desperate people (men and women) scribbled off pleading, barely literate letters to President Jefferson — ONLY because one could write to the President for free, for in that era the recipient paid for delivered letters and he had free franking privileges — begging for work, for some little handout for herself the penniless widow with children, or decrying his economic trade embargo which was starving them?

It was an often somber, merciless world.  Most of us today would probably last in it about 5 minutes before keeling over.  Most tilled the soil from light to dark.  It took a backbreaking week of hard work, by hand, for a woman to do a single load of laundry, and then she started all over again the next week.  It was a life in which even food could not be taken for granted.  If you by some means had the resources to enjoy it, you “prosperously” killed your own meat.

There was no such thing as a doctor as we today understand one, and so most people died by age 40.  (Today, it seems most haven’t grown up by 40.)  Even among the “elite,” Jefferson’s wife, after having had 6 children by him in 10 years, died at age 33 due to complications following childbirth.  One of only their two who survived to adulthood, and who by the standards of her era also had had a very comfortable life, also died following childbirth, not yet 26.

And having been in office only a month and a half, with barely any anaesthesia by today’s standards the first President of the United States himself had a tumor removed by a knife-wielding “surgeon,” as a doctor overseeing demanded, “Cut away — deeper — deeper still!  Don’t be afraid!  You see how well he bears it!”

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Ah, the good ol’ days.  But, by then, it was approaching 11 PM here.  Yours truly could take no more and asked the Wife to turn it off: the inaugural coverage was winding down, and they were suddenly going all “Fox” on us.

Where are their brains?  Mr Goldberg?  That academic?  Those like them?  Are they sitting on them?  No wonder most Americans tuned their commentary out long before back in November.  For if those were representative examples of the steady rightist “commentariat” diet most Americans regularly heard of “Republican plans,” it is easy to see why we now have Barack Obama as president.  (Put another way, remember “Creative Republican Alternative Proposals?”  What’s that acronym spell?)

Yours truly now completely understands why Sen McCain lost the election and Republicans got turned out of the House and Senate in large numbers.  Indeed, it is actually shocking that Sen McCain didn’t do a heckuva lot worse.  Such commentators have effectively turned “conservatism” into nincompoopism.