Canada and Other Matters of Opinion

by Rex Murphy

  HE’S NOT GOD, BUT HE IS AMERICA | December 27, 2008

  Time magazine has genuflected to the obvious and named Barack Obama its person of the year. Which is a good thing. Time can be spotty in its choices—either gruesomely correct, as when it named the Planet (incense to the Gaia crowd), or unwholesomely sycophantic, as when it stuck You (that’s you, smart reader) on the cover.

  Seeing Mr. Obama, I thought: Could have been worse. I guess the Chaise Longue will have to wait for a quieter year. But this year, the magazine couldn’t have gone anywhere else. A fair portion of the American press may have jettisoned every pretense of standard reporting on Mr. Obama, hardly distinguishable in the tone of commentary from preteen girls “Oh–my–God–ing” in the presence of the latest boy band.

  Time has gushed with the best of them. In November, in yet another cover story on The One, it rated Mr. Obama above the sons of kings and even, oh my, above Christ himself: “Some princes are born in palaces. Some are born in mangers. But a few are born in the imagination, out of scraps of history and hope …”

  I shed a tear on reading that. Brought back the molasses knobs of my youth, great glucose bombs that would fell a moose with their sheer sweetness. Yet, the excesses of Time, and the distinct strain of pure idolatry that has infested great swaths of the North American press, don’t change the consideration that Barack Obama was the story of 2008.

  He swiped the Democratic nomination from the Clintons, who, until Mr. Obama appeared on the scene, had that trinket so much in their possession that the contest for the top spot was marked down purely as a ritual. It was Hillary’s, and that was all there was to it. And then, from out of the murky backwaters of Chicago politics, came a little-known black politician with the exotic name of Barack Hussein Obama, who glided with balletic insouciance past the shark’s teeth, muscle and cunning of Clinton Inc.

  He should be person of the year—of the decade—just for that. But it might also be useful to hold in mind, while the hymns to The One as he approaches Inauguration Day increase in volume and fervour, that that’s all he’s done. His Senate record is an empty suitcase. His national achievement is—outside the nomination—precisely nil. Sarah Palin’s resumé is, objectively, much more substantial.

  Hillary was right when she jibed that Mr. Obama was just one speech—the address he gave to the Democratic convention that loosed John Kerry on the American electorate. Off the platform, he’s a great “um-er” and “ah-er” who stumbles with a sentence in a manner that hails to mind the image of George W. Bush on one of the latter’s many desperate safaris to link a cowering subject to its about-to-be mauled predicate.

  If Mr. Obama were a standard politician, the empty resumé would have done him in. But this is precisely the point about Mr. Obama, that he has blasted free of that category. Recall that string of losses he endured toward the end of the eternal primary campaign. Hillary was beating him state after state after state. And, yet, it hardly seemed to matter. Any other politician would have worn that serial trouncing like a wound. Mr. Obama walked on stage after each successive loss as though he’d just woken up from a comforting nap. The composure he sometimes displays, as many have noted, is almost unearthly: he possesses a centred confidence so strong that it almost deflects reality.

  The Obama persona confounds politics as we have known it for at least a generation. His person summons the wish that politics be better. There was not a little intuitive genius in founding his campaign on the most frequently abused concept in politics: hope. That there is a profound desire for improvement in the conduct of public life in America is too obvious to need statement. (The same is true in our country. Oh Lord, how true.)

  On some days, U.S. politics appears to be a frightful compound of graft, mismanagement, incompetence, cronyism, sexual misconduct, mediocrity, avarice and feral partisanship. The people who love America fear for her, not from apprehension over her enemies, but from despair over her putative leaders.

  Barack Obama, by some gift of personality, sent out a flash of inspiration that called the exiled strain of idealism back into U.S. politics. It was not so much that he made politics exciting as that he gave some warrant for the thought it could be worthy.

  He is not Lincoln. He is not, despite Time’s saccharine innuendo, better than the guy from the manger. But he’s the one who’s given the process of politics a second chance in our time. Person of the year. Easily.

  BARACKWATCH | January 3, 2009

  “It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France … and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision.”

  That’s Edmund Burke reflecting on the fate of Marie Antoinette. He was, as we should say today, a fan. “I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in; glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendour, and joy.”

  The prose has a touch of that Chris Matthews “thrill up my leg” quality, although of course infinitely more refined than anything produced to date, either above or below, the host of Hardball’s knee: “I thought 10,000 swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone …”

  Prophetic Burke. He was right about the age of chivalry. But the age of powdered encomium, what we would call the “puff piece,” is still very much with us.

  Celebrity reportage, witlessness in full genuflection to tackiness, has exploded the meanings of flattery and self-abasement. Entertainment reporters, as they deliriously regard themselves, are high-paid oxymorons. They all but lick the shoes of those they cover, and even that exemption is, I’m fairly confident, not total.

  Till very recently, the worship of celebrities was more or less confined to high-gloss, low-IQ entertainment magazines and their TV equivalents. But with the advent of Barack Obama—and, I should insist, not at his prompting—it has done a worrisome crossover. In the year blessedly past, we had a column in the San Francisco Chronicle that makes even Burke’s ode seem hesitant, ambiguous even.

  The columnist wrote, gasped, thrilled, vibrated that Mr. Obama was “ … that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health-care plans … but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve.” Rhapsody is too timid a word.

  Mr. Obama, the column reveals, is a Lightworker, a new-age messianic superpresence. The heading over this prostration, er, column was: “Is Obama an enlightened being?” Call Steven Spielberg. E.T. is back.

  There have been other descriptions of Mr. Obama during the primaries and the election that have been almost as dementedly ardent.

  Normally, the press stands apart from mass adulation. Not so with Mr. Obama. A recent report in The Washington Post read like a mash note from a teenager. The article had a picture of the Lightworker, shirtless, and commented: “ … he was photographed looking like the paradigm of a new kind of presidential fitness, one geared less toward preventing heart attacks than winning swimsuit competitions.” I beg to differ. Pass the defibrillator, now.

  The reporter/disciple was, however, just warming up. Next, he galloped off into territory left unexplored even in the perspiration-saturated pages of chicklit: “The sun glinted off chiseled pectorals sculpted during four weightlifting sessions each week, and a body toned by regular treadmill runs and basketball games.”

  If this guy gives up the politics beat, there are a hundred massage parlours out there thirsty for this kind of copy. This is The Washington Post, remember. Has the financial crisis tipped the collective media mind into entertainment-reporting mode?

  Very little of this, I repeat, is Mr. Obama’s fault. (Although that famous line of his on winning the nomination as “the moment when the rise of the seas began to slow and the planet began to heal” was an unhappy to
e-dip into the waters of absurd self-inflation.) But if the mainstream press offers “the sun glinted off chiselled pectorals,” let’s stop calling it news. This is Baywatch punditry.

  Not worth a mention? On the contrary, there swirls around the figure or persona of Mr. Obama a set of expectations radically disconnected from rationality. He cannot possibly match the fantasies he inspires in some. It’s worth wondering whether eight years of equal but opposite irrationality—the hysterically negative coverage of George W. Bush—has produced its own counter-response. Or whether that strand of new-age therapeutics, the Dr. Phil/Oprah “self-realization” claptrap, has warped U.S. politics into a kind of abysmal “healing workshop.” That would certainly account for some Americans thinking they’ve elected a Lightworker rather than a president.

  The press should be trimming these fantasies, not constructing them. But it’s easier to sigh than to analyze. So on Inauguration Day, don’t be surprised if you read a story that begins (alas, poor Burke), “And surely never lighted on this orb, which he hardly seemed to touch …”

  A CLICHÉD DUD | January 24, 2009

  Put him on a platform and Barack Obama can take any string of words and make them sing. He’s the best speech performer of our day.

  His voice has charm and power. He has an instinctive sense of the lyric and rhythmic underpinning of language, those surplus properties that impart a power beyond sense, beyond just what the words say. He has mastered the timing of public address, when to pause, when to rush a phrase, how to link gesture and stance to moments of emphasis. This is the full package.

  Barack Obama could read a string of fortune cookie messages and some people would come away thinking they’d heard the Gettysburg Address.

  He gave a great performance Tuesday. The speech itself, however, was a dud. So much skill operating on so lifeless a text. It was Vladimir Horowitz playing “Chopsticks.” A speech that has hardly begun gives us clouds that are “gathering,” storms that are “raging,” a fear that is “nagging,” grievances that are “petty,” interests that are “narrow” and decisions that are “unpleasant” displays an alarming hospitality to cliché. Is there a dull-adjective shop in the new White House?

  If they carve this one in marble, the appropriate subscript will read: Bring me your poor, your tired, your hackneyed phrases—your obvious descriptors yearning to be twee.

  It contains sentences that begin as merely flat but end in perfect banality: “Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions, who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans.” How many times have you heard that sad rhetorical turn? And where the sentence should deliver its punch, in comes the pale tepid verbal paint of “too many big plans.”

  There are sentences of pure fudge: “We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people, and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan.” The first half of that sentence should have been the plainer declaration that the war against insurgent forces and al-Qaeda in Iraq has turned to success, and might have made a mention of the general, David Petraeus, who worked the change. He’s why Mr. Obama can leave.

  The second half is a pure skate. Mr. Obama is going to “forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan”? Actually, he’s going to re-engage in an unfinished war with 30,000 or so new troops. Mr. Obama’s words make it seem like peace is the starting point. Afghanistan may be as tough for him as Iraq was for George Bush.

  Do you have a sleepy idea? Give it a platitude to curl up in. Has there ever been a chamber of commerce speech that has not included this sentence: “The state of the economy calls for action … and we will act—not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth.” Poor old growth. Always laying that new foundation.

  Mr. Obama’s few ventures into vivid metaphor were not always happy or consistent: “We have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united.” The Civil War wasn’t a taste of anything. Neither was segregation. Both were a full meal, one of horror, the other of dishonour to the nation’s ideals. I’m not sure “swill” belongs in there at all, but it’s a strange swill that half a phrase later is a “dark chapter.” It should have been, in any case, dark chapters (war and segregation)—plural.

  Finally, I’d like to note what isn’t in this inaugural address. There is no citation of that one greater orator, whose inspiring words and assassination-amputated life reconfigured the conscience of America so that a black politician becoming its president became truly possible: Martin Luther King.

  The real preface to Mr. Obama’s inaugural address, the precondition of his being able to deliver it, will be found in Dr. King’s immensely superior “I have a dream” speech. It is inexplicable that Dr. King, the most eloquent man America produced in the twentieth century, was not quoted directly by a president whose elevation to office should be seen as the consummation of Dr. King’s martyred life’s effort.

  An inaugural address worthy of its occasion winds history into its every sentence. Echo and allusion, direct quotation, bind the day to the great words and deeds of all the days before it. Mr. Obama’s speech would have gained both power and grace by direct citation of the unquestioned hero of the civil-rights movement.

  But this week’s address, sadly, was far less than its moment, and in much need of all the genuine power and grace a reference to that grand and fully eloquent man, Martin Luther King, would have given it.

  The above piece inspired an extra-large bag of mail from readers, not all of it, or even most of it, I have to say, sympathizing with my reaction to President Obama’s inaugural speech.

  The new president’s first official visit was to Canada, you will recall, his early presence no doubt reinforcing the general enthusiasm of Canadians for his style and manner. Both the prime minister and the leader of the opposition were jealous of their time with him, each hoping, I guess, to gain something by association with politics’ new superstar. Mr. Ignatieff’s party went so far as to beam the image of him with President Obama on one of the electronic billboards overlooking Times Square. I don’t know how many votes that will harvest in say, Saskatchewan, but it is surely an illustration of the value the Liberals see in branding their leader as a friend of The One. See also “It Might Have Been,” page 326.

  BAD ENGLISH

  NOTHING IS SACRED | July 10, 2004

  We are, I hope, past the hollow fury that greeted Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. Mr. Gibson has done well for himself—even Michael Moore must envy the box-office success of The Passion. Of course, here in Canada, we’ve had the irritant of the recent federal election to keep our minds off things godly, even those that come with previews and in Dolby sound.

  Election past, I’ve felt some need to put the satanic thoroughly behind me, and found a welcome means in a couple of books about William Tyndale, the earliest translator of the New Testament into English. I hadn’t realized till now that his work was so foundational to the great text of the King James Version, which has had the approval of centuries for its elegance, beauty and pith. Poor Tyndale got burnt at the stake for his labours.

  Two books exhaust the glories of the English language: that great translation, worked by the scholars and linguists of the early seventeenth century, and the works of Shakespeare. Between them, Shakespeare and the King James set the limits of what the English language is capable of, in poetry or prose, in rhythm and cadence, in eloquence and plain speaking. It takes a nervy person to tamper with either of them.

  Alas, there are always nervy people. Shakespeare has been bowdlerized, amputated, updated, and there is even a plain-language version put out for the “benefit” of college students. I read a sample in a downtown bookstore recently: “Wha’ sup, Romeo?” Fortunately, there was a washroom nearby.

  But the Bible, being a sacred book, possesses, one would think, more defences and stronger sanctions against vandalism by the tasteless. Alas, no. New versions of the Bible have always been with us, but wit
h the age of therapy, feminism and the dread, clammy spectre of inclusiveness, the poor old Bible has been pillaged—they call it “updating the text”—by more Visigoths than humbled Rome. About the only qualification these modern updates bring to the art of translation is an absolute tone-deafness to the prose they set out with such reckless insolence to mutilate.

  The latest torment is a translation going under the inspiring rubric Good as New. It is what the makers of computer commercials call user-friendly.

  A few samples are all I have space for. Let us try the famous, sad episode where Peter, the chief of the apostles, denies Christ. The earlier version, familiar to Christians worldwide from the Authorized Version: “Now Peter sat without in the palace: and a damsel came unto him, saying, ‘Thou also was with Jesus of Galilee.’ But he denied before them all, saying, ‘I know not what thou sayest.’”

  What a lovely thing it is. Peter is sitting “without in the palace.” A “damsel,” with wonderfully antique formality, “comes unto him.” She merely states that “Thou also was with Jesus of Galilee.” But the bare statement is for Peter a most terrible inquiry and challenge. It angers him. His fury, a compound of cowardice, and shame at that cowardice is in the clipped “I know not what thou sayest.”

  Now, let’s see what happens when you take the Authorized Version to the body shop and let loose the monkey mechanics of Good as New. (I forgot to mention: Good as New has updated the names. Peter is such an off-putting name. In the new dispensation he is now—I am not making this up—cue the music: Rocky.) “Meanwhile Rocky was still sitting in the courtyard. A woman came up to him and said: ‘Haven’t I seen you with Jesus, the hero from Galilee?’ Rocky shook his head and said: ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!’”