Last night I walked into a hotbed of smoldering liberal libel and anger-- a graduate seminar, no less!

 

     Now, many of these good people are adult learners who've come in from the world of grown-up responsibilities in order to pick up a little learning or tone up their resume in our current degree-obsessed Paperocracy.  Not your typical "Theory"-consuming, Marxist pseudo-intellectual types, certainly.  And yet, based upon class discussion,  not necessarily very bright either.

 

     At the suggestion of Gov. Palin's name, they let in with a veritable chorus (no, make that cacophony, since choruses need to harmonize) of the latest innuendos and smears:  HAVE YOU HEARD that . . .  Sarah Palin banned books?!?  Sarah Palin teaches creationism?!?  Sarah Palin is a control-freak mom?!?  A sexist stunt from McCain?!?  Oh, but aren't we WORRIED:  worried about-- How women might be taken in by Palin?  About how people don't understand their economic interests?  About how many closet racists we have who just won't make themselves vote for Obama, even though they should/need to/desperately want to/must/MUST BE MADE TO?!?

 

     One schoolteacher, a rather dead-on-arrival looking sort, complained about how she had sought out Obama materials from the local campaign office "for her school"--but they had nothing left!  (This was perhaps the first occasion I've had to sigh with relief over Obama's popularity)  Another student worried cryptically over the presence of a large Mark Warner display somewhere roundabouts-- "But where was Obama's name?"  Many a time was it lamented that McCain and Palin "just think we're stupid!"-- to try to take them in with all that fearmongering and crypto-sexism/racism/fascism!

 

     One particularly emotional sort weighed in with a refreshing narrative of conversion, to lighten the mood of glum that had descended upon this monolingual Pentecost of Obama-witnessing.  She had taken her mother (some kind of closet racist, apparently?) in hand and explained to her:  "Now, you cannot tell me that you can look at these candidates on paper, never mind which one is black and which one is white, and not vote for Obama.  I gave her a copy of his speech and said, Read this! [spread that Gospel!].  Don't pay attention to who wrote it, just see if you don't agree with it and then tell me you're not going to vote for him ! . . ."

 

     The good mother relented.  Kids, learn a valuable lesson:  once in a blue moon, hectoring your parents and accusing them of secret guilt actually WORKS.  Then again, just ask the Red Guards.

 

     But let me take this lady at a more serious level than she aspires to.  Even James Fallows (who I find usually very sensible and penetrating) writes in "The Atlantic" that Obama's speeches are crafted not only to be listened to but to be read, to linger on afterwards as documents that contain real thought and embody Obama's thinking.

 

     Well, I can believe that last bit.  But as a retired high school amateur of forensic oratory, let me say that I've never found Obama's speeches the least bit engaging or persuasive.  Passionate?  I think the blinders are finally coming off the MSM and its pundits, if we can judge by Howard Fineman's new digs against Obama's "pride" or Friedman's admonishments about the guy who 'slipped a valium' in Obama's coffee [note to Thomas the Globalization Engine-- that valium's always been in Obama's bloodstream].  No, the passion has never come out of Obama-- it's radiated towards him from his adulating legions.  As for the "thoughtful" bit, let's consider it more carefully.

 

     It is often bragged on Obama's behalf that his speeches show "nuance" and offer proof of how he would lead-- by (so the blandishments go) 'considering every angle of a problem carefully.'  This cliche in particular disturbs me.  It goes to the heart of the intellectual weakness I find in my fellow students.  This is the kind of Socratism for the Masses that self-consciously "hip" (to say nothing of "liberal"!) high school teachers and college professors expose their students to, often with allusions to great second-rate minds and raconteurs like Voltaire, Thomas Paine, and Thoreau.  But what kind of "reason" is it exactly that must consider every single problem in the round-- since when is that the definition of rationality?  Where in the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, Leibniz, Tarski, or Mill is this enforced cliche about a limitless, supine perspectivism forever in suspense to find another "opinion", another "angle"-- and then pawning it off as "Logic"!

 

     And if Obama's thinking approach is bad thinking, it's positively atrocious as a leadership model.  What in the Lord's name have Democrats learned from their experiences with Carter and Clinton?  As if those gentlemen weren't indecisive enough with their collegiate bull-sessions and grown-up Show-and-Tell masquerading as Cabinet meetings and "policy discussions"-- now they've gone and nominated an actual (if not quite full-time) college professor!!

 

     The Obama phenomenon exposes the heart of the upper-middle class liberal electorate.  These are people with very set, wishful notions about what it means to be "smart."  They have playlists on their I-Pods that are considered "hip" (is there any Bach, Bruckner, Mozart or Ellington on these playlists?  Take a wild wager).  They have what is euphemistically called "nice furniture" (in ten years it'll be laughed off as a monstrosity, even though their children have never once sat on it). They took a brief stab at a couple of classic novels during an introductory course freshman year; maybe they did some highlighting in a Routledge secondary-source primer on Lacan in a graduate seminar.  They've never actually read "War and Peace", but they're certain all the Kennedys have.  If you can't find a copy of it at Kennebunkport, well, you know all the Bushes are illiterates.  And the yokels in the mountains and the Confederacy have never even heard of it, so what do they know?  Wasn't Tolstoy into some kind of Christianity, touting living with little or somesuch?  Well, he's famous anyway.  Just, like, you'd have to be really insightful to have ever heard his name though.

 

     So the upper-middle class liberal knows an awful lot about what it means to be "smart" and what it takes to govern.  Partly, it takes a lot of symbolism, but the right kind.  America is a frightfully racist society so being black and in office will do a lot of "healing."  Dressing sharply and working out a lot (going out in the wilderness to hunt or even just tramp about obviously does NOT count!) proves "character".  "Women's issues" are important, but women--eh, not so much.  --Actually, it seems, as long as libertine male politicians ensure abortion-on-demand and maternity leave and provide for outside-the-home childcare, there's no reason for women politicians at all.  --In any event, nominating women is a kind of pandering, and also somehow inexplicably unpleasant.  But a man who speaks well (ie. drones on in dispassionate academese) is clearly what's needed, and if he's indecisive ("thoughtful"), rootless ("a global citizen"), a moral blank ("change we can believe in"), preternaturally grasping ("the audacity of hope"), and shockingly inexperienced ("an outsider")-- then clearly he's the Second Coming of something, except that since you're secular it can't be Christ and since you know very little history you can't come up with anyone more impressive than that polished mediocrity, JFK.

 

     You'd think that people so conscious of literary allusions (Literature itself, it seems, is rather too much work) might be clued-up to the refreshingly Whitmanian energies that emanate from Sarah Palin and (in an admittedly different register) John McCain.  But apparently the Social Democrats among us have little stamina for the bracing project of building, or even just keeping up, the American Character that Emerson, Whitman, and the Founders before them, talked about and extolled.  And American Exceptionalism?  Oh, you must be a Nazi!  Anyway, the conquests of the Assyrians were a work of mercy compared to what the Supreme Court will do with our most cherished rights when McCain stiffens the conservative majority.  Not to mention, he'll start World War III.  Or else he'll have a heart attack and Palin will be President, in which case the Earth will slide out of its orbit and wander the asteroid belt.  No, only one man can save the world-- though his biggest concrete achievement has been winning a spoken-word Grammy.  Only one man has the dedicated followers who can redeem us from irremediable failures-- though so far all they've done is shown up to vote in a caucus.  Only one man has the ideas that will bring justice and prosperity-- though his big idea is "thinking."  Only one man can win our war, though he's never been in one, has no legislative background in defense, forestalled his fact-finding mission until he had every news anchor in tow, opposed the war before he was for it, yet still depends upon the support of those who want to end it.  But off course here "winning" it actually means losing it.

 

     Yep, I reckon that's why the pink collar mandarins of my seminar will vote for Barack Obama.  And that's why I'm voting for John McCain and Sarah Palin.