Touchy, touchy

Patrick Lang: harpies, hippies, whatever; why can't they just leave me the hell alone?

I guess Patrick Lang still has me on his "don't let this hippie weirdo post comments" list. This goes back a couple of years, as I explained in Neo-Confederate ideas in a surprising place 10/04/06 and More on the Confederacy 10/05/06. Apparently he just didn't quite get it how some dang hippies might prefer the United States to the Confederate States of America in historical hindsight. Or at least fail to be impressed by the CSA as a model of honor and statesmanship.

Apparently he still doesn't appreciate my charm. He posted about this article by neocon guru William Kristol, It’s All About Him New York Times 02/25/08. Kristol actually kicks off his column complaining that Barack Obama's clothing style is insufficiently patriotic. (I'm not making this up.) Lang's comments in Kristol on Obama, Sic Semper Tyrannis 2008 blog 02/25/08, were fretting about the threatening implications of Obama's wife suggesting that her husband was inspiring to lots of people. ("Sic Semper Tyrannis", by the way, means "thus ever to tyrants", though often taken to mean "tyrants shall not live" or something similar. It's the state motto of Virginia since whenever; it was also the words John Wilkes Booth shouted in his most famous performance at Ford's Theater after blowing a hole in President Lincoln's head.)

I submitted the following comment on the post. Lang screens his comments and apparently he thought this was just too incendiary for his readers' tender sensibilities. His next post is called Agitprop not done here 02/26/08, complaining about "a wave of ... attacks delivered by a new group of the Harpies of the left, (seemingly a 'task group' made up for Obamian defense of the 'future')."

Did he mean "harpie" or "hippie"? The wounds of the "culture war" are enduring for some people, it appears. Too bad. Because he actually does do some well-informed, reality-based commentary on war issues. Anyway, here was my shocking harpie hippie comment:

"Vote with our feet?" You don't strike me as the kind of guy who's shy about disagreeing with someone.

In this case, at the sky-high altitude of abstraction in which Kristol is speaking in that quote, how could anyone disagree?

But his real point is not to convince people of cloud-level abstractions. He's trying to apply the standard conservative framing of what those bad liberals are about to Obama.

According to that narrative, liberals support nanny government, want to tell us how to live, want to shove their values down everybody's throats, etc.

Whatever validity there may be to the complaint, how much it applies to Obama and his policies can't be determined from the fact that his wife uses a rhetorical flourish like "a hole in our souls" in her speeches. A statement like, "Our souls are broken in this nation" doesn't in itself say to me that the speaker is suggesting a political solution. It sounds like evangelical Protestant commonplace to me.

Personally, I'd rather talk theology in church than in a political meeting. But haven't the Republicans been griping for years that Democrats hate religion, or look down on religious people, or some such alleged failing? So why should Republicans find the occasional evangelical phrase from a candidate's spouse as being threatening?

For that matter, the phrases as excerpted by Kristol in your quotation could suggest a more conservative interpretation (in the theological sense) that humanity suffers from Orginal Sin (see St. Paul, St. Augustine) and that government can address only a part of our needs. Honestly, I haven't been studying the texts of Ms. Obama's speeches for such clues, and I have no idea whether she or her husband share an Augustinian view of the inclination of the heart to sin.

Also, "Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed,” at least taken in the limited context of the Kristol quote here, may lean a bit toward purple prose in its style. But it doesn't really suggest anything more to me than that she thinks Barack will inspire people to be more involved and engaged with public affairs. That sounds like a straightforward quality of responsible citizenship to me. Has the idea citizens of a republic should be involved and informed about public affairs become a strictly "liberal" ideological notion now?

Of course, that's only in the quoted part. Kristol actually starts off the article by complaining that Obama isn't sufficiently patriotic for his standards because ... he doesn't wear a little flag pin in his lapel! How will the Republic survive?

Virginia state seal with "Sic Semper Tyrannis" motto: maybe Pat Lang thinks it means, "thus ever to hippies"

Lang defines his perspective in the second post as, "I have always thought of myself as a paleoconservative libertarian". This is worth remembering. There are quite a few people who have found reason to criticize the Iraq War who will not be entirely happy with the kind of withdrawal that Barack Obama is advocating. And they may also be highly critical of other of his policies, as well.

The Iraq War has been such a disaster that plenty of people have found reason to criticize it, if only to try to distance their own reputations from the disaster. But it has created what could be a misleading impression that expert opinion is more generally supportive of Democratic antiwar measures than is the case. This is a different issue than the general public dissatisfaction with the war, which grew to majority proportions even in the face of the dysfunction of the Establishment press. And it has stayed strong, despite the propaganda claims of the great success of The Surge (aka, the McCain esclation), again in the face of mainstrem media dysfunction.

Tags: barack obama, isolationism, patrick lang, william kristol