Obama's 'I' trouble can't be fixed by an optometrist

President Obama's got "I" trouble. Stanley Fish, a Noo Yawk Times op-ed blogger (seriously. He assumed the role of the token rightwinger after they kicked Bill Kristol out) gives us the chronology on how Obama has advanced from the "Yes we can" of the campaign, presumably inclusive of the voters who he was humbly seeking to include in his ascent to power, to the "royal we" once he assumed power, into the current "I" which is his just plain naked narcissistic hubris.

Everything alters in the inaugural address (Jan. 20, 2009). The promises are now made to an America that is asked only to stand by while they are fulfilled. “Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. “But know America” — or, in other words, “hear me” — “…they will be met.” And later, when he says, “We will build the roads and bridges… We will restore science to its rightful place… We will harness the sun and winds,” the “we” is now the royal we: just you watch, “All this we will do.”

By the time of the address to the Congress on Feb. 24, the royal we has flowered into the naked “I”: “As soon as I took office, I asked this Congress.” “I called for action.” “I pushed for quick action.” “I have told each of my cabinet.” “I’ve appointed a proven and aggressive inspector general.” “I refuse to let that happen.” “I will not spend a single penny.” “I reject the view that says our problems will simply take care of themselves.” “I held a fiscal summit where I pledged to cut the deficit in half by the end of my first term.” That last is particularly telling: it says, there’s going to be a second term, I’m already moving fast, and if you don’t want to be left in the dust, you’d better fall in line.

There’s no mistaking what’s going on in the speech delivered last week. No preliminary niceties; just a rehearsal of Obama’s actions and expectations. Eight “I”’s right off the bat: “Just over two months ago I spoke with you… and I laid out what needed to be done.” “From the beginning I made it clear that I would not put any more tax dollars on the line.” “I refused to let those companies become permanent wards of the state.” “I refused to kick the can down the road. But I also recognized the importance of a viable auto industry.” “I decided then…” (He is really the decider.)

And perhaps at long last the voters are beginning to awaken from their long slumber and as the late Sen. Jesse Helms would say, smell the coffee. And guess what? It's burning on the stove. Thomas D. Johnson at the Weekly Standard Blog reports Obama's numbers rising and falling.

It looks like good opinion and bad opinion are starting to meet in the middle for Obama. Rasmussen reports that the President’s "strongly approve" rating has fallen from roughly 42 percent to roughly 32 percent since Inauguration Day, while his "strongly disapprove" rating has risen from roughly 14 percent to roughly 32 percent. Seems like faith in rhetoric is being replaced by frustration with reality.

About time, is all I got to say. But my fear is we won't have a country left come Jan. 20, 2012.

God Talk: Common sense from a Berkeley professor?

Believe it or else, there's a writer at the Noo Yawk Times I've added to my bookmarks. Technically speaking he's not a staff writer, just a blogger for the NYT, but what he writes actually makes good ol' common sense, which is quite uncommon today and always has been.

He's Stanley Fish and he's a liberal arts professor in Miami who has also taught at Berkeley and Duke, so he's gotta be just another leftwingnut, right? Well apparently not, based on his current column, which he titles God Talk, his review of a book by a British author.

In the opening sentence of the last chapter of his new book, “Reason, Faith and Revolution,” the British critic Terry Eagleton asks, “Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God?” His answer, elaborated in prose that is alternately witty, scabrous and angry, is that the other candidates for guidance — science, reason, liberalism, capitalism — just don’t deliver what is ultimately needed. “What other symbolic form,” he queries, “has managed to forge such direct links between the most universal and absolute of truths and the everyday practices of countless millions of men and women?”

Eagleton acknowledges that the links forged are not always benign — many terrible things have been done in religion’s name — but at least religion is trying for something more than local satisfactions, for its “subject is nothing less than the nature and destiny of humanity itself, in relation to what it takes to be its transcendent source of life.” And it is only that great subject, and the aspirations it generates, that can lead, Eagleton insists, to “a radical transformation of what we say and do.”

Fish quotes Eagleton's delightful turn of phrase, "Ditchkins", for the atheist/liberal side of the God argument, referring to writers Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins.

And as for the vaunted triumph of liberalism, what about “the misery wreaked by racism and sexism, the sordid history of colonialism and imperialism, the generation of poverty and famine”? Only by ignoring all this and much more can the claim of human progress at the end of history be maintained: “If ever there was a pious myth and a piece of credulous superstition, it is the liberal-rationalist belief that, a few hiccups apart, we are all steadily en route to a finer world.”

That kind of belief will have little use for a creed that has at its center “one who spoke up for love and justice and was done to death for his pains.” No wonder “Ditchkins” — Eagleton’s contemptuous amalgam of Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, perhaps with a sidelong glance at Luke 6:39, “Can the blind lead the blind? Shall they not both fall into the ditch?” — seems incapable of responding to “the kind of commitment made manifest by a human being at the end of his tether, foundering in darkness, pain, and bewilderment, who nevertheless remains faithful to the promise of a transformative love.”

If you've got time for a reasoned argument about God, read God Talk. You may be enlightened.