And I Say Unto Thee Verily, It's All Cool, Man

I have an aunt and uncle--good liberals, a college professor and technical writer who drive very fuel-efficient automobiles--who are working for the Obama campaign. I thought of them as I read Reza Aslan's funny-because-it's-true article in today's Post, "He Could Care Less about Obama's Story," for at the end of the day, it is your standard Progressive's conviction that "the world" shares his superficial obsessions and self-reflecting vanities, which drew him to his own personal Obama in the first place. Earlier this year I visited my relatives and tried to understand why it was exactly that they evinced such perfervid devotion to a guy who is, after all and at the end of the day, just a politician. These are intelligent, educated, perceptive, widely travelled, generally charming people. My uncle is a great scholar of Conrad, of all things. Yet in the end their rationales and reasons reduced to a singular love for his soaring transformational hokum, and after a day in the fridge the reduction crystallized into the predictable fatty mush. In the end, it flatters them to be the sort of people who would vote for a young black guy with a funny name. This is the pervasive ailment among Obama's educated liberal supporters, and they project it onto a world of peoples that have "turned against America" under the dastardly reign of the dauphin, George W. Bush. Let's not deal in pure caricature. Obama's supporters, with the possible exception of Andrew Sullivan, who is notorious for his fleeting, dangerous enthusiasms, do not expect that their candidate's mere ascension will efface eight years of imperializing, let alone the hundred that preceded them that liberals see generally fit to ignore. Nonetheless, they do seem to imagine that some kind of international good will will necessarily accrue to the United States because brown people elsewhere will be so damnably pleased to see one of their own at the wheels of the world's most pimped-out nation-state. This sort of transnational racialism, in which the world's duskier and yellower and paler and browner hues form a spiritual extension of what we laughably call "minorities," is odd but nearly universal among America's not-so-leftists, who sincerely seem to believe that "historic wrongs," as they blithely euphemize slavery and apartheid here in the US of A, can be rectified through some mildly redistributive "programs" run by some executive agency or other of the Federal government. Likwise, they have come somehow to blieve that the pure havoc we have brought to so many other countries can be soothed by an "increased concern in human rights" and a "new face in Washington" and "cooperation."

Indeed there is an entire catalogue of sentiments that liberals expect the next president to publicly express, but contrition is conspicuously absent. Part of the problem is that they genuinely believe that other peoples perceive America as they do, which is as a fundamentally new, "reinvented" nation with the turning of each presidential election. The people afflicted by America "policies," do not view us in this way, of course; they perceive the continuity of American actions, and as Aslan notes, the fabled young middle-eastern man probably cannot name an American president beyond the most recent two. The notion that we will correct carpet bombing with ecumenical paeans to the values we all share, whatever those may be and whoever exactly "we" are, has got to be one of the most vicious self-delusions I've ever encountered.