Breughel's Icarus, For Instance

I had this great line about Scott Lemieux of Lawyers, Guns, and Money--I was going to say that discovering a progressive with a military hardon is like finding out that someone keeps his VHS cuckold-fetish porn in the same sock drawer as his serial-killer paperback biography collection . . . but alas, the posts that I remembered weren't  authored by Lemieux but by his longtime companion, Robert Farley.  So then the insult got complicated.  It's like discovering that someone's husband keeps . . . well anyway, Girl, leave him!  He's a weirdo and a creeper!  But what was I saying?  Oh, right: there is an amusing and silly tit-for-tit between Lemieux and Glenn Greenwald regarding The Obama: here is Greenwald's most recent; here is Lemieux's.  I do like Glenn, for all the ragging I've given the poor guy over the ages and epochs of the internet; I account him merely naïve, and I blame it mostly on law school, which is, if degree programs are diseases, the bovine spongiform encephalopathy of what I like to call hire ed, har har.  Lemieux is just a hack of the Yglesias variety, though less prone to malapropism, which perhaps counterintuitively makes him much, much more boring; you can never count on him to utter anything yawningly distant from what he was really trying to say, and as a consequence he is rarely anything but banal.  He, in any event, accuses Greenwald of insufficiently grasping the multivalent powerpolitics of the institutions of American government and of forever overreading into the secret heart of Barry O. when he ought to be concentrating on the far more significant history of off-year election representative party transfer in the 3rd congressional district of Somestate, USA, wherein the real story of everything and anything is writ.  To my mind Glenn is anything but a wannabe mindreader; he is more an exhaustive cataloguer of actual utterances; I do not think he is consulting a Ouija to determine that Barry wants to ritually murder Social Security or what have you; I think he is consulting the New York Times archives.

Luckily, I am here to tell you that they are both wrong.  If not immediately obvious, beneath my blithe anarchism lurks the austere heart of a Calvinist, though I consider our various predestinations the prerogative of lovely Clio rather than dour Yaweh.  Guys like Lemieux project an air of intellectual sophistication by calling moralists fools and claiming that they fail to grasp the delicate interplays of power that determine the policies of nations and empires; but they are the fools, and they never follow their institutional arguments to their ultimate conclusion, which is not that the system constrains Bush or Obama, but that it produces them; that although we are accustomed to crediting Caesars with the particular character of their Rome, it was in fact Rome which made each Caesar.  If you take, oh, a more Tralfamadorian view of Barack Obama, then he appears not as an actor in a play, but as a detail in a picture--everything turning away quite leisurely from the disaster.