Under Washington “I cannot tell a lie”
Under Nixon “I cannot tell the truth”
Under Carter “I cannot tell the difference”
Add Obama to this “There is no difference”
It occurred to me some time ago that Obama is probably our first truly postmodern president.
With Clinton, the lies were the tribute that vice pays to virtue. There was, at least, an attempt to stake and hold to certain assertions. Which suggested some notion of the value of the appearance of consistency. Hence the ridiculous rhetorical contortions (“it depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is) as an attempt to maintain the appearance.
With Obama … it seems as if the pretense has been dropped. There is not only no hesitancy to say “A” to Audience #1, and then turn around and say “non-A” to Audience #2; there appears to be no sense that the contradiction even needs to be explained, let alone covered over (i.e. the Clinton approach).
I could swear I’ve even read lauditory accounts in the media for this (ahem) “ability” on O’s part to hold contradictory beliefs in his mind simultaneously, with ease. Not as part of a mental struggle to resolve the conflict, mind you; but in the sense of being comfortable with the contradiction itself. This is characterized by the media as a trait of mental suppleness (or some similar hooey phrase).
When all it is, is postmodernism, a spit-in-the-eye refutation of the entire foundation and legacy of Western thought, and a habit that drives engineers and other linear thinkers apesh*t because they know (having seen firsthand) the disastrous results of trying to implement A and non-A as the same function at the same time.
Ideas have consequences. Unfortunately, the consequences of academic ideas (too often negative these days) rarely get expressed in a manner that swiftly or directly affects the lives of academics. Ditto the lives of high-level government bureaucrats. (Jamie Gorelick, anyone?) And those are the only two worlds Obama has ever known in his adult life. He has been able to “afford” his postmodern thinking because he has never been the one who had to pay the price for its results. That price was paid, in Chicago, by the people at Grove Parc Plaza. Now it is about to be paid by a couple hundred million regular Americans.
