And so it begins
[This post originally appeared on my short-lived "weekly" blog, "Hopefully Considered." -ed.]
It's appropriate, in a way, that I'm writing my first weekly blog column in the aftermath of Tim Stevens's wedding on Saturday. When we were in high school, Tim wrote a weekly column, called "Complaint of the Week," which he sent to his friends via e-mail. Those of us on the distribution list eagerly awaited each week's rant: they were always very amusing, and you never knew just what Tim was going to gripe about next.
Of course, I didn't name my weekly blog after Tim's weekly e-mail column. I named it after the weekly newspaper column that my grandfather, Tom Loy, wrote for Connecticut's Imprint Newspapers during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Papa Loy's column was, in a sense, almost the opposite of Tim Stevens's column. Instead of complaining about things, Papa's goal was to provide a break from the doom and gloom that so often dominates the news. Hence the name, "Hopefully Considered."
Sometimes, Papa would pursue "hopefulness" by summarizing a bunch of positive, uplifting news stories from the past week. Other times, he would focus on a particular "good news" item, and try to draw some larger meaning from it. Often, he would pleasantly recount a life experience or childhood memory and relate it to current events. But whatever the topic, Papa sought to discuss it in a tone that was, as the column's title suggests, hopeful and uplifting. Even his dire warning in February 1990 about the dangers of global warming ended with an anecdote about a 13-year-old boy who "helped saved a New England wetland by spearheading a campaign against a building project."
(I daresay Papa Loy would have been a Barack Obama fan. "Hope! Change! Yes we can!" No buffenbarger, he; my grandfather would have eaten Obama's hopeful message right up, methinks.)
The tone of my "Hopefully Considered" columns will almost certainly fall somewhere in between Papa's undying optimism and Tim's unyielding pessimism. Papa rarely, if ever, allowed such emotions as anger, outrage or disgust to seep into his prose; I inevitably sometimes will. But while I won't seek out the silver lining in things as assiduously as Papa always did, I think the title of this new blog provides me with a worthwhile challenge: to avoid the worst excesses of what my dad calls "high dudgeon," since my least hopeful, most outraged posts also tend to be the ones I'm most likely to regret later on. Rather than exploding in righteous rage, it's usually better to take a deep breath and, as Papa would say, "sit a while first." That's something I'll strive to do with this weekly blog.
Er, assuming I actually decide to continue with this weekly blog, that is. Just one week in, I'm already having serious doubts about the viability of the concept. The tardiness of this post is symptomatic of a larger problem: as Sunday approached (and then arrived, and then receded into memory), the specter of writing this post came to feel like a homework assignment, much moreso than updating the old hyperactive blog generally did -- notwithstanding that the updating the old blog took much more time than writing this one silly post has or will. I guess it's just the immediacy of the old blog that kept it, 99% of the time, from hanging over my head like a looming cloud: I updated it whenever I felt like it, and then it was done, so there was nothing to loom.
Anyway, suffice it to say, if updating the weekly blog continues to have that "homework assignment" feeling in my head, there's no way I'll still be doing this by the end of July. But Becky tells me I should give it at least a few weeks, especially considering we were traveling this week -- unusual, extenuating circumstances, she says. (By the way, did I mention we saw the Google Street View truck?) I'm skeptical that our travels made much difference in this regard, but still, I'm not giving up the ghost on the weekly blog quite yet. This is only Week 1, after all. Michigan didn't forfeit the season after losing to Appalachian (HOT! HOT! HOT!) State, did they?
Regardless: enough meta-blogging! Rather than agonize or procrastinate further, I'm giving myself an hour to write the remainder of this post... actually, 56 minutes now. Go!
After all that "blogging about blogging," what to actually blog about in my first weekly column? Frankly, I don't have any sort of overarching theme for this column, so if you're expecting it to coalesce into some great work of bloggy genius, I'm afraid you'll be disappointed. Instead, I'll once again channel Papa Loy by turning to the Linklog -- which is essentially my digital version of his "clippings." Papa used to clip and save articles from the newspaper that he might want to comment on in future columns. That's essentially what the Linklog is for me: a collection of articles that I would have blogged about during the week, if I'd been blogging, and that I therefore might have something to say about in my column.
There were two major topics that got a lot of play in my Linklog last week: Hurricane Bertha and Barack Obama's patriotism. I'll write about the latter shortly, but let's start with the former.
I actually wrote a full update on Bertha for Pajamas Media that hasn't been published yet, but the basics are this: she formed on Thursday, just 500 miles off the coast of Africa, becoming the easternmost July storm in recorded history. She then languished as a weak tropical storm for a few days before unexpectedly and explosively intensifying on Sunday and Monday, from a 50 mph storm to a Category 3 hurricane -- maybe even Category 4 -- in about 30 hours.
Bertha's sudden strengthening was, in Dr. Jeff Masters's words, "somewhat surprising," given that "environmental conditions for intensification were good, but not great," and it once again proved that forecasters have precious little skill at predicting hurricane intensity. Further proving this point: Bertha has since weakened almost as rapidly as it strengthened, and is now a Category 1 hurricane seemingly destined for a return to tropical storm status. As Alan Sullivan wrote this morning, "Southwesterly shear is now degrading Bertha as fast as yesterday's windlessness strengthened it. Hurricanes are fickle. Their energies are vast, but the least disturbance of their symmetry sometimes tears them apart."
In any event, Bertha now holds the records for easternmost tropical storm, easternmost hurricane, and easternmost major hurricane to form in the Atlantic basin in recorded history (basically, since 1967, when the satellite era began). Bertha is also the sixth strongest pre-August hurricane on record in the Atlantic basin.
It appears, however, that Bertha will not become the third storm named Bertha to impact me personally. (We got hit by Tropical Storm Bertha in Nova Scotia in 1990, and by the remnants of Hurricane Bertha in Connecticut in 1996.) She is very unlikely to impact the U.S., and will probably not even come terribly close to Bermuda. A dying swipe at Newfoundland is possible, but it's much too early to tell at this point.
What, if anything, does Bertha's formation portend for the rest of the season? Believe it or not, it actually might be a meaningful sign that we're in for a busy season. As Max Mayfield explained on his blog: "There is no good correlation between when the season starts and the overall seasonal activity for the Atlantic. The overall number of named storms in June and July (JJ) does not mean much in telling us how active the remainder of the season will be." However, the number of Cape Verde storms in June and July is a different story:
Anyway, onward and upward. I promised I'd say something about Obama's patriotism, and since I've only got 33 minutes left, I guess I'd better start.
I've noticed a trend in recent days among conservative bloggers and columnists toward trying to elevate the discussion of Barack Obama's patriotism -- or alleged lack thereof -- to a legitimate topic of debate, rather than the purely emotional, irrelevant, demagogic, low-information-signal-sending, fever-swamp nonsense that it quite obviously is. Basically, the object of the game here is simply to keep Obama's patriotism in play as a legitimate question. One need not, and indeed should not, attack it directly. Instead, what we're seeing are, to steal Ben Smith's words, "sophisticated, bank-shot attacks" on Obama's otherwise self-evident love of country.
Bruce Kesler's suggestion that Obama should prove his patriotism by divorcing his wife misses the mark, since it's so obviously absurd and intellectually dishonest as to be totally risible (though, disappointingly, it did get an apparently-approving link from Glenn Reynolds, whose intellectual integrity sometimes seems to go out the window where Obama is concerned).
A better example came from a column I read, and then promptly lost track of (I forgot to put it in the Linklog!) and now cannot find, that said Obama's version of patriotism -- which the author characterized as a love of the ideals that Obama says America stands for, coupled with unrelenting criticism of what he claims America has become in reality -- is like a husband saying to his wife that he loves what she could potentially be rather than what she is now. This argument was interesting enough to pass the laugh test, yet upon closer inspection, it falls apart rather quickly.
The author apparently fails to comprehend the difference between a human being, whose actions are governed by his or her own internal decision-making processes -- the locus of which, the brain, is inseparable from the person being judged -- and a nation-state, whose actions are governed by, well, a government, which can be replaced wholesale with a new government (whereas a person's brain cannot be replaced). Thus, to harshly criticize the actions of a government, or a series of governments, and to suggest that a nation isn't living up to its ideals, while still claiming to love the nation, is entirely different (and more plausible) than claiming to love a person while suggesting that said person should totally alter his or her personality, appearance, etc.
A better analogy would be a husband who loves his wife, but hates her mental illness (or alcoholism, or whatever) and insists that she get help. I don't think anyone would suggest that a husband in that situation doesn't love his wife, simply because he focuses more on what she could be than on what she presently is. That's essentially what Obama, according to this author's characterization of his message, is saying about America: that she's a good nation in need of an intervention. There's nothing unloving -- or unpatriotic -- about that.
The classic of the "sophisticated bank shot attack on Obama's patriotism" genre, however, comes from Jonah Goldberg, who wrote in USA Today that "Barack Obama has a patriotism problem." Goldberg started with a line of attack similar to the above-paraphrased author, quoting Obama's riff on "what I believe will make this country great" and responding: "Not to sound too much like a Jewish mother, but some might respond, 'What? It's not great now?'"
But then Goldberg takes up a different line of attack: he asserts, in essence, that Obama's alleged elitism is itself unpatriotic:
You see what he did there? Goldberg spends an entire column insinuating that Obama is unpatriotic because he's an elitist who wants to fundamentally reform the country, but then he concludes by disclaiming the notion that he's saying what he just said. Thus, anyone who accuses Goldberg of calling Obama unpatriotic can be attacked for being a conspiratorial lefty who doth protest too much.
Well, I doth protest, dammit. Goldberg's argument is interesting, sort of, and yet it's pretty damn flimsy when you really get down to it. Indeed, consideration of Goldberg's key points falls into the category so deftly described by Chief Justice Marshall in Marbury v. Madison: "deeply interesting... but, happily, not of an intricacy proportioned to its interest."
First of all, Goldberg's definition of what constitutes valid cries for reform, as opposed to unpatriotic anti-Americanism, is awfully narrow. Goldberg writes, "We might need to change this or that policy or law, fix this or that problem, but at the end of the day the patriotic American believes that America is fundamentally good as it is." I daresay an awful lot of reformers, in all eras, of all ideologies, would be affronted by the notion that their crusades for change involved nothing more than attempts to "change this or that policy or law, fix this or that problem." Leaving aside the question of whether this particular moment in American history is actually one where fundamental, wholesale change is needed, can't be all agree that such moments do occasionally exist, or at least that they could exist, in theory? If American society and government really were to become corrupt and benighted -- and again, I'm not saying they are now, necessarily, but hypothetically it could happen -- would it be unpatriotic to argue that we've gotten to the point where the country, in its present state (as opposed to its ideal state, or its past glory), might not be so "fundamentally good" at the particular moment in question? According to Goldberg, this is indeed an unpatriotic thing to say, under any and all circumstances. That's an entirely untenable position.
Secondly, Goldberg's suggestion that elitism and anti-Americanism are equivalent is intriguing but pretty clearly incorrect. Being elitist is bad and wrong, but it isn't the same thing as being unpatriotic, any more than anti-intellectualism (e.g., the belief that those "bitter" "clingers" are fundamentally and intrinsically better than coastal elites) is unpatriotic. You can't single out a particular group of Americans (e.g., the denizens of flyover county, pointy-headed professors, National Review columnists) and declare, "If you don't like these particular Americans, you hate America." That's just not how it works.
What makes Goldberg's argument so frustrating is that, amid all the crap, he does hit upon an important point: patriotism has to mean something. It can't just be a meaningless concept, with no substance beyond silly symbols. Yet the content suggested by Goldberg is wrong, and in the mean time, the central result of the debate he's fostering is that it keeps this issue alive a bit longer, a topic of quasi-legitimate debate, thus helping to thwart Obama's apple pie campaign and allowing the low-information signals about his supposed lack of patriotism to continue seeping down to those barely-paying-attention voters in places like Ohio and Pennsylvania who are still trying to figure out who this Barack Osama guy is. As long as MSM and blogosphere types keep asking the question, "Is Obama patriotic?," it doesn't matter what the answer is; what matters is that low-information voters get the vague sense that he's, y'know, different than them. Whether intentionally or not, Goldberg & co. are winning just by keeping the ball in play.
I was going to make some suggestions about what are legitimate boundaries for definitions of patriotism, but I've run out of time to finish my post, so I'll have to leave that to y'all, or maybe take it up next week.
WEDNESDAY MORNING UPDATE: Pajamas Media has finally published my Bertha post, about 12 hours after its meteorological data was current, and with a headline -- "Are We In For a Busy Hurricane Season?" -- that is nearly identical to the headline they put on my last article. Worse, the headline implicitly invites commentary on that irrelevant side-issue, global warming, instead of focusing on the topic at hand: Hurricane Bertha.
Oh, well.
UPDATE, A BIT LATER: At my suggestion, the headline has been changed to "Hurricane Bertha Humbles Forecasters."
The publishing delay is still a problem, though; hurricanes can change rapidly in just a few hours, never mind half a day or more. I'm trying to work something out with PJM that would alleviate this issue, but it may or may not be practicable. We shall see.
NOTE: These "updates" originally appeared in a separate post; I've moved them here. Comments on the original post can be found here.
It's appropriate, in a way, that I'm writing my first weekly blog column in the aftermath of Tim Stevens's wedding on Saturday. When we were in high school, Tim wrote a weekly column, called "Complaint of the Week," which he sent to his friends via e-mail. Those of us on the distribution list eagerly awaited each week's rant: they were always very amusing, and you never knew just what Tim was going to gripe about next.
Of course, I didn't name my weekly blog after Tim's weekly e-mail column. I named it after the weekly newspaper column that my grandfather, Tom Loy, wrote for Connecticut's Imprint Newspapers during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Papa Loy's column was, in a sense, almost the opposite of Tim Stevens's column. Instead of complaining about things, Papa's goal was to provide a break from the doom and gloom that so often dominates the news. Hence the name, "Hopefully Considered."
Sometimes, Papa would pursue "hopefulness" by summarizing a bunch of positive, uplifting news stories from the past week. Other times, he would focus on a particular "good news" item, and try to draw some larger meaning from it. Often, he would pleasantly recount a life experience or childhood memory and relate it to current events. But whatever the topic, Papa sought to discuss it in a tone that was, as the column's title suggests, hopeful and uplifting. Even his dire warning in February 1990 about the dangers of global warming ended with an anecdote about a 13-year-old boy who "helped saved a New England wetland by spearheading a campaign against a building project."
(I daresay Papa Loy would have been a Barack Obama fan. "Hope! Change! Yes we can!" No buffenbarger, he; my grandfather would have eaten Obama's hopeful message right up, methinks.)
The tone of my "Hopefully Considered" columns will almost certainly fall somewhere in between Papa's undying optimism and Tim's unyielding pessimism. Papa rarely, if ever, allowed such emotions as anger, outrage or disgust to seep into his prose; I inevitably sometimes will. But while I won't seek out the silver lining in things as assiduously as Papa always did, I think the title of this new blog provides me with a worthwhile challenge: to avoid the worst excesses of what my dad calls "high dudgeon," since my least hopeful, most outraged posts also tend to be the ones I'm most likely to regret later on. Rather than exploding in righteous rage, it's usually better to take a deep breath and, as Papa would say, "sit a while first." That's something I'll strive to do with this weekly blog.
Er, assuming I actually decide to continue with this weekly blog, that is. Just one week in, I'm already having serious doubts about the viability of the concept. The tardiness of this post is symptomatic of a larger problem: as Sunday approached (and then arrived, and then receded into memory), the specter of writing this post came to feel like a homework assignment, much moreso than updating the old hyperactive blog generally did -- notwithstanding that the updating the old blog took much more time than writing this one silly post has or will. I guess it's just the immediacy of the old blog that kept it, 99% of the time, from hanging over my head like a looming cloud: I updated it whenever I felt like it, and then it was done, so there was nothing to loom.
Anyway, suffice it to say, if updating the weekly blog continues to have that "homework assignment" feeling in my head, there's no way I'll still be doing this by the end of July. But Becky tells me I should give it at least a few weeks, especially considering we were traveling this week -- unusual, extenuating circumstances, she says. (By the way, did I mention we saw the Google Street View truck?) I'm skeptical that our travels made much difference in this regard, but still, I'm not giving up the ghost on the weekly blog quite yet. This is only Week 1, after all. Michigan didn't forfeit the season after losing to Appalachian (HOT! HOT! HOT!) State, did they?
Regardless: enough meta-blogging! Rather than agonize or procrastinate further, I'm giving myself an hour to write the remainder of this post... actually, 56 minutes now. Go!
* * * * *
After all that "blogging about blogging," what to actually blog about in my first weekly column? Frankly, I don't have any sort of overarching theme for this column, so if you're expecting it to coalesce into some great work of bloggy genius, I'm afraid you'll be disappointed. Instead, I'll once again channel Papa Loy by turning to the Linklog -- which is essentially my digital version of his "clippings." Papa used to clip and save articles from the newspaper that he might want to comment on in future columns. That's essentially what the Linklog is for me: a collection of articles that I would have blogged about during the week, if I'd been blogging, and that I therefore might have something to say about in my column.
There were two major topics that got a lot of play in my Linklog last week: Hurricane Bertha and Barack Obama's patriotism. I'll write about the latter shortly, but let's start with the former.
I actually wrote a full update on Bertha for Pajamas Media that hasn't been published yet, but the basics are this: she formed on Thursday, just 500 miles off the coast of Africa, becoming the easternmost July storm in recorded history. She then languished as a weak tropical storm for a few days before unexpectedly and explosively intensifying on Sunday and Monday, from a 50 mph storm to a Category 3 hurricane -- maybe even Category 4 -- in about 30 hours.
Bertha's sudden strengthening was, in Dr. Jeff Masters's words, "somewhat surprising," given that "environmental conditions for intensification were good, but not great," and it once again proved that forecasters have precious little skill at predicting hurricane intensity. Further proving this point: Bertha has since weakened almost as rapidly as it strengthened, and is now a Category 1 hurricane seemingly destined for a return to tropical storm status. As Alan Sullivan wrote this morning, "Southwesterly shear is now degrading Bertha as fast as yesterday's windlessness strengthened it. Hurricanes are fickle. Their energies are vast, but the least disturbance of their symmetry sometimes tears them apart."
In any event, Bertha now holds the records for easternmost tropical storm, easternmost hurricane, and easternmost major hurricane to form in the Atlantic basin in recorded history (basically, since 1967, when the satellite era began). Bertha is also the sixth strongest pre-August hurricane on record in the Atlantic basin.
It appears, however, that Bertha will not become the third storm named Bertha to impact me personally. (We got hit by Tropical Storm Bertha in Nova Scotia in 1990, and by the remnants of Hurricane Bertha in Connecticut in 1996.) She is very unlikely to impact the U.S., and will probably not even come terribly close to Bermuda. A dying swipe at Newfoundland is possible, but it's much too early to tell at this point.
What, if anything, does Bertha's formation portend for the rest of the season? Believe it or not, it actually might be a meaningful sign that we're in for a busy season. As Max Mayfield explained on his blog: "There is no good correlation between when the season starts and the overall seasonal activity for the Atlantic. The overall number of named storms in June and July (JJ) does not mean much in telling us how active the remainder of the season will be." However, the number of Cape Verde storms in June and July is a different story:
Stanley Goldenberg, a research meteorologist with NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division, has shown “…if one looks only at the June-July Atlantic tropical storms and hurricanes occurring south of 22°N and east of 77°W (the eastern portion of the Main Development Region [MDR] for Atlantic hurricanes), there is a strong association with activity for the remainder of the year. According to the data from 1944-1999, total overall Atlantic activity for years that had a tropical storm or hurricane form in this region during JJ have been at least average and often times above average. So it could be said that a JJ storm in this region is pretty much a “sufficient” (though not “necessary”) condition for a year to produce at least average activity. (I.e., Not all years with average to above-average total overall activity have had a JJ storm in that region, but almost all years with that type of JJ storm produce average to above-average activity.)”It should go without saying that none of this has anything whatsoever to do with global warming, and if anyone so much as utters those words in comments, my head may explode. :)
Anyway, onward and upward. I promised I'd say something about Obama's patriotism, and since I've only got 33 minutes left, I guess I'd better start.
* * * * *
I've noticed a trend in recent days among conservative bloggers and columnists toward trying to elevate the discussion of Barack Obama's patriotism -- or alleged lack thereof -- to a legitimate topic of debate, rather than the purely emotional, irrelevant, demagogic, low-information-signal-sending, fever-swamp nonsense that it quite obviously is. Basically, the object of the game here is simply to keep Obama's patriotism in play as a legitimate question. One need not, and indeed should not, attack it directly. Instead, what we're seeing are, to steal Ben Smith's words, "sophisticated, bank-shot attacks" on Obama's otherwise self-evident love of country.
Bruce Kesler's suggestion that Obama should prove his patriotism by divorcing his wife misses the mark, since it's so obviously absurd and intellectually dishonest as to be totally risible (though, disappointingly, it did get an apparently-approving link from Glenn Reynolds, whose intellectual integrity sometimes seems to go out the window where Obama is concerned).
A better example came from a column I read, and then promptly lost track of (I forgot to put it in the Linklog!) and now cannot find, that said Obama's version of patriotism -- which the author characterized as a love of the ideals that Obama says America stands for, coupled with unrelenting criticism of what he claims America has become in reality -- is like a husband saying to his wife that he loves what she could potentially be rather than what she is now. This argument was interesting enough to pass the laugh test, yet upon closer inspection, it falls apart rather quickly.
The author apparently fails to comprehend the difference between a human being, whose actions are governed by his or her own internal decision-making processes -- the locus of which, the brain, is inseparable from the person being judged -- and a nation-state, whose actions are governed by, well, a government, which can be replaced wholesale with a new government (whereas a person's brain cannot be replaced). Thus, to harshly criticize the actions of a government, or a series of governments, and to suggest that a nation isn't living up to its ideals, while still claiming to love the nation, is entirely different (and more plausible) than claiming to love a person while suggesting that said person should totally alter his or her personality, appearance, etc.
A better analogy would be a husband who loves his wife, but hates her mental illness (or alcoholism, or whatever) and insists that she get help. I don't think anyone would suggest that a husband in that situation doesn't love his wife, simply because he focuses more on what she could be than on what she presently is. That's essentially what Obama, according to this author's characterization of his message, is saying about America: that she's a good nation in need of an intervention. There's nothing unloving -- or unpatriotic -- about that.
The classic of the "sophisticated bank shot attack on Obama's patriotism" genre, however, comes from Jonah Goldberg, who wrote in USA Today that "Barack Obama has a patriotism problem." Goldberg started with a line of attack similar to the above-paraphrased author, quoting Obama's riff on "what I believe will make this country great" and responding: "Not to sound too much like a Jewish mother, but some might respond, 'What? It's not great now?'"
But then Goldberg takes up a different line of attack: he asserts, in essence, that Obama's alleged elitism is itself unpatriotic:
Definitions of patriotism proliferate, but in the American context patriotism must involve not only devotion to American texts (something that distinguishes our patriotism from European nationalism) but also an abiding belief in the inherent and enduring goodness of the American nation. We might need to change this or that policy or law, fix this or that problem, but at the end of the day the patriotic American believes that America is fundamentally good as it is.Goldberg goes on to say that "Obamania can seem...vaguely anti-American." But then, intriguingly, he takes a step back from the precipice: "The notion that what America needs is a redeemer figure to 'remake' America from scratch isn't necessarily unpatriotic. But for lots of Americans who like America the way it is, it's sometimes hard to tell when it isn't."
It's the "good as it is" part that has vexed many on the left since at least the Progressive era. Marxists and other revolutionaries obviously don't believe entrepreneurial and religious America is good as it is. But even more mainstream figures have a problem distinguishing patriotic reform from reformation. Many progressives in the 1920s considered the American hinterlands a vast sea of yokels and boobs, incapable of grasping how much they needed what the activists were selling.
The Nation ran a famous series then called "These United States," in which smug emissaries from East Coast cities chronicled the "backward" attitudes of what today would be called fly-over country. One correspondent proclaimed that in "backwoods" New York (i.e. outside the Big Apple): "Resistance to change is their most sacred principle." If that was their attitude to New York, it shouldn't surprise that they felt even worse about the South. One author explained that Dixie needed nothing less than an invasion of liberal "missionaries" so that the "light of civilization" might finally be glimpsed down there. These authors simply assumed, writes intellectual historian Christopher Lasch, that " 'breaking with the past' was the precondition of cultural and political advance." Even today, writes Time's Joe Klein, "This is a chronic disease among Democrats, who tend to talk more about what's wrong with America than what's right."
Echoes of these attitudes can be found in Obama's now infamous explanation that "bitter" working-class rural voters won't embrace him because they "cling" to God, guns and bigotry.
You see what he did there? Goldberg spends an entire column insinuating that Obama is unpatriotic because he's an elitist who wants to fundamentally reform the country, but then he concludes by disclaiming the notion that he's saying what he just said. Thus, anyone who accuses Goldberg of calling Obama unpatriotic can be attacked for being a conspiratorial lefty who doth protest too much.
Well, I doth protest, dammit. Goldberg's argument is interesting, sort of, and yet it's pretty damn flimsy when you really get down to it. Indeed, consideration of Goldberg's key points falls into the category so deftly described by Chief Justice Marshall in Marbury v. Madison: "deeply interesting... but, happily, not of an intricacy proportioned to its interest."
First of all, Goldberg's definition of what constitutes valid cries for reform, as opposed to unpatriotic anti-Americanism, is awfully narrow. Goldberg writes, "We might need to change this or that policy or law, fix this or that problem, but at the end of the day the patriotic American believes that America is fundamentally good as it is." I daresay an awful lot of reformers, in all eras, of all ideologies, would be affronted by the notion that their crusades for change involved nothing more than attempts to "change this or that policy or law, fix this or that problem." Leaving aside the question of whether this particular moment in American history is actually one where fundamental, wholesale change is needed, can't be all agree that such moments do occasionally exist, or at least that they could exist, in theory? If American society and government really were to become corrupt and benighted -- and again, I'm not saying they are now, necessarily, but hypothetically it could happen -- would it be unpatriotic to argue that we've gotten to the point where the country, in its present state (as opposed to its ideal state, or its past glory), might not be so "fundamentally good" at the particular moment in question? According to Goldberg, this is indeed an unpatriotic thing to say, under any and all circumstances. That's an entirely untenable position.
Secondly, Goldberg's suggestion that elitism and anti-Americanism are equivalent is intriguing but pretty clearly incorrect. Being elitist is bad and wrong, but it isn't the same thing as being unpatriotic, any more than anti-intellectualism (e.g., the belief that those "bitter" "clingers" are fundamentally and intrinsically better than coastal elites) is unpatriotic. You can't single out a particular group of Americans (e.g., the denizens of flyover county, pointy-headed professors, National Review columnists) and declare, "If you don't like these particular Americans, you hate America." That's just not how it works.
What makes Goldberg's argument so frustrating is that, amid all the crap, he does hit upon an important point: patriotism has to mean something. It can't just be a meaningless concept, with no substance beyond silly symbols. Yet the content suggested by Goldberg is wrong, and in the mean time, the central result of the debate he's fostering is that it keeps this issue alive a bit longer, a topic of quasi-legitimate debate, thus helping to thwart Obama's apple pie campaign and allowing the low-information signals about his supposed lack of patriotism to continue seeping down to those barely-paying-attention voters in places like Ohio and Pennsylvania who are still trying to figure out who this Barack Osama guy is. As long as MSM and blogosphere types keep asking the question, "Is Obama patriotic?," it doesn't matter what the answer is; what matters is that low-information voters get the vague sense that he's, y'know, different than them. Whether intentionally or not, Goldberg & co. are winning just by keeping the ball in play.
I was going to make some suggestions about what are legitimate boundaries for definitions of patriotism, but I've run out of time to finish my post, so I'll have to leave that to y'all, or maybe take it up next week.
* * * * *
WEDNESDAY MORNING UPDATE: Pajamas Media has finally published my Bertha post, about 12 hours after its meteorological data was current, and with a headline -- "Are We In For a Busy Hurricane Season?" -- that is nearly identical to the headline they put on my last article. Worse, the headline implicitly invites commentary on that irrelevant side-issue, global warming, instead of focusing on the topic at hand: Hurricane Bertha.
Oh, well.
UPDATE, A BIT LATER: At my suggestion, the headline has been changed to "Hurricane Bertha Humbles Forecasters."
The publishing delay is still a problem, though; hurricanes can change rapidly in just a few hours, never mind half a day or more. I'm trying to work something out with PJM that would alleviate this issue, but it may or may not be practicable. We shall see.
NOTE: These "updates" originally appeared in a separate post; I've moved them here. Comments on the original post can be found here.
posted by Brendan Loy at
7/08/2008 09:59:00 PM
