From: Harry Gendler <gendl...@ix.netcom.com>
Subject: The Omnipresent Leader - They want us to "pledge to be a servant
to our president"?
To: "Harry Gendler" <gendl...@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Sunday, September 6, 2009, 5:33 AM
National
Review
September 05, 2009
The
Omnipresent Leader - They want us to “pledge to be a
servant to our
president”?
By Mark Steyn
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NWRiZTdhYTA4MmFkYWJkYjliZDA5OWFiMTU0YmU5YTg=
On
Friday, I had the rare honor of appearing in the pages of
the New York Times,
apropos President Obama’s plans to beam himself into
every schoolhouse in
the land in the peculiar belief that Generation iPod will
find this an
enthralling technical novelty. As Times reporters
James C. McKinley Jr.
and Sam Dillon wrote: “Mark Steyn, a Canadian author
and political
commentator, speaking on the Rush Limbaugh show on
Wednesday, accused Mr. Obama
of trying to create a cult of personality, comparing him to
Saddam Hussein and
Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader.”
Oh, dear! “A Canadian author”: Talk about
damning with faint
credentialization. I don’t know what’s crueler,
the
“Canadian” or the indefinite article. As to the
rest of it, well,
that’s one way of putting it. Here’s what I
said on Wednesday re
dear old Saddam and Kim: “Obviously
we’re not talking about the
cult of personality on the Saddam Hussein/Kim Jong-Il
scale.”
Close enough for Times work.
But, if the Times wants to play this game, bring it
on. The Omnipresent
Leader has traditionally been a characteristic feature of
Third World
basket-case dumps: The conflation of the man and the state
is explicit, and
ubiquitous. In 2003, motoring around western Iraq a few
weeks after the
regime’s fall, when the schoolhouses were hastily
taking down the huge
portraits of Saddam that had hung on every classroom wall,
I visited an
elementary-school principal with a huge stack of suddenly
empty picture frames
piled up on his desk, and nothing to put in them. The
education system’s
standard first-grade reader featured a couple of kids
called Hassan and Amal
— a kind of Iraqi Dick and Jane — proudly
holding up their
portraits of the great man and explaining the benefits of
an Iraqi education:
“O come, Hassan,” says Amal. “Let us
chant for the homeland
and use our pens to write, ‘Our beloved
Saddam.’”
“I come, Amal,” says Hassan. “I come in a
hurry to chant,
‘O, Saddam, our courageous president, we are all
soldiers defending the
borders for you, carrying weapons and marching to
success.’”
Pathetic, right?
On Friday, August 28, the principal of Eagle Bay Elementary
School in
Farmington, Utah — in the name of
“education” — showed
her young charges the “Obama Pledge” video
released at the time of
the inauguration, in which Ashton Kutcher and various other
bigtime
celebrities, two or three of whom you might even recognize,
“pledge to be
a servant to our president and to all mankind because
together we can, together
we are, and together we will be the change that we
seek.”
Altogether now! Let us chant for mankind and use our pens
to write, “O
beloved Obama, our courageous president, we are all
servants defending the hope
for you and marching to change.”
And, unlike Saddam’s Iraq, we don’t have the
mitigating condition
of being a one-man psycho state invented by the British
Colonial Office after
lunch on a wet afternoon in 1922.
Any self-respecting schoolkid, enjoined by his principal to
be a
“servant” to the head of state, would reply,
“Get lost,
creep.” And, if they still taught history in American
schools, he’d
add, “Oh, and by the way, that question was settled
in 1776.”
To accompany President Obama’s classroom speech this
week, the White
House and America’s “educators” drafted
some accompanying
study materials. Children would be invited to write letters
to themselves
saying what they could do to “help the
President.”
My suggestion: “Not tell people what I really think
about his lousy
health-care plan.”
Well, after the unwelcome media attention, that exercise
was hastily dropped.
For the rest of us, the president does not yet require a
written test from
grown-ups after his speeches, but it’s surely only a
matter of time. The New
York Times managed to miss my point: Far from
“accusing” the
president of “trying to create a cult of
personality,” I spent much
of my airtime on Rush’s show last week
“accusing” the
president of doing an amazing job of finishing off his own
cult of personality
in record time. Obama’s given 111 speeches,
interviews, and press
conferences in which he’s talked about health care,
and the more he opens
his mouth the more the American people recoil from his
“reforms.”
Now he’s giving a 112th — to a joint session of
Congress —
and this one, we’re assured, will finally do the
trick. That brand new
Chevy may be rusting and up on bricks by the time he seals
the deal, but
America’s Auto Salesman-in-Chief will get you to sign
in the end.
The president has made the mistake of believing his own
publicity — or,
at any rate, his own mainstream-media coverage, which is
pretty much the same
thing. They told him he was the greatest orator since
Socrates, but, alas, even
Socrates would have difficulty playing six sets a night
every Open Mike Night
at the Soaring Rhetoric Lounge out on Route 127. Even
Ashton Kutcher’s
charms would wane by the 112th speech.
“Mr. Obama,” wrote Peggy Noonan in the Wall
Street Journal,
“has grown boring.” Amazing but true.
He’s a crashing bore,
and he’s become one in nothing flat. His approval
ratings have slumped
— not just among Republicans, not just among
independents, not just among
seniors, who are after all first in line for the death
panels. But
they’ve fallen among young people — the
starry-eyed members of the
Hopeychangey Generation who stared into the mesmerizing
giant “O”
of his logo and saw the new Otopia. According to the latest
Zogby poll,
Obama’s hold on the young is a wash: 41 percent
approve, 41 percent
disapprove. Zogby defines “young” as under 30,
so maybe the
kindergartners corralled into his audience this week will
still be on side, but
I wouldn’t bet on it.
The president’s strategy on January 20 was to hurl
all the vast
transformative spaghetti at the wall — stimulus, auto
nationalization,
cap’n’trade, health care — and make it
stick through the
sheer charisma of his personality. Unfortunately, the
American people
aren’t finding it quite so charismatic, and
they’re beginning to
spot the yawning gulf between the post-partisan
hopeychangey rhetoric and the
budget-busting prosperity-throttling future-beggaring
big-government policies.
No wonder the poor chap’s running out of material. At
the time of
writing, one of his exercises for America’s
schoolchildren is to suggest
what you’d like him to do in his next speech.
Here’s mine: Call in
sick, sir. You’ll be doing your presidency a favor.
The president is not our ruler but our representative, a
citizen-executive
drawn from the people. It is unbecoming to a self-governing
republic to require
schoolchildren to (to cite another test question) select
the three most
important words in the president’s speech.
But, if we have to trudge down this grim road, go on, kid,
I dare you:
“That’s all, folks!”
Oh, wait. You have to rank the three most important words
in order:
1) Try
2) Something
3) Else
