Category errors most foul
From Tom Junod's recent Esquire piece about Barack Obama.
Without comment, but with emphasis added:
Without comment, but with emphasis added:
You are a good man. You are an honorable man. You are both president of the United States and the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. You are both the most powerful man in the world and an unimpeachably upstanding citizen. You place a large premium on being beyond reproach. You have become your own deliberative body, standing not so much by your decisions as by the process by which you make them.
...you, of all people, have turned out to be a man of proven integrity whose foreign and domestic policies are less popular than your proven willingness to kill, in defense of your country, even your own countrymen ... indeed, to kill even a sixteen-year-old American boy accused of no crime at all.
posted by Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy at 8:29 AM
20 Comments:
If you take out "in defense of your country, even," which is clearly false anyway, the self-refutation would be A is not A level perfect.
L'Etat, c'est moi.
" your proven willingness to kill, in defense of your reelection,
Fixed that for you.
Kool-Aid is a helluva drug.
L'Etat, c'est moi.
Ought to be his new campaign motto.
Seems like the author is being (unintentionally?) ironic in the style of Marc Antony's funeral speech: "but Brutus is an honorable man".
I haven't read the whole article, but the author Tom Junod is definitely doing more than just idolize Obama. He looks critically at the atrocious policies like drone strikes and the dangerous precedents they set. He's also clearly sensitive to the whole al-Awlaki story and his family, particularly his 16-yr-old American son killed by drone.
However, as the quote indicates, Junod uses a strange, distracting literary approach, in which it's hard to tell whether he naively believes in his leaders, or is going for stylistic irony, i.e. assuming the voice of an American circa 2008 optimistic about Obama, and deliberately juxtaposing this optimism with disturbing facts ("to kill even a sixteen-year-old American boy accused of no crime at all"). One could also accuse Junod of psychologizing politicians and intuiting the motives he wants, which journalists really oughtn't to do.
I haven't yet stomached going past the first page, but while writing about Obama's murders, it's appalling that he couches them in facts decidedly not in evidence, re: Obama's super-pure soul.
Further, he refers to Abdulrahman's death as "collateral damage," a shrugging euphemism in the best case, and another fact not in evidence -- we have no idea whether he was the intended target of the drone strike that killed him.
Perhaps you've heard of the man who thought he was dead, when in reality he was very much alive. His delusion became such a problem that his family finally paid for him to see a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist spent many laborious sessions trying to convince the man he was still alive. Nothing seemed to work. Finally the doctor tried one last approach. He took out his medical books and proceeded to show the patient that dead men don't bleed. After hours of tedious study, the patient seemed convinced that dead men don't bleed. "Do you now agree that dead men don't bleed?" the doctor asked. "Yes, I do," the patient replied. "Very well, then," the doctor said. He took out a pin and pricked the patient's finger. Out came a trickle of blood. The doctor asked, "What does that tell you?" "Oh my goodness!" the patient exclaimed as he stared incredulously at his finger... "Dead men do bleed!!"
The contrast between Obama's thoughtful and honorable reputation and the reality of his policies is in fact the point of this article, which is highly critical. Some other quotes:
Regarding killing people instead of putting them in Guantanamo: "What's human is always only human, and often wrong... you are making the same characterization of those you target that the Bush administration made of those it detained, based on the same sources. The difference is that all your sentences are final, and you will never let anybody go. To put it as simply as possible: Six hundred men have been released uncharged from Guantánamo since its inception, which amounts to an admission of a terrible mistake. What if they had never even been detained? What if, under the precepts of the Lethal Presidency, they had simply been killed?"
And 'the Obama administration has been legally innovative in the cause of killing. It has called for the definition of an "imminent threat" to be broadened and for the definition of "collateral damage" to be narrowed. An imminent threat used to be someone who represented a clear and present danger. Now it is someone who appears dangerous. Collateral damage used to be anyone killed who was not targeted. Now the term "collateral damage" applies only to women and children. "My understanding is that able-bodied males of military age are considered fair game," says the former administration official, "if they're in the proximity of a known militant." '
Stella, it is nonetheless bizarre and dreadful that the writer asserts that Obama is a well-proven good man, a soul of extraordinary integrity, claims profoundly contrary to the evidence even without due consideration given to his assassination program.
My first read of Tom Junod's piece was similar to yours. But, then, I got to wondering what I might write that would create such a level of unassailable dissonance that the dissonance couldn't be ignored by the reader. I decided that I probably couldn't do as well as Junod did. Those who see Obama as you do (and, I do) are likely to share our initial response. But, might we both allow that neither you, nor I are the intended audience? Is it not possible to see this as Junod having simply stipulated the operating assumptions of his intended audience, and then proceed to systematically undermine every one of those assumptions?
~ bystander
it is nonetheless bizarre and dreadful that the writer asserts that Obama is a well-proven good man, a soul of extraordinary integrity, claims profoundly contrary to the evidence even without due consideration given to his assassination program.
Yes. Having read the whole article, I think the point is actually to make the reader question that claim, but obviously this interpretation is ambiguous.
Too ambiguous for me. It does repeatedly imply that the assassination program is an outlier rather than fitting fairly comfortably into the overall right-wing policy thrust of the Administration.
Good link, Vast Left. Before deciding between Marc Anthony level irony or simple schizophrenia, I think I'll read the whole piece one more time -- but not until I've digested my breakfast.
"Is it not possible to see this as Junod having simply stipulated the operating assumptions of his intended audience, and then proceed to systematically undermine every one of those assumptions?" - bystander
Bruce Springsteen does this to good effect in his songs, "We Take Care of Our Own" and "Born In The USA."
...
From Chicago to New Orleans
From the muscle to the bone
From the shotgun shack to the Superdome
There ain’t no help, the cavalry stayed home
There ain’t no one hearing the bugle blowin’
We take care of our own
We take care of our own
Wherever this flag’s flown
We take care of our own
I have to agree with Vast Left.
Reagan was able to use "Born In The USA" to rally his electorate.
Junod questions Obama so subtly that these questions are so drowned out by the sanctimonious praise so as to not even exist except on a close reading; and the Obama supporters are more into the emotional video media than the thought inducing print media or they would have known what this creep was up to well before now.
I presume that by calling Obama a well-proven good man, he's referring to standard American standards: Obama has not yet been caught with his dick anywhere it's not supposed to be. Plus, the pillars of the corporate media would be glad, nay honored to have a beer with him. That he has the integrity of a Mitt Romney (or if you prefer, the other way around) simply doesn't register.
From the horse's..erm...whatever:
The call was a surprise, not simply because I'd tried to speak to this man over the months that I was researching my story, but also because he understood the story better than most of the people who've read it, and thought that I "captured the President fairly."
"You know, most of the people reading this piece are saying that you think that this policy is a bad thing," he said. "You don't say that at all. There's just a current of unease running through the piece that makes people come to that conclusion." In the course of our conversation, I came to believe that he understood that unease because he shared it.
So Junod outright renounces the Mark Anthony interpretation.
It's the underpants gnome theory of presidential politics!
1. Obama is doing something very bad.
2.????????
3. Obama is a good man.
So very, very many words to show that Junod knows what Obama is doing is wrong, but he hits a wall of denial that he can't circumnavigate.
It's like those little wind-up toys I used to put in the children's Christmas stockings. They totter along until the hit an obstacle and then keep pressing against the wall, little plastic legs churning without pausing, little robot or rabbit head or chattering teeth pressing against the wall, unable to move.
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home