Author Archives: Rob Harrison

Barack Obama, writer?

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It would never have occurred to me to ask whether or not Sen. Obama wrote the books attributed to him; but as the Anchoress points out, writers write. It’s what they do, because the need to write drives them. If circumstances are such that they have little time or energy to spare from the other demands of life, they may write very little, but when they can, what they can, they write.Which does raise the reasonable question: do we see that kind of drive in Sen. Obama’s life? Put another way, do the existence and quality of his books (and particularly Dreams from My Father) square with the rest of his writing career? We know Barack Obama wrote virtually nothing for the Harvard Law Review despite serving a term as its president; we know that at Occidental College, he wrote some truly awful poetry; and we know that when it comes to any other evidence of his ability as a writer—”a school paper, an article, a notebook, his Columbia thesis”—that he’s been careful not to let us see it. Jack Cashill argues that on the basis of this evidence, the only reasonable answer to the question is “no”:

Prior to 1990, when Barack Obama contracted to write Dreams From My Father, he had written very close to nothing. Then, five years later, this untested 33 year-old produced what Time Magazine has called—with a straight face—”the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician.”The public is asked to believe Obama wrote Dreams From My Father on his own, almost as though he were some sort of literary idiot savant. I do not buy this canard for a minute, not at all. Writing is as much a craft as, say, golf. To put this in perspective, imagine if a friend played a few rounds in the high 90s and then a few years later, without further practice, made the PGA Tour. It doesn’t happen.

If Cashill’s skepticism is correct, this might seem a curiosity; it’s not exactly a major literary scandal, after all. Indeed, in the realm of political ghostwriting, it would be at most a distant second to JFK accepting the Pulitzer for Profiles in Courage. If Cashill’s analysis, which is close and compelling but not conclusive, is correct that Barack Obama’s ghostwriter was none other than Bill Ayers, that would certainly give the lie to his efforts to deny any kind of close relationship between the two of them, but again, it’s not like there’s any great wrongdoing here. The fact that this question can be not only raised but convincingly argued, however, is a reminder of one very serious issue with the Obama campaign: even after all these months, despite the books, we still don’t really know all that much about Barack Obama, let alone feel like we know him—and he’s done everything he possibly can since bursting on the national scene to keep it that way.

The last hurdle for an Obama victory

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I’ve been working for a while on a post, which I’m planning to get up later today, on what I expect out of an Obama presidency—and at this point, that pretty much is what I expect. I believe John McCain has a chance to win, but I don’t believe he’ll make his case forcefully enough to do so. Still, because there are significant unanswered questions about Barack Obama, he does have the ability to do so, and as a consequence, the McCain campaign has been starting to show some signs of life again. A lot of that is due to Sarah Palin; now that they’ve let her off the short leash to campaign on her own and do things like local TV interviews (that one’s with a Tampa station), she’s once again injecting some energy into the ticket. It also helps that the MSM are finally starting to notice some of the things the Obama campaign has been trying to keep behind the curtain, as with this CNN report on the relationship between Barack Obama and Bill Ayers:

This is an issue for which the Obama campaign has no good answer, as Mark Halperin’s interview with Robert Gibbs shows. All Gibbs, a senior adviser to the Obama campaign, could do was try to answer questions Halperin wasn’t asking and refuse to address the question he was asking: “Does Barack Obama think it’s appropriate to have professional ties to an unrepentant terrorist?” Gibbs ended up (on a question about his favorite country-music lyric) with this: “I’ll say it to you, Mark, but not to your listeners: ‘Here’s a quarter, call someone who cares.'”Some might say that Sen. Obama’s association with Ayers shouldn’t matter; if the Obama campaign wants to take up that challenge, address it straight on, and make that case, more power to them. So far, though, they’re refusing to do that, trying to duck the question and hope people just don’t care; and as Peter Wehner notes, that’s not a responsible approach.

Some may believe it should matter a lot, some may believe it should matter a little, and some may believe it shouldn’t matter at all. But that association, like the associations with the Reverend Wright and Tony Rezko, are part of Obama’s history and deserve to be discussed in a temperate, reasonable, factual way. Mark Halperin attempted to do just that. Team Obama’s evasive and clumsy response simply raises additional doubts about its candidate and his past. If there’s a simple explanation to Obama’s past associations, it would be helpful to hear what it is.

The thing is, as Sen. Obama knows full well and most people don’t realize, for him, “just some guy who lives in my neighborhood” isn’t nearly as dismissive as it sounds. He lives in Hyde Park, in a fairly tight-knit community of intellectuals who range from “very liberal” to “extremely liberal”; folks like the Obamas, Ayers, and Rashid Khalidi, the radical Palestinian advocate who lived in the neighborhood until 2003, formed a much closer group, a much stronger community, than the word “neighborhood” suggests to most people these days. The folks who live in the Obamas’ neighborhood, including Ayers and Khalidi, have done a lot to shape them into the people they are.Along with these associations goes another one, Sen. Obama’s ties to ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now); this is a bit of an odd case, since he likes to talk about his time as a community organizer, but doesn’t want people to know about the organization that would show them what that was really all about. That might have something to do with the fact that ACORN is being investigated for voter-registration fraud (we now have, for instance, 105% of the eligible population of Indianapolis registered to vote—and it’s not just happening there, it’s all over the place), which is particularly troubling since the Obama campaign has paid ACORN $800,000 for voter-registration efforts. You’d think his campaign would know that this is what they mean by “getting out the vote,” given his long association with them. (Earlier, during his time on the board of the Woods Fund, that fund gave ACORN almost $200,000.) Then again, in Chicago, this is just standard operating procedure, so maybe it doesn’t seem unreasonable to them. Even so, you can understand Sen. Obama and his campaign not wanting people to know what “community organizing” really looks like:

Acorn’s tactics are famously “in your face.” Just think of Code Pink’s well-known operations (threatening to occupy congressional offices, interrupting the testimony of General David Petraeus) and you’ll get the idea. Acorn protesters have disrupted Federal Reserve hearings, but mostly deploy their aggressive tactics locally. Chicago is home to one of its strongest chapters, and Acorn has burst into a closed city council meeting there. Acorn protestors in Baltimore disrupted a bankers’ dinner and sent four busloads of profanity-screaming protestors against the mayor’s home, terrifying his wife and kids. Even a Baltimore city council member who generally supports Acorn said their intimidation tactics had crossed the line.

Obviously, that sort of strategy isn’t any visible part of Sen. Obama’s run for the White House; but this isn’t the image he wants people to have in mind when he talks about being a community organizer.In a lot of ways, it seems to me, what the Obama campaign is really trying to do is to keep people from thinking about him as a Chicago politician, because everybody knows what that means. I think that’s the big reason they want us all to forget about Bill Ayers, and Tony Rezko, and the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, and for that matter Richard Daley; because if you start thinking about him in terms of those people, and then throw in the questions about the legitimacy of a lot of the money the Obama campaign has raised (and their failure to answer those questions), then Sen. Obama stops looking like a new figure in politics and starts looking like nothing more than old-style Chicago corruption with a new face. I’ve said before that the McCain campaign needs to tie Sen. Obama to Nancy Pelosi (and also Harry Reid), and they do (and they’ve tried, at least somewhat, but so far without enough success); the other thing they need to do is tell the public that he’s just another Chicago politician. Gov. Palin has started making that case; Sen. McCain needs to step up and drive it home.HT for several of the ACORN links: The Anchoress

That’s the Internet for you

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I’m moving and thinking very slowly today, trying to steer chains of reasoning around the sharp headache that keeps flickering behind my eyes; I had a couple posts I wanted to work on today, along with sermon work and some other things, but nothing’s happening very fast.I do want to mention, though, something that amused me last night. I have to admit, I didn’t watch the debate—I already had a headache, and figured I could catch up with it later—so I was bewildered, sometime after 9:30, to get up and check my blog traffic and find it going clean through the roof. Turns out, when John McCain made his comment about Barack Obama’s overhead-projector earmarks, that hordes of people pulled up Google and went looking; and for whatever reason, when you Google Obama overhead projector or some variant of that, my post “Barack Obama as overhead-projector screen” from this past July is right there near the top. It’s just a short post that has nothing to do with the earmarks Sen. McCain was talking about—rather, it’s a brief comment on a remarkable column by the redoubtable Shelby Steele—but there you go: that one post got more hits in half an hour last night than the whole blog had gotten over the previous week, as one person after another checked it out. I do hope most of those folks kept going on down their search lists (as I did, with one of them) to find the information they wanted on Sen. Obama’s earmarks. (If so, they might also have found a link to this piece on Sarah Palin’s record on earmarks, which is much stronger.) As it is, though, I’m reminded of a complaint I’ve heard a time or two before that the problem with Internet searches is that they lack serendipity. The usual comparison is to looking a word up in the dictionary, and all the other interesting words you run across while you’re trying to find the one you want; supposedly, the precision of our Internet searches means that people don’t experience those accidental discoveries anymore (which may be a good thing or a bad thing, depending). Offhand, though, I don’t think we’ve gotten to that point. My blog bears me witness.

The crux of theology

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I’m up late, can’t sleep, feeling crummy, just sitting here on the couch with the laptop wandering the Web doing things that don’t need much brainpower (I could be trying to tackle Colossians 2:9-15 for this Sunday’s sermon, but I think it would take two falls out of three without breaking a sweat); but even in moments like these, God is at work, and there are grace notes. For whatever reason, his Spirit brought to mind the story of how Karl Barth, during his visit to America in 1962, was asked how he would summarize his theology; this brilliant Reformed thinker, the greatest and most important theologian of his century, this prolific mind who wrote millions and millions of words, answered, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” That really is the bottom line, isn’t it? What a comfort.

Unspectacular

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It’s been quite a while since I’ve been tagged in a meme; apparently, though, Pauline over at Perennial Student tagged me a couple weeks ago, and I missed it. (I’ll admit, I tend to be a bit erratic in my reading.) This one’s pretty simple: name six unspectacular things about yourself. This offers me a wide, wide field . . .

  1. I’m physically utterly unspectacular—moderate height, thinning medium-brown hair, glasses. (At least my beard is reddish.)
  2. I sing baritone in our church choir; I do not sing solos.
  3. I love baseball, but my best position is bench jockey. As a hitter, I used to be pretty good at getting on base, but in the field I’m strictly a utility player—I can make errors at all nine positions.
  4. I love Chinese food—the real thing, not the Americanized stuff (though some of that can be pretty good, too). In fact, I’m very fond of every Asian cuisine I’ve tried (Thai, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Malay, Indonesian, Indian, Lebanese). That’s one of the things I really miss about living in Vancouver, BC: all the authentic ethnic food.
  5. I’m a diehard Seattle sports fan. So far this year, the Mariners have lost 100+ games, the Sonics have been stolen by an Oklahoma robber baron, the Seahawks are 1-3, and the Husky football team is 0-5 on the season (and 0 for their last 7). I’ve pretty much stopped reading the sports pages.
  6. Having grown up mostly in the Pacific Northwest, I’m a complete weather wimp, especially when it comes to heat and humidity. I can deal with the winters here in Indiana, but summer’s no fun.

For this one, you’re supposed to tag six people, but a) it’s late, and b) I never have good luck with my tags, so I’ll just throw it open: if you want to respond, consider yourself tagged.

Random thought re: M. Night Shyamalan

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The latest issue of Touchstone arrived today; I’m currently partway through Russell Moore’s excellent article “The Gospel’s Bigger Idea: You Can’t Tell the Story of Jesus Without Jesus,” which I would link to if it were only available online. (I may very well post on it later anyway.)At the moment, though, my brain is off on a tangent. Dean Moore notes in his piece that he’s never seen the movie The Sixth Sense, in part because a friend told him about the “twist” ending, which he assumes means the movie is now ruined for him.

If I saw the movie now, I would see the same film everyone else saw at its release, but I would be seeing it with the mystery decoded. I would see where the story was going.

This is true, but I don’t think it ruins the movie. I watch very few films, but I have seen that one, at the urging of a couple good friends of ours; I watched the whole thing, appreciating some aspects of it and very much not appreciating others, and waiting for the twist ending—and when it came, was very surprised to find myself not surprised, because the “twist” was something I had understood from the beginning of the movie. I was interested to be told afterward (was it in the extras on the DVD? I don’t recall) that M. Night Shyamalan had actually not expected it to be a twist for the audience—it was a revelation for the protagonist, of course, but he assumed the audience would understand the situation. His indirect exposition at the beginning proved to be rather too indirect for most people to catch, however, and so the film ended up a different experience for audiences than he had expected.This is, I think, unfortunate, for two reasons. One is that people watched the movie less as a character study—which was the aspect that I really liked; Bruce Willis did a terrific job with a fascinating role—and more as a horror thriller. That probably helped Shyamalan at the box office, but I think it weakened the effect of his work. To put it in terms of this post, this focused people more on the mystery in the story (“What’s the twist going to be?”) and less on the mystery of the story: who are these two characters, what are they about, and what is the real meaning of what’s going on?The other is that it established Shyamalan as a sort of O. Henry of the theater, with a hefty dollop of Poe or Lovecraft: a guy who made creepily atmospheric films that set you up for a great twist ending. Again, that was great for him in the short run, and most people agree that Unbreakable was a major accomplishment as well; but trying to live up to that has been an increasing burden on him, and one that seems to be ruining him as a writer and director. His greatest break, the jolt of surprise that (with an assist from The Blair Witch Project) made a megahit of The Sixth Sense, may ironically be the thing that breaks him. It’s too bad; he’s a gifted storyteller, if he’d just stuck to telling real stories instead of artificial ones.

No half measures

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HT: U.S.S. MarinerIn bringing the 777 to production, Boeing took the pursuit of perfection to its logical extreme: to make sure the wings were as strong, and as capable of enduring severe weather, as the design team wanted them to be, the company built an entire airplane (just the structure, not the interior equipment) just to break it, and then they took that plane and bent the wings until they snapped. The hope was that the wing would withstand at least 150% of the stress it would ever have to endure in the air; it did, breaking at 154%.There is, I think, a lesson here for the church—and no, it’s not “stress your volunteers until they break,” which too many churches already do. Boeing didn’t break people, they broke stuff; the church should always be able to tell the difference (which means, among other things, that we really shouldn’t get into the world’s habit of referring to people as “resources” and “assets,” because those are stuff words). Specifically, Boeing put the mission ahead of the stuff, and if they needed to break stuff to get the mission done right—to be sure they’d built a plane that was at least as good as they wanted it to be—they went ahead and broke the stuff. Indeed, they built it for the express purpose of being broken, just so they could be sure.The American church, I think, could stand to profit from their example. We have our mission statement direct from the mouth of God:

Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

We need to make sure that that mission—which is completely antithetical, be it noted, to using up and burning out the people we already have in an effort to attract more people—is the driving motivation behind everything we do, to the point that nothing else is allowed to hold us back. If concern for those outside the church means that some of our stuff gets broken, then so be it. (Indeed, if concern for those inside the church means that we focus more on feeding and discipling them than on prodding them to contribute to the building fund, then praise God.) Certainly, we should be good stewards of the things we have; we should invest the time and money to take care of whatever buildings we own or use, and to do everything to the best of our ability to the glory of God. But we don’t exist to have an attractive building—or, for that matter, a large building—or to have great music, or to have a well-produced worship service, or to have lots of programs. We exist to make disciples of Jesus Christ, including each other, and all those other things exist to support that mission. If that means allowing some disorder and some breakage, we need to be willing to let that happen; if it means not having the big building and the big budget, we need to embrace that. We can’t be about the stuff; we need to be about making disciples—all about making disciples, nothing held back—and let the stuff fall where it will.

Educational Alzheimer’s

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When individuals lose their memory to Alzheimer’s or another form of dementia, we universally recognize this as a tragedy, and so we pour large amounts of money into research to identify the causes and work toward developing a cure. But when the nation loses its collective memory? As any lover of history knows, that’s what’s happening year by year. The great historian David McCullough put it this way thirteen years ago in his National Book Award acceptance speech:

We, in our time, are raising a new generation of Americans who, to an alarming degree, are historically illiterate.The situation is serious and sad. And it is quite real, let there be no mistake. It has been coming on for a long time, like a creeping disease, eating away at the national memory. While the clamorous popular culture races on, the American past is slipping away, out of site and out of mind. We are losing our story, forgetting who we are and what it’s taken to come this far. . . .The decided majority, some 60 percent, of the nation’s high school seniors haven’t even the most basic understanding of American history. . . .On a winter morning on the campus of one of our finest colleges, in a lively Ivy League setting with the snow falling outside the window, I sat with a seminar of some twenty-five students, all seniors majoring in history, all honors students—the cream of the crop. “How many of you know who George Marshall was?” I asked. None. Not one.At a large university in the Midwest, a young woman told me how glad she was to have attended my lecture, because until then, she explained, she had never realized that the original thirteen colonies were all on the eastern seaboard.

As Brian Ward of Fraters Libertas notes, the situation hasn’t improved in thirteen years, either.

The liberal news site MinnPost celebrates this glimpse into the state of public education in Minneapolis:When asked what historical figure they’d most like to study this year, an astounding 22 of the 35 students in Ms. Ellingham’s eighth-grade history class at Susan B. Anthony middle school in Minneapolis answered, “Yoko Ono” and/or “John Lennon.”I weep for the future. The great historian David McCullough was on C-SPAN this past week, looking like a beaten man while describing the crushing level of historical ignorance among America’s youth. He summed up with the warning that one can never love a country one doesn’t know. It sounded like an epitaph.

A lot of people will look at this and blame it on history being boring—a perception which I’ve never understood, since history is the human story, the summation of all the interesting (and not-so-interesting) things that have ever happened; sure, it’s boring if badly taught, but so is anything else. The real problem, I think, is ideological: the teaching of history, and especially American history, just isn’t valued by the elites who controle public education, because too many among them don’t especially value the country which that history has produced. Like Barack Obama, their chosen candidate, their conception of the good of America is primarily forward-looking—it’s about the changes they want to make and the good they believe they can create; they don’t want to learn from history, they want to be free of it. Thus John Hinderaker writes,

My youngest daughter started middle school this year. After around a month of classes, as far as I can tell the curriculum consists largely of propaganda about recycling. My high school age daughter told me tonight that in Spanish class she has been taught to say “global warming,” “acid rain” and “greenhouse effect” in Spanish. . . .The schools can teach anything if they care about it. The problem is that they don’t care about teaching history, least of all American history. Public education is agenda-driven, and American history—the facts of American history—is not on the agenda.

The problem is, we cannot get free of history—not as long as human beings are still sinful; the attempt to do so only leaves us blind to what others may do. The study of history is in large part a way of learning from the mistakes (and the insights!) of others so that we don’t have to reinvent them all ourselves. This is why the philosopher George Santayana was right to declare that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it; it’s also why progressives who try to evade this truth by dismissing it as a truism are self-defeating, because any true progress requires escaping the historical loop, which requires learning the lessons of history and taking them seriously. True progress must be founded on a chastened realism about human behavior, not on utopian optimism about human potential.The nub of the matter here is that the command of the Delphic oracle is still essential to any human wisdom: “Know thyself”—and our ability to do so rests on our memory, because to a great extent, as I’ve said before, memory is identity. We cannot know ourselves if we’ve forgotten who we are, what we’ve done and why we’ve done it and whom we did it for (or to, or against)—and this is no less true of us as a nation than it is of us as individuals. We cannot understand who we are and why we do things the way we do if we don’t understand how we got here; and as a consequence, we may well throw away treasures because we don’t know enough to see their value.The last word on this really should belong to David McCullough, of whom I am a great and fervent admirer, who put it beautifully in his 1995 acceptance speech (which is well worth reading in its entirety):

History shows us how to behave. History teaches, reinforces what we believe in, what we stand for, and what we ought to be willing to stand up for. History is—or should be—the bedrock of patriotism, not the chest-pounding kind of patriotism but the real thing, love of country.At their core, the lessons of history are largely lessons in appreciation. Everything we have, all our great institutions, hospitals, universities, libraries, this city, our laws, our music, art, poetry, our freedoms, everything is because somebody went before us and did the hard work, provided the creative energy, provided the money, provided the belief. Do we disregard that?Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude. It’s a form of ingratitude.I’m convinced that history encourages, as nothing else does, a sense of proportion about life, gives us a sense of the relative scale of our own brief time on earth and how valuable that is.What history teaches it teaches mainly by example. It inspires courage and tolerance. It encourages a sense of humor. It is an aid to navigation in perilous times. We are living now in an era of momentous change, of huge transitions in all aspects of life-here, nationwide, worldwide-and this creates great pressures and tensions. But history shows that times of change are the times when we are most likely to learn. This nation was founded on change. We should embrace the possibilities in these exciting times and hold to a steady course, because we have a sense of navigation, a sense of what we’ve been through in times past and who we are.

The crowning irony of a strange campaign

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Paul Hinderaker of Power Line has brilliantly captured something I’ve been thinking about but hadn’t quite put together like this:

If it turns out to be the financial crisis that puts Barack Obama over the top in his quest for the White House, the irony will be difficult to overstate. First, the biggest driver of the financial crisis was not any conservative policy such as the kind of deregulation John McCain supports. Rather, as Diana West argues, the biggest driver was the “race-based social engineering” that “virtually created the sub-prime mortgage industry.” The implosion of that industry, in turn, triggered the present crisis.The operative vision, then, was leftist and racialist, not free-market. As West puts it, the social engineers decided that not “enough” minorities had homes because not “enough” minorities were eligible for mortgages. The solution was to junk the bottom-line, non-racial markers of mortgage eligibility traditionally used by banks to distinguish between good and bad credit risks—steady employment, clean credit, and a down payment. Obama, then, is the beneficiary of the terrible failure of affirmative action style policies in the mortgage banking sector.But the irony extends further. For it turns out that intimidating banks into making bad loans to minorities was a major activity of “community organizations” during the 1990s. And, according to Stanley Kurtz, Obama himself trained and funded ACORN activists who engaged in such intimidation.Using a combination of intimidation and white guilt to plunge the banking industry into the crisis that brings a radical activist to power—even Saul Alinsky couldn’t have drawn it up this well.