The President delivering his DNC acceptance speech (September 6, 2012: Photo from the Denver Post)
(Note: this post is the first of perhaps three, based on entirely subjective experiences and criteria—I never said I was a coherent thinker).
Some recent events—and the upcoming event of Paul Ryan's and Joseph Biden's Vice-Presidential debate on Thursday, October 11th—had me revisiting the President's acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention about a month ago. My sense of his speech was that it was much like those I have seen him give before: a churning engine of non sequiturs, mixed with glancing touches to key Democratic policy erogenous zones. For example, mid-speech, and in a nine paragraph-sequence where each paragraph effectively began with the subject "we"—my, the President inclines towards collectivism!—he said (NPR transcript):
We don't think the government can solve all of our problems, but we don't think the government is the source of all of our problems — (cheers, applause) — any more than our welfare recipients or corporations or unions or immigrants or gays or any other group we're told to blame for our troubles — (cheers, applause) — because — because America, we understand that this democracy is ours.
As spoken it is but one sentence. Its zig-zagging logic proceeds for a while (not this...not that...nor this...nor that....) until the tie-breaker parachutes in to get us back on course: "America, this democracy is ours" (foreshadowing: the President says "democracy," not "representative democracy" or "federation of sovereign states"). When the sentence's structure and word-content are disentangled and reduced to simpler, logical form, we actually wind up with nine separate sentences:
- We do not think that the government can solve all our problems.
- We do not think that the government is the source of all our problems.
- We do not think that our welfare recipients are the source of all our problems.
- We do not think that our corporations are the source of all our problems.
- We do not think that unions are the source of all our problems.
- We do not think that the government is the source of all our problems.
- We do not think that immigrants are the source of all our problems.
- We do not think that gays the source of all our problems.
- We do not think that any other group we're told to blame for our troubles is the source of all our problems.
This arm's-length way of presenting things might make us forget that we are deep into a political speech, where we expect to hear innuendos through to outright assertions about the beliefs and policies of one's political opponents. So when we consider the speech's partisan context, and factor in the contrasting conjunction "but" that links sentences 1 and 2, the sense becomes:
- We do not think that the government can solve all our problems.
- We do not think that the government is the source of all our problems.
- But some people think that agreeing with sentence 1 requires to you disagree with sentence 2 (and therefore think that the government is the source of all our problems).
These unidentified "some people" have bad logic, for they have committed the fallacy of an invalid inference based on misplaced quantity—Dad cannot fix my broken bike, therefore Dad broke my bike.
There is more. Look at the end of sentence 9, "...any other group we're told to blame for our troubles." Being faithful to the transcription compelled me to include that clause only with the portion of the text in which it appears: the very end of the list. Yet the unnamed people who "tell us what other groups we are to blame for all our troubles" appear in the paragraph's context and pacing to be in reality the ones who earlier on in the paragraph grouped together welfare recipients, immigrants, and gays and others, for us. If this is a fair read, then the President is not speaking here in his own voice, saying something that he himself thinks, something that his audience needs to hear. No, he is reciting what one of his logically-stunted opponents might say, were they there, complete with a starter-list of suspects whom that person might offer to us as the culprits responsible for all of his or her own grievances: "Immigrants are responsible for all our problems, and if not them, well, then, the gays are." Are the President's opponents that unintelligent?
Thinking through texts like these has rendered me forever deaf to the siren song of President Obama's rhetoric. Even his catapulting 2004 DNC "no red-state, no blue-state" speech did not send a thrill up my leg.
Yet the President does have skills. The literal insinuation I've noted—his threading of straw-man anti-homosexuality into a paragraph ostensibly about the role of government—is something he does elsewhere, which in my mind is more telling, and for my money more worrisome. My real concern is with an apparent collectivism that seems to place the seat of America's values in the government instead of individual citizens and their local communities, a sinister turn of events.
In one of the paragraphs in a nine-paragraph string that begin with "we," the President subtly inserts the word "charity" into a sentence that discusses what "we" should do and think:
We, the people — (cheers) — recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom which asks only, what's in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense. (Cheers, applause.)
While the sentiments in this quotation are hard to disagree with, there is a word that I would have much preferred not to see there, the word "charity." As a Catholic Christian I cannot be unhappy with the word, nor its central location in the Christian life; faith, hope, and charity are the animating virtues of a Christian life, well-lived. My concern is with the presence of this word in a political speech that is enumerating what it is that government is supposed to do. Is it the task of the government, and the federal government above all, to exemplify and thereby to teach what charity is?
Part of my trouble is that my first instance of ever hearing that word was in the wonderful adaptation of the plainsong chant, Ubi caritas et amor deus ibi est—where there is charity and love, there is God. The English hymn is rendered "Where Charity and Love prevail, there God is ever found," and the hymn has been historically used on Holy Thursday in Easter Week, when the Christian faithful re-enact the Lord's washing his disciples' feet. Charity, in the Catholic context in particular, is the love we have directly for God first and foremost, and for his Images (i.e., us humans) precisely in our likeness, our family resemblance, to him. It is this devotion towards God's human creatures that commands us care for their basic needs: whatsoever you do...
But this vocabulary and these virtues I learned in church and through the myriad rivulets of my Catholic religion. It is not the task of government to instruct me on the proper love of God, or of God's people. My priest does that, your rabbi or imam does that.
The President is not my pastor.
My ultimate concern is that, in President Obama's take on things, nothing seems to lay outside the scope and possible command of the federal government. The federal government is in charge of protecting the American personality, of protecting "who we are" (the President's trump card when he is at a loss in arguing for why we should not allow something: "it's not who we are"). The federal government is the protector of charity and love. What's left for those of us who aren't in the government?
It turns out that the President had an answer for that, too:
So you see, the election four years ago wasn't about me. It was about you. (Cheers, applause.) My fellow citizens — you were the change. (Cheers, applause.)
Thereafter follows a litany of things that we all did: helped a girl get heart surgery, a man in Colorado went to medical school, children of immigrants didn't get deported, etc. As the President describes it, we all do, and did, every thing. Every citizen seems to do what the government does, and the government's actions are all the citizens' actions. Just how far is this removed from authentic collectivism?
Question: if we all do every thing, and no one alone does any individual thing, and we are therefore all completely equal, I wonder whether the President is willing to exchange his position with mine. But I am no pastor, and neither should the President be.
Next up: Berlin, thirty-four years later. Hint: look at the header photo on the top of this page.