Note: this piece was originally published at American Thinker.
By Selwyn Duke
Contrary to what my title
indicates, I probably judge Barack Obama more harshly than most reading this
page. I don’t think he is just a
misguided ideologue or merely a creature of expediency. I believe, practically speaking, that he is
an evil man. That is to say, while he is
largely ignorant like so many others, he has developed an affinity for evil. He mistakes it for good.
Yet, to be blunt, Obama doesn’t
alarm me as much as the average American.
To explain why, I’ll present something Roman philosopher and statesman
Marcus Tullius Cicero said
2000 years ago when lamenting Julius Caesar’s rise to dictator:
Do not
blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed
and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and
gave him triumphal processions . . . . Blame
the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the 'new, wonderful good
society' which shall now be Rome's, interpreted to mean 'more money, more ease,
more security, more living fatly at the expense of the industrious.' Julius was
always an ambitious villain, but he is only one man.
Barack Obama is only one
man. A bad man, yes, but he is a symptom
more than a cause. Without millions of
fawning Americans, he would just be a community agitator, vainly preaching
Alinsky principles from a soapbox. Of
course, he is a symptom that exacerbates the underlying problem, and
symptomatic treatment — to ease immediate pain and hardship — is certainly in
order. But it is only the worst of
physicians who focuses only on symptoms while ignoring the cancer eating away
at the patient’s midst.
Some of us lament the presence
of self-professed communists such as Van Jones — and other assorted
intellectual mutants, such as Cass Sunstein and John Holdren — in government, and
how we elected a man who broke bread with self-professed communists such as
Bill Ayers. But why complain now? We’ve had self-professed communists such as
Bill Ayers — and other assorted intellectual mutants, such as Ward Churchill,
Cass Sunstein and John Holdren — in academia for many decades. And good Americans still donated money to
universities and still sent their most precious possessions, their children, to
them. So, should it be any surprise that
millions of these children would, knowing nothing and feeling all the wrongs
things, flock to the polls and cast votes for people just like their teachers
and professors? You may say that their
parents knew nothing of these universities’ true nature. But it was their place to find out. And Obama did not create the modern
academy. He is more a creation of it.
We also criticize Obama for
saying “We no longer are [just] a Christian nation” and while speaking in
Turkey that “We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation
or a Muslim nation.” But can we really
say he’s wrong? Has Christmas not become
completely commercialized? How many of
us say grace with our families before meals?
How many of us pray every day? How
many Americans subscribe to the modern perversion of the “separation of church
and state” idea? How many of us say “God
Bless” upon parting? Have the majority
of American “Christians” not descended into moral relativism? It is here that some will call me a religious
nut. All right, but I simply note that a
Christian nation would actually practice Christianity and that if we are
satisfied to be only nominally Christian, it lends weight to the argument that
we’re not actually Christian. Of course,
we certainly can condemn Obama for attending a pseudo-Christian church and
being part of the problem, but he didn’t create our secular age. He is more a creation of it.
One thing Obama certainly did
help create is the tea-party phenomenon.
It is the largest, most impressive grassroots movement I can remember
and I truly hope it grows beyond what even the most zealous reader would
prefer. Yet, when I hear the protesters
complain about the violation of the Constitution, I have to wonder where they’ve
been. Did they miss the activist 1947
“separation of church and state ruling”?
Have they learned about FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society? Don’t they realize that the federal
government long ago exceeded its constitutional bounds? Where is the constitutional mandate for Uncle
Scam to involve itself in and/or fund housing, food stamps, farm subsidies,
Medicaid, global-warming research, mass transit, and school sports
programs? The fact is that most things
the federal government has its claws into are none of its affair. Thus, to only now complain about
constitutional trespasses is like having finally noted the invasion of Poland
when the Nazis started bombing Great Britain.
We also have to ask how serious
most Americans really are about respecting the Constitution. Here’s a little test for them: Are you
willing to give up your Social Security in the name of constitutional
adherence?
I thought so.
The average American has his
version of acceptable constitutional violation, Ruth Bader-Ginsburg has hers,
and Obama has his. And Obama didn’t
create the “living document” mentality.
He is more a creation of it.
Then there is our putrid
popular culture. Effete Hollywood types
— such as the Obama sycophants in this
bizarre Harpo Productions video — thuggish rappers, MTV stoner types and the
rest of our decadence czars helped galvanize the youth and propel the empty
vessel to victory. Yet, while
entertainment is a bastion of the left, it’s not entirely a creation of
it. The reality is that we, the people,
empowered them. We watched their movies;
laughed at their salacious jokes; were titillated by their prurience; and
tolerated their mainstreaming obscenity, homosexuality and gratuitous
violence. We allowed our children to
dress in their ghetto styles and imbibe pure and utter filth. Like with so many other things, we helped
create our entertainment — a major symptom of spiritual malaise — and then it helped
induce many secondary symptoms. And one
of them is Obama.
Of course, nothing is more
associated with that symptom than the Shill Media, but I think you know what’s
coming. Who bought the mainstream papers
for all those decades, watched the nightly news and bought all the lies? “How could people know?” you ask? Well, some certainly knew — and some of those
knew better than others.
Like Cicero, I’m sure I sound
quite condemnatory, but I’m not here to lay a curse or consign anyone to
Hell. I don’t want to be found guilty of
the George Bernard Shaw mistake G.K. Chesterton criticized most colorfully when
he wrote:
It is
not seeing things as they are to think first of a Briareus with a hundred
hands, and then call every man a cripple for only having two. It is not seeing
things as they are to start with a vision of Argus with his hundred eyes, and
then jeer at every man with two eyes as if he had only one. And it is not
seeing things as they are to imagine a demigod of infinite mental clarity, who
may or may not appear in the latter days of the earth, and then to see all men
as idiots.
In reality, for us to have
avoided that ever-repeated pattern of civilizational decline, the common man
would have to be a very uncommon man, something, in the least, like a sublime
moral philosopher. And, certainly, no
person will have, metaphorically speaking, a hundred industrious hands, a
hundred all-seeing eyes or even come close to enjoying demigod-like mental
clarity. Yet a nation doesn’t have to
resign itself to being blind and crippled, either. We can usually manage one more hand and eye.
Truth be known, when we elected
Obama, the nation said “Look, ma, no hands!” with its eyes closed. It required corrupted judgment to be blind to
what Obama was. Note that “corrupted” is
different than “corrupt.” When saying a
computer file is corrupted, there is no implication that it’s evil; rather, it
simply means it no longer functions as it should.
This partially explains why
facts often don’t matter today. Just as
correct input may not yield correct output if fed into a malfunctioning
computer, all the necessary facts may not yield a correct conclusion when
processed by a corrupted mind. And anyone
with a properly functioning virtue file would have sensed the lack of same in
Obama. After all, there were so many
indications, from his radical associations to his tolerance for infanticide
(that’s what you call a clue) to the fact that he once allowed his then two-year-old
daughter to listen to rap to his empty sloganeering. Yes, we could’ve . . . known.
Yet my point here is not about
the average person, who isn’t reading substantive commentary anyway. It’s that
even most of us who oppose Obama and are political are just political, content to fight the battle with one hand and one
eye. So many of us — this includes
readers and commentators — are
satisfied with boilerplate; it’s Alinsky this and Alinsky that, San Fran Nan,
Afghanistan and the Taliban, this bill and that political shill. This isn’t to say there’s not a place for
such things, as many do need a course in politics 101. But if we want to have any chance of winning
the war, we must move on to graduate work and fight it on the deepest levels,
the spiritual and cultural. We must
scrutinize ourselves and evaluate how we have been complicit in empowering the
culture that spawns Barack Obamas. We
must remember that those of us who are engaged are a minority weighed against
an apathetic majority. A few stones
however, can be substantial enough to tip the scales against a million
pebbles. But this can only happen if we
so greatly increase the weight of our virtue that it outweighs the vice that is
everywhere.
I once heard a man of the cloth
put it perfectly, saying “Everyone is in a different stage of conversion.” Every thought we contemplate, word we utter
and action we take move us closer to or further away from perfection. And it’s always time for another hand and
another eye.
© 2009 Selwyn Duke — All Rights Reserved
selwynduke.com 
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