Friday, August 08, 2008

The Preachy Style...   [Victor Davis Hanson]

I think most Americans, especially given the winning personality of Mrs. Edwards, would rather let John Edwards solve his own problems and not hear about them. But the rub comes from what we might call his trademark preachy mode, transmogrified from the jury summation to the national pulpit. In that sense, Edwards is a sort of a secular version of Jim Baker/Jimmy Swaggert/Ted Haggard—and people long ago tired of him.

Live and let live is our national creed, but Edwards had to lecture us instead about the intimacies of his wife's medical condition in such a way to highlight his own character, often in the context and in the pursuit of his own ambition. In the same manner, we all didn't much care whether he wanted to build a 30,000 sq. ft. monstrosity, replete with a self-indulgent playroom: his money, he earned it through litigation, and he was welcome to spend it as he liked.

BUT, when one juxtaposed his tastes for the lavish with his sermons to supposedly uncaring Americans about their heartless unconcern about the poor and homeless, then the contrast between word and deed became, well, sort of insulting.

Ditto Al Gore. No one objects to a former Vice President lobbying the rest of us to wake up to the dangers of supposedly human-induced climate change, or even the single-mindedness by which he pursued his case. But the stridency, the Armaggedon-like speeches, the furor by which he tolerated no dissent, the questioning of opponents' methods, the vein-bulging shouting, all that only highlighted the energy-drinking Gore house, the Gore con of carbon offsets to be used as medieval-like penance, the Gore preference for a carbon-spewing, fuel-guzzling private jet, the Gore lake yacht, and so on.

Ditto once again, Michelle Obama. No one minded her unusual and occasional remonstrations about America's need to improve, but when she got on a roll and then finger-wagged about America's intrinsic meanness, its ever-rising arbitrary bars, the logical lack of patriotism one might feel in it, and then once again all that was framed by the most recent Obama multimillion-dollar joint income, the private schools, the mansion, her generous compensation, it just didn't ring authentic. The Right Rev. Wright vaporized, in part, because his 10,000 sq ft. abode, suppposedly replete with elevator and white-neighborhood, was in direct contrast to his black-liberation rants about the phoniness of black-middle-classness and the delusional pursuit of so-called white material success and values—ranting all the way to the bank as it were.

Big-hearted Americans seem to forgive almost all sins in their public figures except two: hypocrisy and ingratitude.

08/08 06:29 PMShare