Waterloo. Munich. Katrina. 9/11.
There's no chance, I suppose, that this Obama moment has actually never happened before and that the analogies we use are so crude that they are of little use or so ideologically loaded that they blow up in your hands.
Maybe it's all about power. Or maybe about comfort. Or maybe about competence. We just don't like the feeling that we don't know what is going on or what will happen as a result. To call an action President Obama takes his "Munich" is not to explore the meaning of the action, but to damn it by historical analogy. If the use of analogies is supposed to give us the sense that we understand what is going on, I suppose there is no getting away from them. The sense that we understand what is going on is much prized.
That means that my first proposal for defusing the use of historical analogies won't help us much. I was going to say that choosing an obscure battle in an obscure war as the crucial analogy might work. The long version would be "The meaning of this event is like the meaning of the Battle of Gloenkloof for the Boers." The everyday form would be, "This is Obama's Gloenkloof."
I admit there are a lot of battles to choose from, battles that only historians specializing in that period would have heard of, but I like this one because I like saying Gloenkloof. Try it yourself. Don't hold back.
My second proposal is to choose a historical analogy that goes in the direction you want it to go (criterion 1) and that has enough historical similarity to keep it from being dismissed out of hand (criterion 2).
It is the Gulf oil crisis that is generating the most demand for historical analogies at the moment. The least imaginative one I have heard is that "BP-gate" is "Obama's Katrina." OK. The President needs to be careful not to say "Hell of a job, Brownie" or to have his picture taken in a flyover at 10,000 feet. But what else does it offer?
Thomas Friedman, who thinks the administration should never let a crisis go to waste and who follows that advice as a columnist, wants to call it Obama's 9/11. Certainly there is some point in that. Friedman wants Obama to base on this event a huge and broadly supported reform agenda against oil dependency. Not a "war on oil" but a "crusade for independence." Nice idea, but President Bush didn't have to face down a huge pro-terrorist corps of lobbyists to get the PATRIOT Act passed.
It will not surprise you that I have an analogy in mind myself. I choose the Iran hostage crisis of 1979. President Carter's commitment to getting the hostages back safely meant that he could not plan a "rescue" that would get them all killed. (He did get them all back, by the way, and is still proud of that.) That means he was limited to the public display of the powerlessness of his office--to his own powerlessness.
It turns out that is unacceptable. For all that our schoolchildren learn about "co-equal branches" and "checks and balances" and all that, when we get into really distressing circumstances, we want HIM to "do something about it." We don't care all that much what. What we know is that we have a right not to be afraid and that it is the President's job to keep us from being afraid. Or discouraged.
From the standpoint of political psychology, this is the principal function of the presidency. It is the service most prized by the people. It is the failure they find least forgivable. The voters shrugged, more or less, at President Clinton's dalliance with Monica Lewinsky and they kept on shrugging as more and more titillating versions were marketed. Clinton's bad judgment adjacent to the Oval Office didn't make them feel fearful.
But Obama holds the most powerful office in the world. An oil disaster of unprecedented scale is upon us. And the President is doing....what? He's visiting the Gulf coast for photo ops. He's making speeches. He even lapsed into an uncharacteristic vulgarity, hoping to show how upset he is about all this. Nothing works. BP has or has access to the best petro-disaster experts in the world. They are doing everything they can, now that we have a disaster to work with. These are the people Obama would hire if he took control of the crisis away from BP and ran the capping and diversion operations from Washington D. C.
There's really nothing he can do. It's his hostage crisis and he's the hostage. He is failing in the most basic popular demand that he do whatever is necessary to "fix things" or pay the consequences at the polls. His helplessness can't be spun. It can't be replaced by any story over which the President has personal control. It's like being put in the stocks, for the derision of passers-by.
So that's my choice analogy. It doesn't offer any advice, but it gives some direction to hand-wringers.
You are exactly right in paragraph one (and kudos, perhaps, for an unintended pun in pointing to the fact that many of our responses to the oil disaster have been crude.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, there was a column yesterday at the Huffington Post that made your point exactly. The columnist scolds (sort of) Jerry Brown for using a Nazi analogy, one of the greatest sins and surely one of the greatest temptations for the historical analogist. But having pointed out Brown's sin, he cannot resist the analogy's seductive power and engages in his own dalliance. See "Meg Whitman Isn't Joseph Goebbels" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-kelly/meg-whitman-isnt-joseph-g_b_630808.html See also your post below on hypocrisy.
As the PCUSA General Assembly meets next week they will consider a study paper that calls the Israeli policy towards Palestinians apartheid. It turns out that the U.N. has categorized and defined certain treatment of displaced and marginalized people anywhere to be apartheid, and the authors of the report are diligent in showing how the definition applies. I voted (in the minority) in our Presbytery to endorse adoption of the report not because it is non-partisan and objective, but because it would allow us to hear an otherwise marginalized voice, that of Palestinian Christians. But I am afraid that the report is doomed if not to defeat at the GA then to being ignored or rebuked in local congregations precisely because of the use of historical analogy. In fact, I happen to think that Israeli policy towards the Palestinians is unjust and destructive in ways not altogether dis-similar to the policies of the white governments in South Africa two decades ago. But that strange Afrikaans word should not be analogized.
The historical analogist should keep certain analogies locked in a safe the combination to which he or she does not know. She will have to seek the permission of a wise other even to open the safe. Among the analogies kept there would be almost all Nazi-related and certainly holocaust, Auschwitz, and probably Beer Hall Putsch. "Ethnic Cleansing" should be avoided as should references to the Rwanda genocide if for no other reason than they cheapen the suffering and loss of those in the actual historical circumstances. Not to be too glib, but doesnt' the holocaust "belong" to the Jews and apartheid to the blacks and coloreds of South Africa?
Also kept in this safe for different reasons, mostly having to do with when analogies becomes cliches, should be Waterloo, Pearl Harbor, 9/11, Camelot and probably a lot more.
All that said, I think your analogy to the Iran hostage situation works and though I believe his restraint and patience may have been Carter's greatest triumph while in office, can any Carter analogy ever be positive in the market of mass consumption? By the way, have you noticed that the New York Times has taken to the spill-o-meter approach to keeping track of the disaster. This is day 72. Counting days may have worked for Walter Cronkite during the hostage crisis, but I'm not sure how it will play out here. The hostage crisis ended when the hostages were released. When will the spill crisis end? When BP says so? Yeah, but those BP spokespeople are so much the Joseph Goebbels of corporate double talk...
How the iPhone 4 could be Apple's Waterloo
ReplyDeleteHeadline from Consumer Reports found in Google new.
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