The Way the Future Blogs

As we were departing our last Hawaiian port of call, the captain got on the horn with bad news. He said the part of the Pacific Ocean we were heading into, which was most of it, was poorly served with American TV. Therefore CNN and ESPN and all the other feeds that had supplied most of the channels in our stateroom TVs were now but a memory. They wouldn’t be back until just before we docked in San Diego at the end of the cruise, but he was happy to announce that we wouldn’t be totally deprived of a voice from home. The Fox channel (which reached the Earth’s surface not from a communications satellite, like everybody else, but through a navigation satellite, which covered everywhere) would be glad to serve us while the real news people were absent.

In the event, it wasn’t any worse than I had expected. It wasn’t any better, either. As a news source, Fox suffered from not offering very much of it, preferring to allocate its time slots to its right-wing pundits — Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter and Newt Gingrich were among the ones they promised — for the purpose of explaining the true meaning of the news rather than delivering any. When big news stories broke, Fox did cover them, at least at first, on a reasonably factual basis: the crash landing of a bird-damaged jet in the Hudson River, the inauguration of President Barack Obama, the brief and not really explained in-and-out candidacy of Caroline Kennedy as appointee to Hillary Clinton’s vacated Senate seat.

Each of these events Fox kept alive for days, perhaps so that they could explicate the moral lessons involved: the faith-based explanations for the survival of the jet’s occupants, the theory that, since she was a member of the evil Kennedy tribe, Caroline probably had a trunkful of sordid secrets a fitness hearing would expose to the world. And, in order to give Obama’s inaugural address a fair and impartial review, they engaged a person who truly did know something about inaugural addresses. He had written both of George W. Bush’s.

(Confession: I haven’t actually experienced seventeen full days of Foxiness. Along about the tenth day, I finally figured out that, if I tuned to that channel but turned the sound down to zero, I would never have to hear the crazy-making utterances of Hannity, O’Reilly, et al anymore but could get a rough idea of what was going on in the world from the news crawl at the bottom of the screen, which, relatively speaking, was only mildly toxic.)

Chicago Sun-Times, Nov. 5, 2008

Like a lot of other people, I voted for you, although you weren’t my first choice. Actually you were my third. But as the campaign progressed I began to see how revolutionarily hopeful your candidacy was, and how wrong I had been ever to prefer anyone else.

The first thing was your brilliant style of fund-raising. American candidates normally put the arm on the biggest and richest bankrolls they can for the fattest checks, with the result that every candidate achieving election does so owing a large debt to individual persons and institutions, including such powerful entities as the National Rifle Association and (forgive me, dear wife the college professor) the teachers’ unions. All of which take care to see those debts get handsomely repaid in the currency of government favors.

But, President Obama, you didn’t do that. You raised your campaign funds primarily from individuals and in relatively small amounts. So you owe a debt too, but in so universal and diffused form that it can best be described as a debt to the American people in general.

Which is actually what every elected official is sworn to honor anyway, by the terms of his inaugural oath. So at one blow you have weakened one of the two great wickednesses in American politics, the favoritism given the rich and powerful.

Of course that is only one of the sins that besmirch our democracy. What about that other one, the power of the single-issue voter? Why, you’ve done something about that, too.

You said you wanted to be the president of all Americans, not just the ones who voted for you. That’s a pretty sentiment. It has been adopted — at least rhetorically — by just about every elected official in America since the Dutch ruled New Amsterdam, and if there is one of them that ever has put that principle into practice once elected, his name escapes me.

But look what you did, President Obama. The pastor of your church made some repellently unpatriotic remarks about the American treatment of African Americans. Others you have chosen to honor were gays or gay-bashers, liberals or conservatives, and a storm of disapproval rose against each one of them.

I am not privy to your thoughts, President Obama, but I think I see what you are doing. You are putting into practice that famous, and famously neglected, Golden Rule, “You and I disagree on some issues, but let’s work together on the others anyway, so we can jointly keep making the world a better place.” So there you have struck heavy — I hope mortal — blows against two of the most crippling evils in American polity. Don’t stop.

 

Even after I had come to the conclusion that you would make the best president of all the people in the field, I had some lingering doubts. You were, after all, visibly a person of color. Was it possible that the American voter could elect an African American to the highest office in the nation?

About that I kept my fingers crossed. Indeed, I think you might well have been defeated at the polls, except for two wholly unexpected factors. One was the surprisingly feckless campaign waged by John McCain (along with the appallingly snide one of his vice-presidential pick, Sarah Palin). The other was the catastrophic self-immolation of the world’s financial structures. It is these things that put you so triumphantly over the top, and if I were a religious man, I would thank God for these healing scourges.

So carry on, President Barack Hussein Obama. There is a huge job ahead of you. I don’t know how you are going to heal the festering sores of recession and corruption that are all around us — but I know you will try your very good best. And whatever tiny bit I can do to help, I pledge to undertake.