Obama as the most powerful writer since Caesar

Those of us not taken in by the Obama phenomenon have long marvelled at the worship and adulation heaped upon this basically unremarkable man and at the sycophancy displayed journalists, artists, and others who like to see themselves as courageous skeptics and dissenters who dare to “speak truth to power.” So it comes as no surprise to us to have yet another fatuous statement about the brilliance and glory of the current occupant of the White House delivered courtesy of one of these members of the artistic “avant garde.”

This time, the deification of the President takes the form of adoring him as the “the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar” most powerful writer since Julius Caesar.” Caesar’s account of Gaul is, indeed, a classic, and one with which many a Latin student over the years reluctantly has become familiar. It has an elegance and simplicity (for Latin) that makes it more readable than many other works. The jury is out, however, on whether Obama’s telepromptered speeches will be read in two thousand years. The same goes for his two books, including his break-out work, Dreams From My Father. If he actually wrote that book, with its rhetorical stylings in which some have detected the ghost of Bill Ayers, without a helping hand.

As to the substance of the “most powerful writer” remark, there might be some who would differ. The number of writers who have lived since Caesar whose prose style and literary content are more powerful than Obama’s is so numerous one has no time to list them. Given the obvious hyperbolic nonsense of Rocco’s bloviation from that perspective, it is claimed that he meant the remark as “politically powerful.” After all, the argument is, if the President is the most powerful man in the most powerful nation since ancient Rome, and if he is a writer, ergo, by the distributive property, he is the most powerful writer since Caesar.

Actually, with that interpretation, the remark is no less fatuous, though the fatuousness shifts from an artistic judgment to just plain imbecility. Let us assume that Obama in fact is the most powerful man in the U.S., a matter that is in quite some dispute as a practical matter. (I would suggest that I am far more powerful in determining issues that deal with my family’s everyday lives than is Obama or any other president.) Let us also assume that the U.S. is the most powerful nation since ancient Rome, a matter that has to be looked at in relation to other countries at that specific time in order for the evaluation to have any meaning whatever. (Just to keep it simple, let us also ignore the administration’s efforts to make the U.S. less powerful.)

By that reckoning, the U.S. was even more powerful in relation to the rest of the world after World War II. (No, the USSR at that time was not in the U.S.’s league, either in conventional or in nuclear weapons.) John F. Kennedy wrote a book, too. At least, let us assume, as we did with Mr. Obama, that Kennedy actually wrote Profiles In Courage. Richard Nixon wrote eight volumes. Do we also apply the same test to foreign princes and politicians who governed the world’s strong countries in the past?

There are more problems with this brown-nosing, aside from the fact that is smacks of further cult-of-personality worship reminiscent of Kim Jong-Il’s North Korean functionaries. The cheerleader is Rocco Landesman, the head of the National Endowment for the Arts. He recently succeeded Yosi Sergant who left after it was disclosed that he was trying to push artists into using their work to support President Obama’s domestic agenda. Though he had to resign, Sergant hardly need have worried. As I have posted before, artists have only been too willing to do the administration’s bidding. Landesman and Sergant are yet two more reasons why there should be no NEA. Government-funded art merely becomes Soviet-style appropriation of art for political purposes, just as government-funded science becomes appropriation of science for political purposes. Example: global climate change politics.

Then there is the open comparison of Obama to Caesar, a historical blunder of the first magnitude. There are those on the right who are paranoid that Obama will abolish elections, or at least term limits, to install himself as a quasi-dictator a la Hugo Chavez. Add to this the bread-and-circuses mentality of the Left in charge of the Congress, the massive intrusion of the federal government into more and more private decisions, and the debasement of the dollar. Of course, there is also the proliferation of unaccountable administration officials openly denominated “czars.” Justifiably or not, for many on the Right, this becomes a vision of the Roman Republic in its waning days.

The Founders of the American Republic admired the ancient Roman Republic, its civic virtue, its political institutions, and its commercial success and military honor. At least, they admired an idealized version of that republic. Early American writings make that admiration of Rome, its institutions, and citizens very clear. At the same time, the Americans feared the rise of an American Caesar and set up a selection process for the President that sought to avoid the rise of such a figure. Taking the vote for President from the people and reposing it in the hands of electors selected through a process determined by the state legislatures was intended to produce the nomination of several candidates from those most qualified under norms of republican virtue. It was a process designed to have the best in each state nominate the best in the several states. By the terms of the Constitution, election of the President from those nominated would, more likely than not, be in the House of Representatives. That was another step to produce a deliberated choice, rather than one selected directly by the people who would be prone to emotional appeals to vote for some popular tribune skilled in the low arts of popular politics.

When Andrew Jackson was elected as the first general since George Washington, his candidacy was greeted with dismay by those who adhered to the old republican ideology of the founding generation. Thomas Jefferson was horrified by Jackson. Henry Clay derisively referred to Jackson as just a “military chieftain.” But Jackson, aided by the emerging modern political party system, won by appealing exactly to those low political arts the Founders despised. “King Andrew I” was the American Caesar who was a danger to the Republic.

From a social and political standpoint, Landesman’s adulation of Obama is both risible in its fawning and, in following a path well-trod by Obama supporters, vaguely sinister. As the article points out, comparing Obama to Caesar when other Presidents were available as more sympathetic companions, is revealing about the administration on many levels. None of them good.