The Age of Stupidity is Over

The pontifical role of the sculptor, painter, director, musician or poet who (a) reads Leviticus to the Americans, (b) holds up a correctly positioned sociological mirror before them, or (c) like Oswald Spengler, predicts their unavoidable end – this predominantly “European” role was never principally designed to apply to the United States. Nonetheless, since Ronald Reagan’s era at the latest, a bitter, politically tinged culture war has raged there. These were the battle fronts: liberal city-slickers vs. conservative country hicks, church theologians vs. secularists, Darwinists vs. Christian fundamentalists, abortion opponents vs. “pro-choicers,” arch-conservative radio commentators vs. moderately liberal print journalists and just about every intellectual in general.

The last hippie in the USA was sighted three decades ago, but he lives on as a symbol of un-American filthiness on vulgar reactionary talk shows like Rush Limbaugh’s (audience up to 12 million) – similar to the “1968ers” here in Germany.* The Vietcong didn’t win the war, the worthless hippies lost it, at least according to all the would-be Rambos. When the asinine Sarah Palin appeared on the scene, she finally lent a political cabaret atmosphere to that culture war as evidenced by the numerous satire skits on TV comedy shows and YouTube.

If this culture war had a strategist, it had to have been George Bush’s closest advisor, Karl Rove. He mobilized an evangelical fundamentalist majority previously known as “silent” in Nixon’s era and “moral” in Ronald Reagan’s. For undecided voters in the South and the Midwest, he and his allies in the conservative media developed a worldview in which good and evil were clearly identifiable: the evil were the liberal voters in the coastal states who pushed for gay marriage and rejected the death penalty, as well as that morally depraved Hollywood crowd. The evil included “gangsta” rappers and arrogant intellectuals from Harvard and elsewhere who questioned the American right to bear arms. The good were the average Americans who lived outside the big cities, untainted by the immoral invasion of modernity and labor unions, who were saved by devout patriotism.

Obscure publishing houses profited from this national sanctimony by turning out eschatological pamphlets by the millions. America’s middle class, whose real income had grown by only 0.7 percent over the previous 30 years, found solace in this piety and voted for a president who consulted not with his “daddy, a former president, but with “a higher Father.” And that Father commanded him to go to war against Iraq.

The cultural critics of the Bush administration started out as laughable lone warriors, people like filmmaker Michael Moore and later the director Oliver Stone. Shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001, the comic author and cartoonist Art Spiegelman began satirizing the Bush administration for this newspaper. Not until several years later did a New York publisher find the courage to bring out Spiegelman’s biting satire as a book that eventually sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Only then did the rumor begin to circulate that Bush was perhaps the wrong president in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Although not decisive at the polls but notable nonetheless, the political preferences of American show business celebrities from George Clooney to Matt Damon to TV diva Oprah Winfrey played a supportive role. It was primarily because of them that African-Americans began flexing their political muscle for the first time. Noted authors like Deborah Eisenberg and her life-partner, dramatist and actor Wallace Shawn, as well as Toni Morrison supported Obama. So did author Richard Ford and the poets Paul Auster and his wife Siri Hustvedt. Whoever spoke with these people during the Bush years detected in them an almost physical revulsion against the president whose belletristic preferences remain a strongly guarded state secret, even to this day. His wife, Laura, who occasionally invited prominent poets to the White House, unceremoniously uninvited them as soon as she learned they had publicly criticized her husband. For publicity-shy Thomas Pynchon, Bush’s policy of eavesdropping on telephone conversations brought to life the plots of many of his novels dealing with government agencies grown too powerful. For environmental activists, Bush was the embodiment of a full-blown ecological disaster.

Over 300 million Americans have neither a poet laureate nor a philosopher of whom it may be said they are “the nation’s conscience.” Even world-famous linguist Noam Chomsky, whose “leftist” analysis of America’s economy still cause a stir, wouldn’t go quite that far. In any case, it’s nearly impossible to find a single author or intellectual – regardless of political leaning – willing to regard President Bush with wistfulness. Even William F. Buckley, the godfather of American neo-conservatism, distanced himself from the Iraq War shortly before his death.

The invective thrown at George W. Bush, whether on the pages of the New York Times or in the nation’s innumerable blogs, can be summed up in one sentence: If his critics are right, he was the stupidest president in America’s history. Author Philip Roth reveals the contrast between him and his successor, the Harvard graduate and law professor Barack Obama, when he calls Obama “the most intelligent president since Thomas Jefferson.” Obama’s biography “Dreams of My Father” shows him to have a highly developed sense of style. His election rhetoric, which changed with the economic crisis to resemble the sober pronouncements of an emergency room surgeon, has a classical format – something that in a country where Senators see themselves in the same light as those of ancient Rome, is highly valued.

The big coastal cities, with famous authors such as Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem, provided Obama with campaign financing and the financially active Obama team in cyberspace reportedly numbers 13 million. It’s irritating that they continue to receive donation requests from Obama headquarters and it begs the question whether they’re perhaps trying to found a new “second public” designed to compete politically with Congress. But the fact remains that since the development of the Internet, no politician has been as successful as Obama in harnessing and unifying opinion behind him. He also won the election because he had most of the young, enfranchised bloggers on his side. Commentators in Washington are already talking about the “Obama Generation.”

The fact that Obama’s election produced a political-cultural watershed will be the subject of many doctoral dissertations for years to come. Millions of Americans, whether politically passive or active, now communicate with one another exclusively via a single medium, the Internet; they represent a cultural power factor that surpasses every other medium, including television. The New York Times, in contrast, has a daily circulation of 1.5 million at best.

If the political discourse in the New York Times is representative of fully half the nation (something the editors maintain) then the editorial articles on George Bush written by former theater critic Frank Rich result in a frightening final report card for the departing president: “We like our failed presidents to be Shakespearean . . . but this president is truly a dwarf . . . he’s already been forgotten even though he’s still here . . . the enormity of his failures compared to the stature of the man is truly astounding.” For years, Paul Krugman faithfully reported the extent of Republican economic mismanagement to the American public once each week. Krugman is the man to whom a Swedish jury awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, and not because of his political beliefs. His prescient analysis of the financial crisis were truly prophetic.

The central organ of America’s liberal cultural intelligentsia, The New York Review of Books, without doubt the most sophisticated literary-critical magazine in the nation, made no secret of its rejection of the Bush government. Neither did it do so in the hopes of a new spirit in Washington during the next four or eight years of the Obama era.

“Obama plans for the long term,” wrote Elizabeth Drew in the Times, “and that’s why he’s better prepared for the office than any other commander-in-chief in the modern history of the office.” It may be that such advance laurels for the incoming president may one day drag him down like an anchor, but for the time being he’s being greeted with hymns of joy. Elizabeth Drew: “The American public has rejected the stupidity of the Bush regime by an overwhelming majority; his wars, his lies, his torture, his secret dealings, his incompetence and his thirst for power that endangered our constitutional rights . . . after the election, the American people had the feeling that they had finally been washed clean.”

In the latest edition of the New York Review, the question of whether or not legal action should be taken against those politicians and high government functionaries who were responsible for the torture of prisoners by the CIA and the military. To the dismay of many Obama voters, the incoming president has already decided against it. The country has more pressing problems, he says. Even if it doesn’t come to actual legal proceedings, the American publishing industry will be dominated during the coming years with investigative research reports in which the political activities, the wheeling and dealing and the stupid decisions of the Bush-Cheney team take center stage. An autobiography of George Bush doesn’t appear to be in the making; instead, his wife, Laura, has announced that she is writing her memoirs. The author’s early negotiations with New York publishing houses left several of them hopelessly perplexed. A spokesman for New Yorker magazine said, “She’s exactly like her husband.” What did he expect? Hillary Clinton?

America’s cultural war isn’t over yet by a long shot, but a conservative constant in the debate, namely the ideologically coded leftovers of racism, have lost political effectiveness with Obama’s election. America’s voters have made their decision; the American Majority has replaced the “Moral Majority” and that’s of far greater historical importance than the victory of one political party over another.

*The “1968ers” (also called the “68ers”) is a general term for that generation of Germans, mainly students during that era, who engaged in social and political protest throughout Europe.