hustings speech in 1972.

Not a few commentators were even darker in their assessment, concluding that the speech was a muddle wrapped in mendacity inside a cipher. It is to that last group that my own brief commentary belongs. An erudite reader, responding to my judgment that it was “one of the worst speeches in modern memory,”  sent along a bit of tonic abuse from H.L. Mencken on Warren G. Harding’s perfromance as a speaker: “It reminds me,” wrote Mencken,

“of a string of wet sponges, it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of a dark abysm (I was about to write abcess!) of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble, it is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.”

I thought it worth sharing Mencken’s little detonation with you. I have a feeling it will come in handy in the months ahead.

What do we take away from President Obama’s speech about the Iraq War and the U.S. economy last night? It was — at least, it was intended to be — a major statement.  A few days ago, the president had  announced that the United States would forthwith be withdrawing its combat troops from Iraq. Over the last few months, it has become ever clear to the American people that the president’s vaunted “stimulus” plan has failed to stimulate anything other than continued high unemployment and staggering deficits. Here was his chance to make his case on prime time.  How did he do?

I thought it one of the worst speeches in modern memory. Not only was it long on empty boilerplate, it was scrubbed clean of anything memorable or forthright. It also flirted shamelessly with incoherence. You can find the text of the whole speech here. I’d like to concentrate on the opening few paragraphs and add a few words about the denouement, such as it was, of the performance.  “Tonight,” the president began, “I’d like to talk to you about the end of our combat mission in Iraq, the ongoing security challenges we face, and the need to rebuild our nation here at home.” OK. Three items: the war, security threats, the dismal economic situation here in the U.S. Then what?

I know this historic moment comes at a time of great uncertainty for many Americans. We have now been through nearly a decade of war. We have endured a long and painful recession. And sometimes in the midst of these storms, the future that we are trying to build for our nation – a future of lasting peace and long-term prosperity may seem beyond our reach.

But this milestone should serve as a reminder to all Americans that the future is ours to shape if we move forward with confidence and commitment. It should also serve as a message to the world that the United States of America intends to sustain and strengthen our leadership in this young century.

Notice the gap or chasm between these two paragraphs: “a future of lasting peace and long-term prosperity” that “may seem beyond our reach” followed by  . . . what? A “milestone”? What milestone? “A future of lasting peace,” etc. that may seem “beyond our reach”? Or was it the “storms” of the Iraq war and economic stagnation? Are they the “milestone”? Why, whatever it is, should that marker remind us (“all Americans”!) of anything, let alone that “the future is ours to shape if we move forward with confidence and commitment”? Is that really any better than Roderick Spode’s assurance (in The Code of the Woosters, I think) that “Nothing stands between us and our victory except defeat! Tomorrow is a new day! The future lies ahead!”

Objection one: “Haven’t they done good work?” Occasionally.  Not very often, really. I thought (and said publicly) that Dana Gioia did excellent work at the NEA. But usually both endowments, and especially the arts endowment, have simply certified and promulgated the establishment, i.e., the left liberal, agenda emanating from Washington.  Besides, why should the federal government get involved with the arts and the humanities anyway?  That is the critical question.  The answer is: it shouldn’t. Would you like a museum/opera house/concert hall in your town?  Save up the money and go ahead and build it.  Why should the taxpayers foot the bill?

Objection two: Europe!  The state pays for culture in Europe. Aren’t Americans being philistines by not involving the state in culture?

Oh? Have you taken a look a Europe and its state-supported culture recently?  Really, this objection is almost too embarrassing to answer. What makes you think that state involvement of culture leads to anything other than the growth of the state and its insinuation into areas of life they have no business being in? Take your time.

Objection three: “But the budgets of those agencies are so small, less than $200 million each. Nancy Pelosi eats that for lunch.”  True, but you have to start somewhere. A journey of a thousand miles, etc., etc. Besides, getting rid of the Endowments would send a salutary, if largely symbolic, message to deans, arts administrators, and other parasitic busybodies.  It would also get the government  out of the embarrassing business of supporting “cutting-edge,” i.e., meretricious, art and “research.” Yes, on balance, I think dispensing with the Endowments would be a good thing all around.

“Head of Behaviour Change,” Ministry of Transport, Bicycle Division. It would be funny if it were not Orwellian. It is, my friend observed, “very 21st Century Britain.”

Now, you don’t nail up an open-letter, 39-Articles question like that — savor the force of the  word “really” — unless you intend to pose what Latinists call a “num” question, i.e., a question that expects the answer “no.” “Is Johnny really such a bad person/paragon of virtue/excellent tennis player/etc.” Answer: “No, he isn’t.”

So it was only to be expected that Ron argues that the problem for the West is not Islam, not really.  He also argues — and here we get the “message” part of his title — that conservatives, or at least some conservatives, don’t understand that. They, mistaken souls, think that Islam is the enemy. Ron’s post is an effort to show them the error of their ways.

By “them” I include myself, since I —  along with Andrew McCarthy, David Horowitz, and a few others —  are put forward  as exemplary offenders, folks who go about “demonizing Islam” and hence impede genuine understanding of the problem and hence progress at battling terrorism.

I won’t try to compete with Ron in length.  But since I believe there is some rhetorical slippage in Ron’s argument  — he begins by saying one sort of thing, illustrates it with quite a different sort of thing, then concludes with a third sort of thing —  I thought I should respond.

The first movement in Ron’s argument is that conservatives like me believe that Islam itself is the problem.  There is an important sense in which this is true.  See, for example, the piece I wrote called “Islam vs. the West: What you Need to Know.” In that column I cite, with approval, a piece  by Andy McCarthy warning that “Islam is not merely a religious doctrine, but a comprehensive socio-economic and political system” whose tenets are fundamentally, essentially, inextricably at odds with Western, liberal, democratic, secular society. In another column,  I elaborate on this point:

“It is part of the genius of the West — part of what distinguishes the West from the rest — that it has, almost from the beginning, tempered the binding claims of religion by acknowledging the legitimacy of secular institutions. This acknowledgment is not only a political decision, it is an existential dispensation, clearing a space for freedom and the claims of individual liberty. Islam, in principle and as a matter of historical fact, refuses to acknowledge any separate place for civil society or the exercise of individual liberty. Its byword is not ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’ but rather submission of everything to the will of Allah. ‘Like the Communist Party in its Leninist construction,’ [the philosopher Roger] Scruton observes, ‘Islam aims to control the state without being a subject of the state.’ If you want to know what that looks like in practice, contemplate the behavior of the Taliban, the Iranian Mullahs, or the followers of al Qaeda and its offshoots.”

Bottom line: Ron is  correct that I believe Islam, not just “radical Islam,” is the problem. It’s a position, incidentally, that has  a long and distinguished  pedigree.  For example, in his book Judgments on History and Historians,  Jacob Burckhardt,  observed that

“All religions are exclusive, but Islam is quite notably so, and immediately it developed into a state which seemed to be all of a piece with the religion. The Koran is its spiritual and secular book of law. Its statutes embrace all areas of life…and remain set and rigid; the very narrow Arab mind imposes this nature on many nationalities and thus remolds them for all time (a profound, extensive spiritual bondage!) This is the power of Islam in itself. At the same time, the form of the world empire as well as of the states gradually detaching themselves from it cannot be anything but a despotic monarchy. The very reason and excuse for existence, the holy war, and the possible world conquest, do not brook any other form.

The strongest proof of real, extremely despotic power in Islam is the fact that it has been able to invalidate, in such large measure, the entire history (customs, religion, previous way of looking at things, earlier imagination) of the peoples converted to it.”

Byron York, reporting on this gratifying development in the Washington Examiner, also has some lovely quotations from Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post (“I … would love to hear from former President Bush on this issue”) and former New Republic editor Peter Beinart (“I pine for George W. Bush”).

Now it’s true that President Bush muddied the waters when he proclaimed, a few days after 9/11, that Islam means “peace.” In fact, the word Islam means “submission,” as in submission to the will of Allah, given to a grateful mankind through the teachings of a Dark Ages warrior, mystic, and polygamist, and codified  in the stern imperatives of Islamic law, a.k.a. Shariah. Still, while Bush said “Islam is peace” and hosted, as did Bill Clinton, iftar dinners at the White House, his actions clearly showed that he understood that the battle against terrorism was much broader than a battle against al-Qaeda.

My own view, which I’ve stated in this space before, is that Islam is fundamentally incompatible with “foundational Western values like free speech, the separation of church and state, and equality under the law. Such things are not simply missing from Islam: they are positively repudiated by Islam.”

In the September issue of The New Criterion (out soon at www.newcriterion.com), I weigh in on the controversy over Ground Zero mosque, noting that, although it may soon recede from the headlines, it raises some very large issues concerning tolerance, the relation of rights to tolerable behavior, and the compatibility of Islam with liberal democracy. It also, as Andrew C. McCarthy noted at NRO, “powerfully demonstrates” the growing divide between the American people and the progressive ruling class.”   One side endeavors to defeat the enemies of freedom and tolerance. The other seeks to accommodate them, believing, McCarthy observes, that “they are moving us toward a better, smarter policy that will reduce the threat by making our enemies like us better.”

In the last few months, however, I think I have experienced some of that fervor that makes makes converts such an amusing if often exasperating spectacle for the rest of us.  My minor metanoia regarded technology, not ontology.  For years I had been a stalwart partisan of the PC. I regarded the whole world of Apple computers with disdain.  Looking back on it now, I see that the first step was the irretrievable one: I traded in my Blackberry for an iPhone.  From there, it was but a short step to an iMac, then a MacBook Pro,  Apple TV and, of course,  an iPad.

I always regarded the Kindle reading device as an expensive paperweight.  My office at Encounter Books owns one but no one actually uses it.  We’ve downloaded a few books just to see if they exist — they do — but we’ve generally been disappointed  by how they look.

Reading books on the iPad is something else again. Aesthetically, typographically, there is still some way to go — the fact that (as far as I know)  you cannot specify which fonts a given book will display is a big liability in my view.  But leaving that to one side, books look terrific in iBooks, the iPad reader of choice.  (But Kindle users do not despair: the books you bought from  Amazon look great on the Kindle app for the iPad.) Which brings me to the denouement of this little tale:  as of just a week or two ago, a whole suite of Encounter Books are available for the iPad through iBooks (and Kindle).  Included in the the first big batch of titles is my book The Rape of the Masters. Any readers interested in “how politics sabotages art”?  Of course there are!  Now you can download and read it on your iPad.  Three cheers for technology!

• Jobless Claims Jump to 6-Mo High

• Market Signals Fears on Economy

• Big Trade Gap Sign of Weak Growth

• Analysts Predict Market Malaise

A bit further down the page there is a section headed “President Obama.” Under that rubric we find:

• Obama: Worst of Recession is Over

• Could Meet With Iran President

• Approval Falls to New Danger Zone

• Weary Aides Head for Exit

Which set is right? Yesterday in this space, reflecting on Obama’s  enthusiastic commendation of Ramadan and all things Muslim, I wrote that Obama is historically unprecedented as an American President. What I had in mind was his apparent equivocation about the nation he was elected to lead. As many commentators have observed, Obama is a “post-national” or “trans-national” political figure. In this, he mirrors the left-liberal, “progressive” consensus the world over—well, in Europe and the North America, which pretty much defines the habitat of that consensus. Somehow, the soil is quite right for it elsewhere: you might get a hard-edged revolutionary leftism in South America or Southeast Asia, but those are inhospitable climes for the elite, politically correct progressivism that has embraced the post- or trans-national solution to the problems of governance.

The problem (well, one of many problems) with having a post- or trans-national President is that America remains (if I may so put it) a pre-post-national country.  Outside the ivy-bowered halls of academia, the newsrooms of the so-called “mainstream media,” and the chambers of left-leaning politicians, people in America are, by and large, national not post-national in their patriotic affiliation. (What would it mean, by the way, to be a “post-national patriot”? “Patriot” derives from patrios, of or relating to one’s fatherland, i.e.,  a particular place. Here, as elsewhere, there is a deep wisdom in etymology.) In other words, most Americans are proud of their country.  They like it that America is rich, powerful, and generous. (Furthermore, I suspect, for most people,  pleasure in the contemplation of their country proceeds more or less in that order.)

Barack Obama is not like most Americans, however.  He eschews — he positively frowns upon — talk of national “exceptionalism,” American or any other variety (but especially American or British pretensions to exceptional status). He never misses an opportunity to apologize for America, most recently, I believe, on August 6 when he dispatched a delegation to Japan to “apologize” for  dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In other words, he apologized for saving a few million Japanese lives, hundreds of thousands of American lives, and ending the war in August 1945 instead of many months later.

The platitude:

“Ramadan is a time when Muslims around the world reflect upon the wisdom and guidance that comes with faith, and the responsibility that human beings have to one another, and to God.”

The mendacity:

“These rituals [fasting and so on] remind us of the principles that we hold in common, and Islam’s role in advancing justice, progress, tolerance, and the dignity of all human beings.   Ramadan is a celebration of a faith known for great diversity and racial equality.  And here in the United States, Ramadan is a reminder that Islam has always been part of America and that American Muslims have made extraordinary contributions to our country.”

What role has Islam paid in advancing justice?  None.  What role has it played in advancing progress, whether you understand the word in a technological or a political sense? None.  What role has it played in advancing tolerance?  Ask Daniel Pearl. “A faith known for diversity and racial equality”: absolute rubbish.  And as for the the idea that “American Muslims have made extraordinary contributions to our country,” name one.

Reading this preposterous statement, mulling over the administration’s position regarding the proposed mosque at Ground Zero — a mosque at Ground Zero! — thinking about the President’s obsequiousness to a Saudi prince, his exclusion of such words as “jihad” and “Islamofascism” from the library of permissible words, I wonder exactly where his loyalty lies.  Not for the first time over the last 18 months or so, I  ask myself: “So here’s President Obama: what, exactly, is he President of.”

“The United States, silly,” you say.

Well, that’s what it says at www.whitehouse.gov.  But is he really the President of the Untied States?  I am not, I hasten to add, suggesting that he wan’t born here or anything like that. No I am just thinking about that little word “of.” It’s a complicated semantic package, isn’t it? Look it up and ponder the page of nuanced definitions all of which suggest some for of union, contiguity, possession, adhesion, filiation.

But is Barack Hussein Obama President of the United States in any of those senses? Again, I don’t dispute his title.  I just wonder what, in his case, it means.

It is, I submit, a question that comes up in his case in the case of Obama in a way that is historically unprecedented.  America has had good presidents and bad presidents, popular presidents and unpopular presidents, honorable presidents and dishonorable presidents, competent presidents and Jimmy Carter. Never before, I believe, have we had a president whose tenure is surrounded by this nimbus of disaffection. You might have thought Jimmy Carter was a sanctimonious nincompoop. You never doubted that he was an American, by which I mean not just that he was a citizen but that his essential identification was with this country.

Can the same be said of Obama? Can it?