The new messiah

You’ve probably already seen the widely quoted passage about Obama by Ezra Klein at the American Prospect:

Obama’s finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don’t even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair.

What Klein is suggesting is that unlike Jesus Christ, the Word made Flesh, who perfectly joins the human nature and the divine nature, the flesh and the spirit, Barack Obama is pure spirit, and we, in responding to his call, become pure spirit ourselves, without bodies, without race.

While I’m accustomed to the messianism of the American left, I didn’t expect to see them adopt the ancient Christian heresy of Monophysitism, the belief that Christ did not have two natures, but only one. According to Wikipedia, Monophysitism holds “that the human nature of Christ was essentially obliterated by the Divine, ‘dissolved like a drop of honey in the sea’, and therefore Christ only had the one (mono) nature, that of divinity.”

What it comes down to is that, in order to eliminate racial differences, which for the left represent the number one problem with human existence, we must transcend our humanity altogether. The next thing you know, Ezra Klein will be talking about beaming us up to space ships.

But of course the neocons, with their belief that America was never a concrete nation and people (the flesh) but only a universalist idea (the spirit), are not that far from Klein.

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Howard Sutherland writes:

Pretty good commentary on what Obama is all about, of a sort that probably would never make it onto a major American paper’s site. The first comment is on point, I think—especially his penultimate paragraph. Sad, though, that so many people on our side seem unable to spell, or at least proofread.

Jonathan E. writes:

Obama says with respect to his campaign that American voters, “want to bring about the fundamental change in how our politics works.”

You’ve mentioned his New Age mumbo-jumbo. I ask myself how is voting for Obama going to bring about “fundamental change?” There is nothing fundamentally different about his policies—they are standard left-liberal, within the traditional context of the Democratic Party. He has not proposed ANYTHING fundamentally different than any other Democrat (in fact Hillary had him beat to the health-care issue a decade ago).

So what is fundamentally different?

The obvious but unstated answer to that question is race. That is what is fundamentally different between him and Hillary Clinton, Christopher Dodd, Joe Biden, John Edwards, etc. None of Obama’s policies are “fundamentally” unique or different or original. He is running on the pretext of race just as Hillary is basing her campaign on “experience.”

He states in more subtle terms what his wife is asserting in a loud, strident voice. In some respects this is a “good cop, bad cop” routine being foisted on the American public.

If we had Muslim suppers at the White House with Dubya, just wait for what Michelle Obama will host!

Paul K. writes:

I listened to a little NPR in the car and they had two black women commentators on who collectively call themselves “Frangelina.” The host asked them if they thought that Obama’s success in two overwhelmingly white states shows that there’s a new era in race relations in America. “I don’t know,” said Frangelina, “we still can’t get a cab in New York.”

“And that’s in the most heterogeneous city in America,” clucked the host.

Doesn’t that underscore the fact that blacks are the most popular among people who are exposed to them the least?

LA replies:

To me the main point brought out by their comment is that if Obama becomes president, the racial problems of blacks are not going to go away. The liberals’ belief in some new advent is sheer fantasy. Yes, they will have the giddy excitement of having a nonwhite as president. But the black problem will continue as before, along with the endless agonizing over the black problem, and the endless search for solutions to the black problem, and the endless blaming of society for the black problem.

So here’s a question to be posed to Obama supporters:

“Black high school seniors are three or four grade levels behind whites in basic skills. Blacks commit far more crime per capita than whites, and are vastly more violent than other groups. 70 percent of blacks are born to unmarried mothers. Whites are afraid of black violence, and many blacks have a deep resentment of whites. These problems obsess society. Liberals blame the persistence of these problems on society. Can you tell me how the election of Obama will end any of these problems? If you cannot, what is your basis for thinking that his election would start a new age of race relations in America? ”

LA writes:

In another entry, a reader offers an answer to the question raised in this entry, whether the racial problems of blacks are ever going to go away.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 09, 2008 12:29 PM | Send