Divinity, Memory, Theology, the Holocaust and God's Very Existence

The Last Witness

Joseph Polak — July 2012, Commentary

Imagine it: the end of an era. The last person able to testify to all that transpired, to all that befell us, the last person who could affirm that we indeed saw what we saw, is gone. Of all the rememberers, I alone am left to sit here, knowing that my time will also come. And then, what becomes of the tale?

I am limited in what I remember; I was not yet three when the war ended. What value is there in the few horrific scenes I can conjure? The historical record is not enriched by them. My memory has become a datum, a relic. Valid, but inessential.

While they still lived, I stood among the other survivors, seasoned, wizened men and women who were perpetually old, prematurely gaunt. Their bodies reflected those days. The deep shadows of what they had once taken in never left them.

They would glance at me in passing, surveying my inconsequentiality, often with patience, often without. I was a fly. “Do you really know, child,” they would ask, “do you really know what it is to have your parents shot before your eyes, do you really know what it is to have your grandparents thrown out of the upstairs window during a liquidation?”

Did I know? I would put my hands in my pockets and shrug, looking, in those early days, for a cigarette. Did I know? The question was an accusation. You do not understand, they were saying, you were too young to make sense of it. The carnage and death, the murder by fever and by hunger—all of which I witnessed, some of which I experienced—were not valid to them because I could not have made sense of such experiences as they occurred. My testimony was that of a blind man. I heard the noises, put it all together later; not acceptable in a court of law, not sufficiently real.

“You say you were there,” they argued. “But you really weren’t.”

Then they would appear astonished at the pain that came over my face from such invalidation and would hastily take pity.

“Bist geven a yingeleh,” they would say. It’s not your fault, you were just a kid. Children, they meant, are frivolous; let’s not take their experiences seriously.

They are all gone now. Their hoary heads and Polish teeth have crossed the great divide, and I alone, I alone am left to tell the tale. I’m a bit of a fake, don’t you think? A bit of a liar, no?

When those memories I did possess would beckon, I trembled. Sleepless nights would become my lot, filled with chills and despair. They were without solace, without consolation. I would not allow love. Love promised that what little memory I did have would be submerged. Love meant the cesspool that was Bergen-Belsen would disappear.

When I was 10 years old, my father murdered, my mother married a man in Montreal who forbade mention of the Holocaust. Shall we let it disappear, I wondered? And if we did, would I continue being? I lived with him but did not take up with him.

I did not, could not, remember what brought on my nocturnal fits of madness; there were no visual scenes in my imagination when primordial terrors wracked my body. I could not remember why I would periodically get mammoth rheumatic tremors that seized me in the darkness and in the light. I did not remember why Mother’s moans of terror shuddered within me decades after she died. I knew that I was afraid of her, not for what she had been but for what she had become. I knew that I did not have, did not want to have, the toughness in her that allowed her to survive. Yet did it enter me, yet does it overtake me. It turns people away when they sense it; I am not easy to love.

For all that, I did not visit my past, really, never gave it a glance, until I turned 50. Slowly I stared at it, slowly, with index cards, I put it into chronological order: the Hague, Westerbork, Bergen-Belsen, the Hague.

Soon after the end of the Holocaust, in Montreal, I fell in with other child survivors. They made up fully a third of my seventh-grade class. We were silent about our past. When the topic came up, we would become restless and look about anxiously for distraction. We did not want to be witnesses; we just wanted to be like everyone else. Eventually we each became an anti-witness. We didn’t want to hear about it, talk about it; we pretended that the ordeal happened to others, to those who did have numbers on their arms. Perhaps we understood that the mature survivors constituted the most humiliated group of people on earth, and we wanted no part of their residual shame.

Mother died when I turned 40. Freddie, a tad older than I, came to sit with me at her shivah.

“Do you remember, Joseph,” he said, “do you remember how we used to play hide-and-seek around the corpses in Bergen-Belsen?”

I did not remember, but it was this question, coming from him, that allowed me to accept myself as a survivor. And it has taken nearly three decades following that shivah for me to have learned that what my mind does not remember, my body does, and so does my soul.

Hesitantly I take my place among the survivors. I get into the line at the gates of the death camps, and I am there, more in death than in life.

And so I sometimes entertain this fantasy that, because of my sheer youth during those years, I am the Last Witness. The Holocaust will pass out of experience and into history. There will be no one left to say “and then they took my parents away and I never saw them again,” or “Moishalleh died in my arms; he had not eaten anything in two weeks and his nine-year-old frame could not take it any more,” or “my high school teacher examined all the boys in the class, and all the circumcised ones were expelled.”

I carry this fear that when I disappear, so will the last memories of that great darkness, so will the fecal stench that attended the typhus, so will the ravages of the outdoors that attended the roll calls, and the stiffness, everywhere, of the corpses. And in the absence of such primary memories, how long will it take for a civilized country again to allow a leader into office who harbors evil beliefs and insidious desires? And how long until the physicians and lawyers and judges and philosophers and writers and musicians and composers and conductors join his cause?

I wonder: If I indeed turn out to be the Last Witness, will my death mark the beginning of the Great Forgetting?

At such moments, fortunately, I have also come to realize the arrogance of such questions, and to understand that such arrogance is where idolatry and atheism begin.

For I will not be the Last Witness; the last Witness will be the greatest, the most humiliated Witness of all. I speak of course, of G-d Himself. He Who is everywhere had to have been there, too. He had to have been present, and He had to have witnessed His reputation as redeemer and savior of Israel sink into the mud of Treblinka and Belzec.

“What will the Egyptians say?” Moses asks when G-d threatens to destroy Israel after they worship the Golden Calf. “Do you want them to say that You took the Jews out of Egypt only so that You might destroy them Yourself when they reached the desert?”

The argument worked; He was averse to being misconstrued.

There is a scene in the great Rolf Hochhuth play The Deputy in which a priest asks the character Hochhuth, based on Josef Mengele, something along the line of, “Have you no fear of divine retribution? Do you not believe that G-d will call you to account for this?”

And Mengele is made to answer: “You have no idea, no idea, how I wish with all my heart that He strike me down, that He slay me every time I send a child to the gas. But He doesn’t.”

No one came out of the Holocaust looking worse than G-d. He is compassionate, the theologians used to say! He hates evil, they claimed! Omnipotent, they said! Caring for His chosen people, the liturgy reads: “Ha-oneh le`amo yisrael be-et shavom elav” (“He Who answers the prayer of His people whenever they turn to Him”). Not this time, not six million times.

Yet although He did not save six million of His people, in an extraordinary reversal of roles and of history, His people, the ones who did survive, saved Him.

The rabbis who escaped the infernos spent scant time contemplating, much less bemoaning what the philosopher Martin Buber has called the eclipse of G-d.

“With ten trials was Abraham tested,” the Mishnah recalls, and he passed them all. Why didn’t Abraham ask G-d all those moral questions about his final trial, the binding of Isaac? “Didn’t you just promise me a chapter ago that my seed will come through Isaac? What am I now supposed to tell people about divine commitments? Is Isaac guilty of something that merits the death penalty? With respect to Isaac, shall the Judge of all the earth not do justice?” Abraham, who clearly knows such questions, does not ask them. When you are in love, as Abraham was with G-d, your love sabotages all such inquiries. Rashi, the great medieval teacher and exegete, says it most clearly: “Lo hirher ahar midotav merov ahavato” (“Because of his great love for G-d, Abraham was not interested in G-d’s intentions and agendas”).

The rabbi of Zanz-Klausenberg, who came out of the camps shaven and shrunk, raged for years about his Holocaust experiences, yet skipped nary a beat in his loving worship of his creator, and embarked almost at once on a successful campaign to build a hospital. The rabbis of Bobov, Ungvar, and Satmar created housing for the poor and provided food programs for the infirm. Like the rabbi of Modzhits, another survivor, who composed and sang his way through the 1950s and 1960s, they built houses of worship, ritual baths, and educational institutions in numbers unmatched ever in Jewish history.

The mighty theological questions emerging from that muddy darkness, they found, merely led back to the gates of Auschwitz, and they chose not to go back there. Never would they be humiliated again, and never again would they permit G-d such humiliation.

And they had confidence that He Who commands the dawn to follow the night will represent them fairly when the last witness is gone, that He Himself will report on the heroism of the victims and on how, in their last moments, they sanctified His name.

The Last Witness will join the legions of victims in the celestial palace that is touted as the place where Elijah, in G-d’s presence, will provide the mighty answers—including one that deals with the great absence while one-and-a-half million Jewish children were being murdered.

Two lines will form in heaven, each of them silent. No one will be asking Elijah a thing.

The first line, with Dostoevsky as its guide, might say: “Elijah, tell G-d that we really have no interest in post-facto explanations about His great absence; it’s just too late for explanations, too much injustice, too much cruelty has been allowed to happen. The notion of an adequate answer to such horror is itself repulsive.”

The second line, forming the dialectic, would have Abraham as its guide. It might assert, “It was never about us, Elijah; we never sought, and still don’t need, explanations. It was always about G-d. We just couldn’t bear His vast humiliation, and we did what we could to mitigate it. Blessed be His name for ever and ever.”

And, were I the Last Witness, I would rage against both camps and ask how dare they remain silent, what self-absorbed luxury were they indulging, anyway, when the memory of that time, of those children, is in danger of dissipating?

“Where is G-d?” I would thunder at Elijah.“Is He out there reciting the names of the camps? Belsen, Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibor? Is He reading the names of the victims?” I would pound the tables with both hands. “Is He weeping?”

About the Author

Joseph Polak is Hillel Rabbi and University Chaplain at Boston University. He is completing a memoir on the first 10 years of his life, which include surviving both the Holocaust and its aftermath.

 

God, the Holocaust, and Divine Memory

November 2012

 

To the Editor:

I read with aroused interest Rabbi Joseph Polak’s “The Last Witness” [July/August]. What got my attention was Polak’s imagining briefly the unanswerable question in relation to the Holocaust. As he uniquely cries it out:

“Where is G-d?…Is He out there reciting the names of the camps? Belsen, Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibor? Is He reading the names of the victims?…Is He weeping?”

These questions are meant to rebuke two opposing assertions put to Elijah as to the “great absence while one-and-a-half million Jewish children were being murdered.” The first imagined assertion is Dostoevskian, that there can be no answer to, or explanation of, such transcendent injustice and cruelty. God should stay silent. The second, opposite, assertion is Abrahamic, that man cannot question God, cannot demand explanations and answers of such awesome divinity.

The rebuke is rageful. How dare anyone remain silent? What self-indulgence allows such silence?

Polak’s questions admit of no answer. They ask what kind of a God would allow such suffering and killing? Who is this God? Wherefore His “great absence”? What penance does He do? Polak “would pound the tables with both hands.” His God must be held to account. Polak is engaged in an imagined confrontation with his creator, from whom he demands some action of remembrance, contrition, and atonement.

I, a non-believer, take a different view. I ask no such questions (of whom, after all?). I am interested in Polak’s questions insofar as they reveal to me the absurdity of belief and faith in light of the overwhelming evil of the Holocaust (in which an uncle and cousin of mine were killed, and during which another cousin of mine suffered but survived the depredations of the concentration camp).

I get no succor or relief from being able to make my God human and contend ferociously with Him. It is a wasted effort. For its presupposition is that there is some divinity worthy of such contention, which concedes reification of a notional God.

If there ever were an occasion that informs Jews that God is not great, that belief and faith in Him are preposterous, and that by them we diminish ourselves and the meaning of the Holocaust, then the Holocaust itself must be that occasion. 

Itzik Basman
Toronto, Ontario

_____________ 

To the Editor:

Joseph Polak’s heartfelt and stirring article resonates within me. Like him, I was born in the Hague, Holland. Unlike him, I survived in hiding, not in Bergen-Belsen. My memory was questioned by adults, my suffering diminished by the assumption of adults that the madness had not touched we youngsters: “You were only a child.”

Joseph and his friend played hide-and-seek around the corpses in Bergen-Belsen. I did not play at all. We children who grew up overnight, did not know play. We were co-operative with our hiders, remained silent unless bidden to talk, and we did not cry.

It appears we two little Dutch boys, Joseph Polak and I, now aged 70 and 72 respectively, are indeed fated to be among the last Shoah survivor witnesses, along with G-d. But can we trust Him to be a reliable witness?

Robert Krell
Vancouver, British Columbia

_____________ 

Joseph Polak writes:

I am struck by how well Mr. Basman read my article, and am grateful for the frankness with which he presents his non-belief. And, if I understand him correctly, he is proposing a kind of Occam’s razor in Holocaust theology: It takes fewer assumptions from the experience of the Holocaust to conclude that there is no G-d than it takes to conclude that there still is one.

Alas, were Mr. Occam alive, I think he would take issue with Mr. Basman. The Holocaust does not pose a single challenge to G-d as Creator, nor to the integrity of His recorded revelation, nor—come to think of it—to most of the classical philosophical proofs that Anselm and Descartes proposed. It does raise questions about our understanding of His role in history—perhaps because we got this wrong in the first place, or perhaps because without the advantage of old-fashioned prophetic revelation, it is impossible to make sense of this role. However, let me assure Mr. Basman that Jews who observe the Sabbath or immerse themselves in the study of the tradition do not seem to feel that they are alone. Nor do they feel that they are deluding themselves.

My article is not about G-d’s existence but instead about divine memory: It is a sort of Midrash on the 2,000-year-old High Holiday liturgy, which claims ve-en shikcha lifnei kisei kevodecho (“there is no forgetting before Your glorious Throne”). More than us, it is G-d Who will have to live with the memory of the Holocaust. What is He doing with this memory?

To my dear friend Robert Krell, the psychiatrist who has dedicated his life to helping child survivors of the Holocaust maneuver their way out of the horror of their memories, my answer is not much different. If G-d can forget nothing—in some ways, that’s terrible. So what is the best way for Him to deal with the Holocaust? Repress it? I think He will be more reliable on keeping the message alive than Dr. Krell gives Him credit for! Or, as I say in the article, I certainly hope so.

(today) Dear Rabbi Polak:

I just today discovered the publication of my letter in November 2012 Commentary concerning your cri de coeur essay, The Last Witness, itself appearing in the July/August 2012 edition of the magazine. I also noted your gracious but respectfully dissenting response, which I very much appreciated.

I’ll hope you don’t mind a pretty brief, direct response rather than engaging the labyrinthine process of writing back via Commentary.

I wonder whether, respectfully, if I’m comprehending your meaning, you’ve accurately characterized my essential point:

... And, if I understand him correctly, he is proposing a kind of Occam’s razor in Holocaust theology: It takes fewer assumptions from the experience of the Holocaust to conclude that there is no G-d than it takes to conclude that there still is one...(my bolding emphasis)

The problem with this characterization, as I read it, is that it locates what I’m saying within the framework, and upon the premises, of Holocaust theology, and that you say I say it simplifies matters considerably—hence the razor, less assumptions—to conclude from the experience of the Holocaust that there is no God rather than that there is one. But I do not come to my nonbelief from the experience of the Holocaust. The formulation that I do puts my nonbelieving cart before my nonbelieving horse.

Rather, I come to my nonbelief by all the intellectual, emotional and experiential means at my disposal over the course of my reading, thinking, academic, writing and lived life. My idea of a “Godless Holocaust” comes from all of that, not the other way around. So for me there is no Occam’s razor that I bring to the Holocaust theology; for me there ought be no theology-- the inquiry into the existence and nature of the divine and its relation to, and influence on, all things—in relation to the Holocaust or to anything else.

One other point—and I mean not to engage in a debate about whether God exists: you say, “My article is not about G-d’s existence but instead about divine memory...” In my field of meagre competence, the law, and the litigated law at that, and from the little I know about formal logic, what you say is a proper example of begging the question, as well as begging the subsidiary question.

The question begged is God’s existence, that, again, only respectfully, not to be o’erleaped by “a sort of Midrash” on divine memory, which presupposes divinity,

The subsidiary question begged, to my mind, indeed perhaps a matter for Holocaust theology as well as other modes of thought and inquiry, is, exactly, the resolution of the awful, terrible tension between belief and faith on one scale and God’s existence on the other. Enragedly pounding the table with both hands, ferociously contending with Him, heartbreakingly asking “Where is G-d” seem to me the wrong responses and the wrong question. The question should be, I argue, foundational not presuppositional. How can there be a God who can visit such incomprehensible, underserved smiting on His Chosen people? How can I, by any means issuing from my mind and heart, reconcile my belief and faith with the experience of the Holocaust?

 

 

Some of Wieseltier On Sandy: The Self Aggrandizement Of Suffering

Eyewitness Sandy: Reflections on a Disaster

Washington Diarist.

• Leon Wieseltier
• November 16, 2012 | 12:00 am

Mario Tama/Getty Images News/Getty Images

A PERSON IN PAIN is a pariah. Misfortune always strikes twice: there is the calamity itself, and there is the marginalization that comes in the aftermath of the calamity, as the rest of society, all the lucky people who were untouched by the flood or the fire, the war or the famine, continue to live according to the customs of the normal world, and are disinclined to have the satisfactions of normality complicated or disrupted by the adjacent misery. They are not mean or selfish. They are merely creatures of their mild experience. They have no natural understanding of its opposite, of the terrible things that typically happen to other people. They are not indifferent, they are ignorant; and when the ignorance ends, when the news gets out that there are people in need of help, they sometimes help. But the ones to whom the terrible things have happened, the wounded ones, are hardly ignorant of the life from which they have been expelled: after all, it was just yesterday. They know the before and they know the after. The world has not stopped—only their world has stopped; and in their fear and their impotence they wait, wondering when they will be re-attached to the otherwise persisting world. Its proximity reassures them and it tortures them. They may note ruefully the expansion of their own understanding: so this is what the affliction is like, the one they heard about before they were themselves afflicted. Adversity enlarges consciousness, though the benefit in awareness does not come with heat and light and food and water, and man does not live by consciousness alone. As a taxi brought me from Kennedy through Manhattan to Brooklyn, a few days after Hurricane Sandy attacked the city, I witnessed two New Yorks: one in light, one in darkness. They were blocks away from each other, and universes. The lifelessness of those streets was shocking, but there was worse to come. One occupies only one’s own position, I thought, and so one must correct for the exclusiveness of that position, for the solipsism of situatedness. Such a correction can be achieved only by the imagination, without which sympathy is provincial, a prisoner of circumstances. It is fine for morality to appeal to memory (“for you were once a slave in Egypt”), but we must prepare ourselves to grasp also enormities that we have never endured. If we do not practice the imagination of suffering, the wretched will truly be alone.

FOR MY FAMILY, the imagination of at least one variety of suffering will no longer be necessary. We now have memory as a foundation for compassion: memory, and a fema number. This time the other people to whom terrible things typically happen included us. In Manhattan Beach, a halcyon archipelago of bourgeois contentment, the waters of the bay to the north and the sea to the south rose angrily and, like armies of pillaging invaders, met to destroy. The flooding was vicious. The waters climbed six feet, eight feet, ten feet. They smashed in doors and knocked down walls. Brick and cement crumbled before them. As the waters began to attack our mother’s house, my sister phoned me, and I do not believe I will ever shake the sound of her terror. Our impossibly frail mother was upstairs, sweetly oblivious to the danger. The SUV was underwater and carried off into the garden. The phones were dead, except for the antiquated land line. The power went out. The live wires brought low by the wind started sparking, which threatened to ignite the fuel in the floodwater from the bay’s broken boats. As the waters began to recede—they came to kill and then fled—the extent of the devastation was revealed. The nights were cold and black; we lived in dread of sunsets. The police created a checkpoint at the entrance to the neighborhood because looting was feared. We kept our mother warm with propane heaters and then with a gas generator, which also restored her hospital bed, though it required heroic dead-of-night searches for canisters of gas. We felt ruined, helpless, indignant, severed, confused. Our spirits were smashed. I smiled twice that week: the first time when I heard about some of my old books,
 Goethe and Croce and Strawson, floating serenely through the wreckage, the second time when a plumber reported that “Nathan’s frankfurters are floating down Surf Avenue.” For purposes of resistance and escape I read by flashlight, and was mordantly comforted to learn that the ancient philosopher Chrysippus wrote a work called On Things Not Worth Choosing for Their Own Sakes.

AFTER TWELVE DAYS the power came on. This was not the case in the Rockaways, in Breezy Point, in Staten Island, in New Jersey. Doctors Without Borders in Staten Island: that’s globalization! I marveled at the mayor’s skill in evading any accountability for the city’s lack of preparedness and quickly wearied of his cashmere swagger. How can anybody named Bloomberg be so utterly lacking in the common touch? The class analysis of the city’s ordeal, this latest and most extreme illustration of Manhattanism, was hard to refute. The center was dining and damn the peripheries. Perhaps there was a risk analysis somewhere, a cost-benefit cleverness, that justified the city’s lack of precaution and the pace of the recovery. There were policy considerations—banalities, really, but now endowed with a crushing force—that suggested themselves even to those of us who have no way to know whether sea walls will work. The first is the primary character of infrastructure. Is there a less glamorous subject in America? We do not like to dwell on our roads and our rails; they are so expensive, and so not digital. As if catastrophes are not expensive, too. Our non-physical environment ripens, our physical environment rots. The second is the incontrovertible reality of climate change, and the historical meretriciousness of its denial.

After Sandy, and it is only the most recent of the devastating proofs, the repudiation of climate science deserves to be universally regarded as intellectually and socially disreputable, the ravings of cranks and the schemings of capitalists at their most contemptible. From the rubble in Brooklyn in early November, I watched America have its sense of reality tested by an election and a hurricane: it was a week in which we were asked to recognize the actually existing country and the actually existing planet. The proper description of reality is not always an easy task. But the new America is here, and so is the new Earth.

Leon Wieseltier is the literary editor of The New Republic. This article appeared in the December 6, 2012 issue of the magazine under the headline “Who By Water.”

Me:

What to make of this; why does it rub me so wrong?

..A PERSON IN PAIN is a pariah. Misfortune always strikes twice: there is the calamity itself, and there is the marginalization that comes in the aftermath of the calamity, as the rest of society, all the lucky people who were untouched by the flood or the fire, the war or the famine, continue to live according to the customs of the normal world, and are disinclined to have the satisfactions of normality complicated or disrupted by the adjacent misery...

...They are not mean or selfish. They are merely creatures of their mild experience. They have no natural understanding of its opposite, of the terrible things that typically happen to other people. They are not indifferent, they are ignorant; and when the ignorance ends, when the news gets out that there are people in need of help, they sometimes help. But the ones to whom the terrible things have happened, the wounded ones, are hardly ignorant of the life from which they have been expelled: after all, it was just yesterday...

What to a make of this, indeed? A pariah is an outcast. Those who calamitously suffer in a unique way are inherently an obvious kind of other, necessarily different from us in their suffering. That is simply a truth of human nature. One amongst us is dying of cancer. We cannot be him, even if we have cancer ourselves. It is in the nature of our consciousness--"and man does not live by consciousness alone," actually he does in a sense--to be separate and unto ourselves, even with those we feel closest to. Two people never become one and to that extent our consciousness and our necessary subjectivity estrange us from others.

Empathy, feeling within one's self another's anguish, always chases after its own ideal.

Therefore, whence "pariah?" Whence our outcasting those suffering extraordinarily? Whence the marginalization? How does Wieseltier in his overreach to lay down almost aphoristically insightful large truth know how many different individuals respond to the tragedy of differentiated suffering remote from their own experience?

Here, rather than a pregnantly stated truth, we get mordant, gauzy generalization not only unrevelatory but distorting the obviously so into propositions the substance of which Wiesletier cannot sustain.

So too is the ascription of "ignorance" to what we, the relatively inexperienced, have not in our experience known. For in its connotative meaning, flowering into ignoramus, "ignorance" is an insult to describe those who deliberately ignore or disregard important information or facts, just as "ignoramus" is one who's willfully ignorant. There is in these thoughts by Wieseltier a subtextual preening, a special pleading for himself, as one of the accursedly enlightened by the wrecking that has vicariously touched his life via his mother. Unlike him, the rest of are sheep, "creatures" merely "of mild experience."

So it's fitting that this patronizing bundle of the obvious distorted into incoherent generalization reaches its own climax with this untrue, clunkily expressed pseudo profundity:

...One occupies only one’s own position, I thought, and so one must correct for the exclusiveness of that position, for the solipsism of situatedness. Such a correction can be achieved only by the imagination...

as if in our necessary separateness as the condition of our individuality we cannot, short of great imaginative leaps, understand and feel others' suffering, as if only the exquisite sensibility of a literary editor can show us the way to imagine the suffering of others, as if the rest of us prosaic, ordinary individuals cannot respond to extraordinary suffering without all this grandiloquent guidance.

The Case For Obama's First Term

By jakeh at TNR, 10,29, 2102:

...CRS, do you have any links to any Obama promise to "address the de facto segregation in America"? I don't recall that, nor do I know how he would do that. Nor do I recall his ever promising to deal head-on with urban crime, which, while a nasty problem, is one that is seen mainly as a local one, and is low on the national agenda. (Chicago is dealing with an increased murder rate basically due to the vagaries of gang politics, and not, say, due to a lack of police officers. Chicago has among the most cops per capita in the nation, and other forms of crime are down.) Nor do I recall foreign aid to Africa featuring prominently in Obama's professed agenda. Meanwhile, I think that Obama would point to the economic stimulus, health care, education reform, community college funding, and student aid -- measures that, while addressed to the nation as a whole (and, in the case of education reform, not measures that I happen to agree with), are geared toward lifting those who are struggling, softening the blow of an economic downturn that minority communities, blacks especially, feel most acutely, and moving toward more equal opportunity. How many black people still have a union job, or any job, due to Obama's rescue of the domestic auto industry, or the stimulus aid to the states? How many black people are able to collect unemployment benefits because Obama extended them in the midst of an economic downturn, and against Republican opposition, because he recognized that individuals are not responsible for macroeconomic forces beyond their control? My guess is that black voters generally see in Obama what I see -- a smart, decent guy (uniquely so for a politician, on both counts) with his heart in the right place, who's been unfairly vilified and obstructed, who's nevertheless managed to get a lot of good things done (including the historic passage of health care reform, which, for me, is almost accomplishment enough for a four-year term), who would like to be able to do a good deal more, and who still represents the still almost unbelievable fact that a liberal black man (an intellectual, besides) occupies the White House and is a strong leader at home and abroad. Some of the luster may have worn off the soaring rhetoric we fell in love with in 2008, but that was inevitable, and, that rhetoric still marks him as a uniquely inspiring politician in my book, and, as far as I can tell, he has followed through on it to a remarkable degree. I can't say that Obama has done everything right, but liberal and liberal black dissatisfaction I think stems mainly from unrealistic expectations...

The Case For Not Liking Obama

A big issue in U.S. presidential elections, apparently, is "likability." It's a factor easy to underestimate compared to policy positions and other matters of substance. But when I consider my own affective responses to politicians, it's obvious how much I'm affected by how I like or dislike a particular candidate, that jostling with or against considerations of substance. 

I've thought from just after he came into real public prominence how much, for reasons I have trouble articulating, I dislike Obama. That had me fervently wanting Hillary to beat him. And it poses a notional dilemma for me as I consider who I'm notionally voting for in the upcoming election. I subscribe pretty solidly to Democratic policies but my dislike inclines me notionally away from Obama and to Romney, who I genuinely like and whose policies I can live with.

Finally, I've read something, today in fact, by a good, young conservative writer, Matthew Continetti, hit piece though it is, that puts well why I don't like the guy:

....Remember when President Barack Obama was likable? Once upon a time the public viewed the incumbent more favorably than his challenger by large margins. These days Obama’s favorable and unfavorable ratings are similar to Mitt Romney’s. The televised debates have unveiled the current administration as alternately listless, manic, angry, soporific, rude, bullying, aloof, and thin-skinned. Americans who have just begun to tune into the election are seeing the president unmediated. They no longer are looking at him through the scrim of fawning press, majestic settings, and roaring crowds. And they are discovering that Obama is not so likable at all. He is actually something of a jerk.

Those who read coverage of the Obama administration closely will have known this for a long time: The president is cold, abstract, prickly, and insular. His brand of cerebral partisanship is better suited for liberal blogging than for leading the free world. He doesn’t enjoy interacting with strangers or even with associates outside his immediate clique. He has few close friends. He relies on about half a dozen senior advisers. His impromptu speech is given to cutting, sarcastic remarks.

Put him in front of an adoring and obsequious audience and he will be charming and suave. But the real Obama is revealed the second you remove the klieg lights. This isn’t a guy who will spend his post-presidency more or less running the Democratic Party, a la President Bill Clinton. Obama will spend his retirement as a solitary member of the irritable left, receiving honorary degrees, appearing on MSNBC, and scribbling for Salon.

The president’s unsociability is one of those obvious facts that are conveniently overlooked. Earlier this week Neera Tanden, the president of the liberal Center for American Progress, caused a mini-controversy when New York magazine quoted her saying, “Obama doesn’t call anyone, and he’s not close to almost anyone. It’s stunning that he’s in politics, because he really doesn’t like people.” Tanden, who has worked for Obama, later “clarified” her remarks. What she meant to say, she tweeted, was that Obama “is a private person.” Note, however, that one can be a private person and still not “like people.” Tanden did not really take back her words. Nor should she. Her initial comments were factual and honest.

A “Democrat deeply familiar” with the Clinton-Obama relationship said pretty much the same thing to Ryan Lizza a few months ago: “Obama doesn’t really like very many people.” A Chicago Democratic donor told Jane Mayer this summer, “He’s not the kind of guy I would go out and have a beer with.” “One United States diplomat” told Helene Cooper of the New York Times in September that Obama is “not good with personal relationships; that’s not what interests him.” That paper’s story on Valerie Jarrett, the president’s closest aide, describes Obama as “introverted” and his social circle as “small.” Michael Lewis’s profile of Obama shows a loner who broods over his decisions, spends time reading and writing and playing basketball with a tightly knit group, and says his biggest difficulty as president is “faking emotion.” His media puppets admit that the president is an emotionless “Spock.”

This combination of arrogance and detachment has been a political problem. Obama has paid a price whenever his unlikable personality has emerged in unscripted moments. There was his promise to meet with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea in the first year of his presidency. There was the time when he told Hillary Clinton that she was “likable enough.” There was his stubborn insistence to raise taxes on capital gains and dividends even though it would raise less revenue. There was his explanation that the white working class didn’t like him because “they cling to their guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.”

There was his remark that the Cambridge police acted “stupidly” when they arrested a Harvard professor.  There was his attack on Scott Brown for driving a pickup truck; his snide retort to John McCain that “the election’s over”; and his jibe that “shovel ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected” (which provoked laughter from his “jobs council”). This year we’ve heard Obama say “the private sector is doing fine,” that he’s “always struck by people who think, it must be because I was just so smart” that they’ve been successful, and that the attacks on our embassies across the Great Middle East were “bumps in the road” to Arab democracy. When Obama says what’s on his mind, his political team runs for the hills.

The debates have made the president’s dilemma worse. Obama has not masked his prideful contempt for Romney. He “told friends that he respected Mr. Romney’s intellect,” the Times reported, “but had come to view his rival as a less formidable adversary as he learned more about him from reading research books and watching his campaign.” He went into the first debate in Denver thinking he would end the race on October 3.

But a huge audience watched as Romney dissected the last four years and Obama responded with a mix of condescension and apathy. The president seemed always to be smirking and looking down at his notes. He barely could mount a defense of his record. He returned again and again to his vision of a fair America. But this was not enough even for his most slavish supporters. Andrew Sullivan called him “effete.” Michael Tomasky asked, “Does Obama even want to win the election?”

The first debate inaugurated a shift in the race toward Romney that hasn’t abated. And the left drew exactly the wrong lesson from it. The left believed Obama had failed because he was insufficiently rude, and the Obama campaign seems to have agreed with them. But that meant Obama was trapped. He had to be more combative, but he also had to retain his likability. Doing both was not an option. Obama chose combat, in keeping with his long-run campaign strategy of maximizing turnout among Democratic Party client groups.

So we got a Joe Biden who spoke under his breath, interrupted Paul Ryan at every turn, raised his voice, gesticulated grandly, cackled during discussions of the Iranian nuclear program, and grinned so wildly that he looked like he was channeling Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of the Joker. We got an Obama who was more engaged but also came across as angry and heated and ready to challenge Romney to a duel. We got a Democratic ticket that, per Chris Matthews’s suggestion, looks like it is auditioning to replace the Cycle on MSNBC.

Obama’s anti-Romney spirit may make for a more disagreeable and somewhat more interesting debate. Television ratings benefit. But how does it solve the weak economic recovery? How does it reassure voters looking for solutions on jobs, health care, the deficit, and energy? How does it improve the president’s image, or restore his poll numbers?

The cliché is that the more likable candidate usually wins the election. Morris Fiorina, one of my favorite political scientists, says that isn’t actually the case. Maybe. What we know for sure is what Washington has known all along: Obama doesn’t like people.

And increasingly, people don’t like him.

 

On Obama's 2007 Video

Andy McCarthy:

...To be generous, Obama’s performance is disgusting. Cynically adopting the black dialect of the American South, a dialect utterly alien to him, he demagogues against Washington’s supposedly selective waivers of the Stafford Act — legislation that requires communities hit by disasters to match 10 percent of federal aid. They waived it for 9/11, he tells the crowd, and they waived it when Hurricane Andrew hit Florida: Those communities were allowed to keep their one dollar for every ten federal dollars. But when he comes to Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the largely African-American population of New Orleans, Obama implies that Congress refused the waiver: “What’s happenin’ down in New O’leans? Where’s yo’ dollar? Where’s yo’ Stafford Act money? . . . Tells me that somehow the people down in New O’leans they don’t care about as much.”
In fact, ten days before Obama gave that speech, Congress had waived the Stafford Act requirement for Katrina. He was well aware of that fact, too. After all, he was one of only 14 senators to vote against the waiver. It was part of a bill to fund the war effort in Iraq. That is, to pander to his Bush-deranged, anti-war base, Obama decided that squeezing New O’leans was a price worth paying. Then, he lied about what happened in order to foment racial resentment — an atmosphere that he calculated would help his presidential bid...
and:

The Perpetual Failure to Understand Obama's Double Consciousness

• John McWhorter
• October 4, 2012 | 7:08 pm

The recent uproar over President Obama’s 2007 speech to black pastors is yet another example of how white people—or at least some of them—don't get it about black people.

A strange note for me to strike, I know, but the fact is that there’s nothing at all surprising in the fact that the President talks, worships, and even thinks in different ways depending on who he’s around. It would appear either that W.E.B. DuBois’ classic formulation about black people having a “double consciousness” hasn’t gotten around as much as it should or that certain people think it ceased to apply sometime around 1965. It didn’t.

DuBois mentioned black people feeling a “two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings.” Yet when I was little, not having read that yet and not yet in a position to glean it from experience, it would sometimes irritate me when my parents would start speaking more “blackly” when we had black friends over, or when they were with their relatives. They didn’t talk that way around me and my sister. It struck me as phony that they would suddenly break out in a different way of expressing themselves.

What I didn’t know was that most black Americans have two ways of talking: around black people, what linguists call Black English, and standard English around others. The two bleed into one another to an extent: most black people have a dusting of “blaccent” when speaking standard, and few even in their most unbuttoned moments speak purely Black English. However, the oscillation between the poles is constant.

This is what Obama, as a black American man, does. It is largely subconscious, which is why most black people as well as white have been rather perplexed as linguists identify a “language” or “dialect” called Ebonics. However, it’s very much there and scientifically identifiable. I have been thrown several times by many whites’ feeling that Obama is faking it when he sounds blacker talking to the NAACP—until I recall my initial feeling about my parents. This time, conservative pundits watching the 2007 tape are even venturing that Obama’s Ebonic cadence is his “real” self and that the standard English he uses in public is the put-on.

But both are him. Americans easily miss something most people in the world find ordinary: that one often speaks quite differently in different situations. Arabs, whose colloquial Arabic is practically a different language from Modern Standard Arabic, would readily understand Obama’s speech repertoire, for example, as would Swiss Germans, most Italians, etc.

It is the linguistic reflection of that double consciousness. The video also reanimates the perplexity among many that the cerebral, mixed-heritage Obama, who seemed so much “past race,” could turn out to have been a member of a church led by a flaming leftist, anti-white pastor like Jeremiah Wright. This, however, was no more of a surprise from a black person of Obama’s generation than the bipolar speaking repertoire.

To be both successful in mainstream America and black-identified is a delicate business. Commonly, the way people wangle the equipoise is to maintain a visceral kind of allegiance to in-group folkways and concerns while building most of one’s life around a more mainstream essence. Peggy Noonan once got this just right, describing Obama’s Wright phase as typifying a “barbaric yawp,” to use Walt Whitman’s term, of opposition that one may maintain in response to your people’s past oppression even while you are moving forward in what you actually do with most of your waking moments.

This is not, as the right would like to have it about Obama, phony. It is a bedrock of being human to harbor contradictory impulses: religious belief in the face of science, intuition versus intellection. Such contradictions are staples of any respectable, much less engaging, biographical portrait, for example.

And it means that brown-skinned superstars of a certain age these days will regularly have their Jeremiah Wright moments. Michelle Obama’s was the “This is the first time I’m really proud of my country” gaffe, surely more of a salute from the heart to the black struggle than a reasoned take on America’s entire history during her lifetime. Then there was Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” line, designed to appeal to a particular demographic rather than the nation as a whole.

As such, why would anyone be surprised that Obama, when speaking to a black audience and not as carefully self-monitored as he soon would be when his candidacy truly took fire, might venture that the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina was hindered at least in part by racism? It is crude to suppose that this is the “real” Obama and that the law professor weighing all sides of an issue, and the current cerebral President, is a pose. For better or for worse, parsing Katrina as a story of racism is a staple of black discourse, as is viewing inner cities as on some level a matter of racist neglect. Obama, with a certain crowd, will certainly dip into such views.

This is his double consciousness in action, just like the black-inflected speech patterns and the comfort hearing sermons by a black preacher who never got the news that the sixties ended. “Two warring ideals ideals in one dark body” indeed—except that the ideals are not exactly at war in people like Obama. Rather, Obama’s “black” side is a seasoning.

More to the point, Obama’s having a black side that comes out more with black people is ordinary. Anyone seriously worried that it means he is some kind of stealth candidate or poseur is backing themselves into the corner of seeing roughly 19 out of 20 black Americans in the same light.

• John McWhorter
• October 4, 2012 | 7:08 pm

The recent uproar over President Obama’s 2007 speech to black pastors is yet another example of how white people—or at least some of them—don't get it about black people.

A strange note for me to strike, I know, but the fact is that there’s nothing at all surprising in the fact that the President talks, worships, and even thinks in different ways depending on who he’s around. It would appear either that W.E.B. DuBois’ classic formulation about black people having a “double consciousness” hasn’t gotten around as much as it should or that certain people think it ceased to apply sometime around 1965. It didn’t.

DuBois mentioned black people feeling a “two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings.” Yet when I was little, not having read that yet and not yet in a position to glean it from experience, it would sometimes irritate me when my parents would start speaking more “blackly” when we had black friends over, or when they were with their relatives. They didn’t talk that way around me and my sister. It struck me as phony that they would suddenly break out in a different way of expressing themselves.

What I didn’t know was that most black Americans have two ways of talking: around black people, what linguists call Black English, and standard English around others. The two bleed into one another to an extent: most black people have a dusting of “blaccent” when speaking standard, and few even in their most unbuttoned moments speak purely Black English. However, the oscillation between the poles is constant.

This is what Obama, as a black American man, does. It is largely subconscious, which is why most black people as well as white have been rather perplexed as linguists identify a “language” or “dialect” called Ebonics. However, it’s very much there and scientifically identifiable. I have been thrown several times by many whites’ feeling that Obama is faking it when he sounds blacker talking to the NAACP—until I recall my initial feeling about my parents. This time, conservative pundits watching the 2007 tape are even venturing that Obama’s Ebonic cadence is his “real” self and that the standard English he uses in public is the put-on.

But both are him. Americans easily miss something most people in the world find ordinary: that one often speaks quite differently in different situations. Arabs, whose colloquial Arabic is practically a different language from Modern Standard Arabic, would readily understand Obama’s speech repertoire, for example, as would Swiss Germans, most Italians, etc.

It is the linguistic reflection of that double consciousness. The video also reanimates the perplexity among many that the cerebral, mixed-heritage Obama, who seemed so much “past race,” could turn out to have been a member of a church led by a flaming leftist, anti-white pastor like Jeremiah Wright. This, however, was no more of a surprise from a black person of Obama’s generation than the bipolar speaking repertoire.

To be both successful in mainstream America and black-identified is a delicate business. Commonly, the way people wangle the equipoise is to maintain a visceral kind of allegiance to in-group folkways and concerns while building most of one’s life around a more mainstream essence. Peggy Noonan once got this just right, describing Obama’s Wright phase as typifying a “barbaric yawp,” to use Walt Whitman’s term, of opposition that one may maintain in response to your people’s past oppression even while you are moving forward in what you actually do with most of your waking moments.

This is not, as the right would like to have it about Obama, phony. It is a bedrock of being human to harbor contradictory impulses: religious belief in the face of science, intuition versus intellection. Such contradictions are staples of any respectable, much less engaging, biographical portrait, for example.

And it means that brown-skinned superstars of a certain age these days will regularly have their Jeremiah Wright moments. Michelle Obama’s was the “This is the first time I’m really proud of my country” gaffe, surely more of a salute from the heart to the black struggle than a reasoned take on America’s entire history during her lifetime. Then there was Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” line, designed to appeal to a particular demographic rather than the nation as a whole.

As such, why would anyone be surprised that Obama, when speaking to a black audience and not as carefully self-monitored as he soon would be when his candidacy truly took fire, might venture that the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina was hindered at least in part by racism? It is crude to suppose that this is the “real” Obama and that the law professor weighing all sides of an issue, and the current cerebral President, is a pose. For better or for worse, parsing Katrina as a story of racism is a staple of black discourse, as is viewing inner cities as on some level a matter of racist neglect. Obama, with a certain crowd, will certainly dip into such views.

This is his double consciousness in action, just like the black-inflected speech patterns and the comfort hearing sermons by a black preacher who never got the news that the sixties ended. “Two warring ideals ideals in one dark body” indeed—except that the ideals are not exactly at war in people like Obama. Rather, Obama’s “black” side is a seasoning.

More to the point, Obama’s having a black side that comes out more with black people is ordinary. Anyone seriously worried that it means he is some kind of stealth candidate or poseur is backing themselves into the corner of seeing roughly 19 out of 20 black Americans in the same light.