a cult of personality

THE DAILY BLADE: Never Mind Marxism. Will An Obama Administration Be Totalitarian?: Part II

Examining President Barack Hussein Obama’s ubiquity – when your favorite TV show has not been pre-empted yet again by one of his prime time speeches or press conferences, you can still watch his Public Service Announcement (video link) about national service that gets heavy rotation, even on FOX – an unabashedly worshipful article by Jennifer Senior in New York magazine noted: “Since occupying the White House, Barack Obama has hosted fifteen town-hall meetings; appeared in more than 800 images on the White House Flickr photo-stream; and held four prime-time press conferences, the same number held by George W. Bush in his entire presidency.”

 

To what end? “He’s trying nothing less than to realign American values. … To Obama, educating Americans … means offering them a kind of moral instruction, one that reshapes their ideas about what’s required of them: industry, responsibility, empathy, humility.”

 

Well, Chairman Mao was also trying to realign Chinese values, and his Red Book exhorted his countrymen to apply Marxist-Leninist theory and ideology to become  more industrious (pages 227- 229), responsible (pages 251-266), empathetic (page 296) and humble (pages 288-290).

 

To enable him to guide China towards what he perceived to be a more enlightened future, Mao created a cult of personality. Is Obama taking a page from Mao’s little Red Book and cultivating and feeding the cultish devotion he needs to radically alter our domestic and national security policies?

 

Wikipedia defines a cult of personality as “aris[ing] when a country’s leader uses mass media to create a heroic public image, often through unquestioning flattery and praise. … A cult of personality is similar to general hero worship, except that it is created specifically for political leaders.” By “political leaders,” Wikipedia means, generally, despots and dictators – Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Josip Broz Tito, Nicolae Ceau?escu, Ferdinand Marcos, Ho Chi Minh, Ayatollah Khomeini, and Kim Jong-Il.

 

Leaving aside Dan Rather’s desire to have the government “make recommendations for improving the news,” the illustration from New York magazine’s article unwittingly represents the jaw-dropping degree to which a compliant mass media has been a tool for Obama’s ongoing efforts to insinuate the government – personified by himself – into every aspect of our lives:

 

 Take, for instance, this fawning article by The Boston Globe’s Washington bureau chief Peter Canellos, insisting that “Obama, so far, seems to occupy a place in the popular culture beyond humor. Ridicule doesn’t touch him. … His calm, serious manner, magnified by his intelligence and command over the issues, reinforces the perception of a diligent public servant at work

Amateur and professional artists, too, are aiding and abetting the MSM in its hagiographic portrayal of Obama, explains Michael Lewis in Commentary magazine:

 

Obama is hardly the first president whose physical likeness has been the subject of devotional art. Yet the others who achieved this status did so only after they had accomplished something great, like Washington, or had been martyred, like Kennedy, or in the case of Lincoln, both. Obama’s iconic status is of a different nature, an artifact not of his presidency but his identity – a youthful man of mixed race and remarkable attractiveness upon whom the greatest of expectations have come to rest. This means that the role played by art, and by artists, has been different in Obama’s campaign and presidency from any other in American history. …

 

[T]here is something unsettling about images that offer little more political commentary than an uncomplicated adulation that borders on power worship. By showing the subjects removed from all political context, and in a beatific reverie, such art produces images that are aesthetically indistinguishable from the “dear leader” effigies that delighted the dictators of the 1930s or of our own day.

 

But despite these strenuous efforts to create the superhuman mystique about Obama upon which a cult of personality depends, Americans are, by nature, too skeptical and impudent to choose thralldom over freedom, argues Johns Hopkins University professor Fouad Ajami in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed:

 

The politics of charisma is so Third World. Americans were never going to buy into it for long. …

 

Mr. Obama isn’t Lincoln with a BlackBerry. Those great personages are made by history, in the course of history, and not by the spinners or the smitten talking heads. …

 

American democracy has never been democracy by plebiscite, a process by which a leader is anointed, then the populace steps out of the way, and the anointed one puts his political program in place. In the American tradition, the “mandate of heaven” is gained and lost every day and people talk back to their leaders. They are not held in thrall by them. The leaders are not infallible or a breed apart. That way is the Third World way, the way it plays out in Arab and Latin American politics.

 

Want proof? The New York Times reports that of the four million babies born in the U.S in 2008, “if any of them were named Barack, there were not enough to make the annual ranking of the 1,000 most popular baby names.” (And by the way, the First Lady leaves so many Americans cold that the name Michelle actually fell in popularity from 94^th in 2007 to 103^rd last year).

 

For his part, Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson notes that Obama is losing ground on healthcare “reform,” cap-and-trade and other big-ticket items on his agenda because “Americans were neither as desperate nor as malleable as they were during the New Deal.”

 

Even so, Obama and the people who surround him have a disturbing instinct towards the heavy-handed manipulation and intimidation common throughout the Third World:

 

† Back in November, Black Panthers stopped people from voting and now, the AFL-CIO and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) are “bringing their muscle to bear to the raucous health-care debates that have erupted … in Congressional town hall meetings across the country,” reports The New York Times. As Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan tartly points out, “[s]omehow that doesn’t sound like a peace initiative.”

 

† After asking Americans to forward “fishy e-mails” about healthcare “reform” to an electronic tip box and using cookies to collect the names and E-mail addresses of anyone who visits the White House Web site, the administration backed down after electronic privacy experts and conservatives raised a ruckus over how the data would be used – and that it was being collected in the first place.

 

† When The Washington Times interviewed car dealers about the problems they were having getting their “cash for clunkers” transactions processed, several insisted on remaining anonymous, because they feared “retaliation” from the Obama administration (second item). If you think their fears were overblown, just remember what happened to Joe The Plumber.

 

† Until parents objected, Obama planned to recruit school kids to push his agenda, with a lesson plan for kids ranging from pre-kindergarten to grade 12 distributed to teachers by the U.S. Education Department to accompany his speech that included such assignments as writing a paper on how they can “help the president.” Republicans expressed concern about “indoctrinat[ing] America’s children to [Obama’s] socialist agenda,” “the theme of obedience to government,” and the classroom activities designed to create a cult of personality. “This is something you’d expect to see in North Korea or in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq,” as  state Sen. Steve Russell (R-OK) put it. In a Washington Times op-ed, the paper’s editor emeritus, Wes Pruden, notes,

 

Obama … got a taste of constituent anger at a distance when he tried to recruit America‘s schoolkids into the Obama cult of hope, change, peace and other vaguely good stuff. Write a letter to yourself, his Education Ministry told the kids in “a lesson plan” distributed to classrooms across the country, and tell the president what you can do to help him. The operative word here, clearly, is “him.” This sounded a lot like a cult of presidential personality to millions of American parents – the bigots, evildoers and Nazis of the fevered and frightened Democratic imagination. Promote your agenda, but not with my kids, the parents told the White House, loud and clear.

 

The White House, first dismissing the protests as “silly” and pretending that Mr. Obama’s speech was really only about hand-washing and good toilet etiquette, finally backed down with the familiar explanation that “we didn’t do it and we won’t do it again (at least until next time).”

 

And Obama’s MO suggests there will be a next time. Writing in American Thinker, John Griffing wonders whether “a form of martial law [is] imminent” because – not wanting to waste a crisis – “Obama appears ready to cross the Rubicon, and all he needs is a killer virus. Griffing connects these dots to make the case that “Washington certainly seems to be looking for some rationale for enhanced domestic military involvement, whether credible or not”:

 

† Obama’s Executive Order basing 80,000 active troops at home for the first time in the history of the peacetime military establishment;

 

† The military has established regional deployment locations all across the United States to “assist civilian authorities in the event of a significant outbreak of the H1N1 virus this fall;

 

† Swine flu has been made into a crisis in the minds of the public … [g]lobal swine flu deaths topped just 1,000 this year … [b]ut President Obama is predicting death tolls of 90,000 and possible infection of up to half the US population; and

 

† The National Guard is even practicing mock takeovers of public schools in the event of an “H1N1 riot”; 

 

Explaining that “[m]artial law has essentially been on the table since President Obama took office, thanks to the Bush Administration’s dramatic revisions of the Posse Comitatus Act – which limited deployment of the US military at home – in the wake of Hurricane Katrina,” Griffing notes that in addition to quelling swine-flu fueled “riots,” “Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has … ask[ed] for the unprecedented authority to base 400,000 soldiers in communities all across the United States” in the event that martial law is imposed to deal with “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters are all paths to disruptive domestic shock.”

Griffing warns that, “Obama is no ordinary President.  This is the man who began his political career in the home of terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, former members of the notorious Weather Underground that plotted the deaths of 25 million Americans in ‘re-education camps.’”

 

After reading Griffing’s chilling description of the totalitarian dystopia that could be unfolding before our very eyes, Max Blumenthal’s recent op-ed in The New York Times – meant to reprove the Republican Party’s “be[ing] captured by its extremist wing” since Obama assumed the presidency – takes on an entirely new cast. Blumenthal quotes from a 1959 letter President Dwight Eisenhower wrote to World War II veteran Robert Biggs, who longed for a leader who would “speak for us” and was certain that American people would “back … completely if the statement is made in truth” in which he recommended that his constituent read “The True Believer” by Eric Hoffer:

 

Eisenhower … explained to Biggs that Hoffer “points out that dictatorial systems make one contribution to their people which leads them to tend to support such systems – freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning these tremendous complex and difficult questions.” The authoritarian follower, Eisenhower suggested, desired nothing more than insulation from the pressures of a free society. …

 

[P]erhaps it was his experience as supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe that taught him that the rise of extreme movements and authoritarianism could take root anywhere – even in a democracy [emphasis, The Stiletto.]

 

But as Ajami observes, most Americans are resistant to this sort of thing: 

 

Those protesters in those town-hall meetings have served notice that Mr. Obama’s charismatic moment has passed. Once again, the belief in that American exception that set this nation apart from other lands is re-emerging. Health care is the tip of the iceberg. Beneath it is an unease with the way the verdict of the 2008 election was read by those who prevailed. It shall be seen whether the man swept into office in the moment of national panic will adjust to the nation’s recovery of its self-confidence.

 

Again, to what end is Obama using the Department of Education, National Endowment for the Arts and other federal agencies to create a cult of personality around him? Clearly, he wants to keep the True Believers amongst us stoked. Why? Because even 400,000 soldiers aren’t enough to subdue an armed populace, and an army of millions of minions rabidly loyal to The One may come in handy.

 

The menacing fervor of the True Believers helped put Obama over the top during the to-the-death primary match with Hillary Clinton. And remember when Dem leaders were openly debating whether there would be riots in the streets to rival the 1960s if Obama did not win the election? And now, an Obama supporter bit off the pinky of a fellow citizen who disagreed with The One on healthcare “reform.”

 

September 11^th is as good a time as any to ponder American exceptionalism, and the dangers of a cult of personality.