It’s very difficult
for outsiders to grasp what’s going on in a foreign country, even when it’s in
the headlines a lot. I saw this when I lived in Moscow . Every day I’d read something in the UK or US
press and be appalled at the trite, superficial and generally awful level of
analysis of Russia
on offer.
Now that I live in the
US ,
I feel the same way about this country. Since American newspapers are pompous
and dull, I don’t read them- I much prefer the scurrilous British journalistic style.
But there is so much ill-informed nonsense about America in the British press that I
often wonder why I bother. For instance I don’t think I’ve ever read one
article articulating just how long-winded and boring Obama is when he gives a
speech.
If you don’t live here
then what you’ll probably remember of Obama’s speeches are a few vaguely
inspiring and yet curiously forgettable orations he gave prior to his election,
and the address full of touchy feely blather and assorted historical
inaccuracies he delivered in Cairo in 2009.
But Obama has given
many, many more speeches than that. In fact, for the first two years of his
presidency he just wouldn’t stop havering (as we say in Scotland .)
Clearly he’d read all that Great Orator hype in the papers and had succumbed to
his own myth. Thus in early 2009 he started appearing on TV to talk to us. A
lot.
This was very annoying.
There I’d be, settling down to watch Hell’s
Kitchen and all of a sudden Obama appears and starts rambling on as if America was Cuba and he was Fidel. After an
hour or so he’d disappear and then the godforsaken “analysis” would begin.
I probably watched two
or three of these addresses, and then stopped. What was the point? Obama is an
utterly conventional thinker, there is nothing he says that you can’t find in an
NYT op ed, and everything else was puffery for his policies. Not only that, but
whenever he did displace Two and a Half
Men from the listings to pitch healthcare reform, support for the policy often
declined.
The president reached
the nadir of rhetorical awfulness when, during a televised address at West Point
Military Academy, he informed the Taliban that the US was going to leave Afghanistan
anyway, and that if they just waited a couple of years they could have it back.
Even the usual media sycophants admitted that he seemed small, isolated and
uncomfortable on the stage (although many still argued that the president’s new
strategy of “Let’s get out of this dump!” was astounding tactical awesomeness.)
After that I gave up
cable and stopped watching network TV and so rarely had to bother with Obama’s waffle.
I understand that he does still like to appear on TV and address the people
however. For instance, last week he appeared on Pakistani TV to assure the citizens
of that unhappy country that his government had nothing to do with the Youtube
clip that nobody needs to watch if they don’t want to and yet which many people
in the Muslim world are very, very angry about.
It was, as usual, an ineffective
performance: the next day the rioting went into overdrive, more people died and
a member of the Pakistani government offered $100, 000 to whoever murdered the
man who made the clip –a US
citizen, by the way.
Undeterred, Obama decided
to make another speech, this time at the UN, which for those of you who haven’t
heard of it is a club popular with tyrants, Jew-haters, gay bashers and lefty
Europeans.
Oh no, I thought, here we go again.
Because after two weeks of rioting and violence, what I really wanted was for a
Western leader to argue forcefully for free speech; to point out that it is
unjust to exclude one interpretation of the world from criticism while
permitting all others to be subject to scrutiny (and abuse); or that given that
over 80% of the world does not practice Islam it’s absurd to think that the rest
of us should be subject to its taboos; or indeed that were it not for the joy
of heresy we would still believe that the earth is 6000 years old and that it
is the center of the universe. And so on.
Yes, it’s bad manners
to insult somebody’s faith, but it should not be a criminal offence and heaven
knows it’s nothing to murder people over. We are not living in the Middle Ages,
thank God.
There’s no way he’s going to say all those
things I thought. And he
didn’t, or at least not exactly. But buried inside all the platitudes there was
nonetheless a strong defense of the First Amendment; he did not apologize for America ’s
freedom of speech, he more or less told the world to deal with it. How refreshing, to hear an obvious truth spoken
aloud! And so for once, I am listening; but as for those who most need to hear
Obama’s message- well, I suspect that’s another matter entirely.