Martin LeFevre: Obama's "I Still Believe" Speech

(White House Photo, 9/9/09, Pete Souza)

Having traveled across America for the first time in the early ‘90’s, a Russian business colleague hailed as a prime example of perestroika and partnership, made a memorable comment. “Initially Americans are very friendly and nice people, but then you suddenly fall off a cliff with them.”

There is an old phrase that defines minimal human character. “That person has bottom.” It means that that individual has some basic principles by which they live. It means they don’t always do whatever is expedient, and go with the herd.

There was a time when America had bottom.

“I've thought about…the character of our country in recent days,” Obama said in his speech before Congress last week. In a country that hasn’t yet hit bottom, one must ask: Does our illustrious president have bottom?

Another way of saying a person or people have no bottom is to say they’ve lost their soul. It takes a long time for a people to lose their soul, but when the proverbial straw breaks the spirit’s back, it goes all at once. The last straw was the set-up slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, not in the second Gulf War, but the first, when America had new high-tech weapons to test. Smarmy George Senior gave rise to smug George Junior.

Like McDonald’s and Starbuck’s, America’s peculiar brand of soullessness has spread around the world. The question is, to what degree and depth?

In his “I still believe” speech before both the Senate and the House, President Obama said that Americans still have “large-heartedness -- that concern and regard for the plight of others.” That simply isn’t true.

The evidence isn’t just the eruption of ugliness at town hall meetings across the country this summer, culminating in the unprecedented breach of protocol by a backbencher from South Carolina who yelled, “You lie!” at Obama during his speech.

The real falsehood the Obama Administration is perpetrating, the falsehood that most people here and abroad still believe, is that as a people Americans are still large-hearted. In Obama’s health care speech, he repeated the phrase “I still believe” five times. Who is he trying to convince?

Two days after his speech, Obama was asked, tongue in cheek, how his goal of bringing more civility into the political discourse has been going. Brandishing that trillion-dollar smile, he said, it’s “still a work in progress, no doubt about it.”

Barack has been coming off a little too smooth, with the glibness and devil-may-care attitude of a con man. Many progressives are openly wondering if he is one. Someone ought to tell Obama that civility can be just another word for keeping the status quo running smoothly.

George Bush often said that there is a faction in the Islamic world that “hates our way of life.” Rather than envy and covetousness for America’s outward riches and shell game of democracy however, to what degree was he picking up and projecting a fear and loathing many Muslims have of becoming a people without a soul? Al-Qaeda has merely exploited that fear and loathing.

I’m not saying that all the ills and evils of the world emanate from America. What I’m saying is that the erosion of culture and character that America exemplifies threatens the human prospect.

If enough peoples inwardly die, as the American people have died, humanity dies. At some level living know that, and rightly fear it.

Perhaps humankind as a whole cannot begin to meet its rapidly growing, multi-faceted crisis until the ‘ole remaining superpower hits bottom. If so, the question then is: What does it take for a people to build a bottom and regain their soul?

At the very least, it takes an end to denial. There is no need to romanticize the America that was to tell the truth about the America that is. We are not the people we were even 20 years ago, much less the people who extended a hand to the vanquished enemies of World War II, and helped them rebuild.

America’s obsessively externalized way of life, which has produced so much wealth, has also produced a bottomless spiritual and intellectual emptiness. And yet, the bubble just gets bigger and bigger, the trivial pursuits even more trivial.

In the global culture that the world has become, the dominance of the ‘hegemon’ is not primarily political, but cultural. A world of self-centered consumers, following the American mindset and model as the Chinese people are doing, is a world of soulless automatons.

Martin LeFevre is a contemplative and philosopher. More of his work and an archive can be found at the Colorado-based site Fountain of Light (fountainoflight.net). martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net

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