Howard Fineman, the Chief Political Correspondent of Newsweek, took it a step further. The truck wasn’t just any old prop but a very particular kind: “In some places, there are codes, there are images,” he told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann. “You know, there are pickup trucks, you could say there was a racial aspect to it one way or another.”39
Ah, yes. Scott Brown has over 200,000 miles on his odometer.40 Man, he’s racked up a lot of coded racism on that rig. But that’s easy to do in notorious cross-burning KKK swamps like suburban Massachusetts.
Whenever aspiring authors ask me for advice, I usually tell ’em this: Don’t just write there, do something. Learn how to shingle a roof, or cultivate orchids, or raise sled dogs. Because if you don’t do anything, you wind up like Obama and Fineman—men for whom words are props and codes and metaphors but no longer expressive of anything real. America is becoming a bilingual society, divided between those who think a pickup is a rugged vehicle useful for transporting heavy-duty items from A to B, and those who think a pickup is coded racism. Unfortunately, the latter group forms most of the Democrat-media one-party state running the country. In perhaps the most explicit testament to the ever widening gulf between the metaphorical class and the simple-minded literalists they reign over, the liberal reaction to a murderous attack in Tucson by a deranged nut of no political affiliation was to blame it on the right’s “extreme rhetoric”—all this talk of “targeting” marginal seats and having your opponent in the “crosshairs.” Liberals can be expected to understand sophisticated concepts such as figures of speech, which is why they can safely name their Clinton campaign documentary The War Room and why Democratic Congressman Paul Kanjorski can rec-ommend, re: the Republican Governor of Florida, “put him against the wall and shoot him.”41 Liberals exist in a world of metaphor, so it would be unlikely for them ever to rouse themselves to act on their rhetorical flourishes. But simple, embittered red-state types are too stupid to be entrusted with such potentially lethal weapons as literary devices.
Obama himself is not about “doing.” Why would you expect him to be able to “do” anything? What has he ever “done” other than publish books about himself? That was the story of his life: Wow! Look at this guy!
Wouldn’t it be great to have him… as Harvard Law Review editor, as community organizer, as state representative, as state senator, as United States senator. He was wafted ever upwards, staying just long enough in each “job” to get another notch on the escutcheon, but never long enough to leave any trace—until a freak combination of circumstances (war weari-ness, financial meltdown, divisive incumbent, inept opponent, the chance to cast a history-making vote) put Obama in line for the ultimate waft. If only Hogarth had been on hand to record a very contemporary Fake’s Progress. No rail-splitting, like Lincoln. No farm work, like Coolidge. No swimming-pool lifeguard duty, like Reagan. Upward he wafted without breaking a sweat, except perhaps when briefly blocked on his whiney Valley Girl autobiography—as who wouldn’t be blocked? It’s tough to write an autobiography when you haven’t done anything.
The new “meritocratic” elite, wrote Michael Young just before his death, “can be insufferably smug, much more so than the people who knew they had achieved advancement not on their own merit but because they were, as somebody’s son or daughter, the beneficiaries of nepotism.”42 As Young had foreseen in his original essay, a cult of (pseudo-)meritocracy absolves the ruling class from guilt. They assume not, as princes of old did, that they were destined to rule, but that they deserve to. Which is wonderfully liberating.
They “actually believe they have morality on their side,” said Young of Britain’s Blairites. The bigger government gets, the more transformative, the more intrusive, the louder it proclaims its moral purity/virtue. Thus, as Peter Berkowitz puts it, the ostensibly impartial concept of “fairness” is now no more or less than “the name progressives have given their chief policy goals.”43
This is politics as a form of narcissism: Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all? In the name of “fairness,” they grant privileges to preferred identity groups over others—that is, they treat certain people unfairly. Yet, if you oppose “fairness,” you must be on the unfair side.
