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Little allowance was given recently to Barack Obama’s analytical assertion that working-class Americans “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Regarding Obama’s remarks, John McCain offered, “I think those comments are elitist,” while Hillary Clinton suggested, that the “demeaning remarks Sen. Obama made about people in small-town America were elitist and out of touch.”
This sounds like a squabble among royal siblings, who having lived in the big-town America of Washington, D.C, suddenly discover a budding kinship with their royal subjects.
If anything, Obama’s awkward remarks were not elitist as much as they were overly thought-provoking. Guns and religion, after all, are emotional issues not to be deliberated. Whether he was right or wrong that economically deprived Americans resort to guns and religion for emotional security remains secondary to a more fundamental debate of whether we determine our shared values by emotion or deliberation.
There is a general distrust among thinkers and doers as they examine each other across this perceptual chasm. Thinkers are regarded by doers as emotional cripples who live a life of enlightened procrastination, while doers are perceived by thinkers as emotional time bombs who live on the edge of their senses.
The chasm has its roots in our cultural heritage, one that fluctuates between heroic sacrifice and hedonistic self-indulgence. We saved the world from fascism and communism, and proceeded to save the spoils of the 20th century for ourselves. At either end of this giving/taking spectrum lies an emotional currency won through the act of doing.
We are then a visceral society, a nation of pleasure-makers and thrill-seekers who have little taste for looking one step back, or two steps forward. “Bring ’em on,” said President Bush to militants in Iraq, much to the chagrin of allies, but much to the delight of populists.
From the aristocratic eloquence of John F. Kennedy and the self-reflective angst of Jimmy Carter, we have gravitated toward a plain-speaking rejection of intellectualism. Ronald Reagan felled the iron curtain with a simple call to “tear down this wall,” while George H. W. Bush expressed discomfort with “that vision thing.” Even Rhodes Scholar Bill Clinton understood the undercurrent of populism by moving his ambitious message to the center.
The media faithfully delivers the message, trailing the sentiment rather than leading the debate. Just as in television entertainment, the emotional currency of television news remains laughs, drama and provocation. Controversy is mistaken for substance, as evidenced by the recent Democratic Party debate in which ABC news commentator George Stephanopoulos asked Obama insightfully: “Do you think Rev. Wright loves America as much as you do?”
Where enlightened leadership can be found or fashioned amid this rubble remains to be seen. By enlightened, we mean thinking one step beyond the doing, regarding with studied deliberation the consequences of our actions. Bush used the emotional currency of 9/11 to lead us down an avenue in Iraq that clearly, we should have thought more about before embarking upon. The world is a complex place that needs leaders that understand the complexities.
Fortunately, there can be reconciliation between Jethro Tull’s thinker and doer. We need a thinker who feels and a doer who considers beyond what his or her speechwriters impart. We don’t know if Barack Obama is that candidate, but a political process that values the question would help.
The thought of living in a world dominated by doers scares the hair off the tops of pointy-head thinkers, just as enduring a world deliberated by thinkers seems unthinkable to doers. We need both. We need a thinker who does.
Eric Frydenlund is a Prairie du Chien essayist. E-mail him at efrydenlund@centurytel.net.
