Wise classicist Victor Davis Hanson recently wrote a short piece titled "Obama in Never-Never Land" which begins:
The chief tenet of postmodernism is that truth and facts are arbitrary constructs, set up by the privileged to manipulate others less fortunate. In the case of our first postmodernist president, Barack Obama, there cannot be facts, past or present, only a set of shifting assertions that gain credence to the degree that they prove transitorily useful for progressive causes. A sympathetic biographer, David Maraniss, noted that almost all the touchstone events in Barack Obama’s mythographic memoir were fabricated. Of course, Obama would object to such a value-laden term and instead call them composites, impressions stitched together and presented as truth to serve the higher moral narrative: a young biracial idealist searching for his identity in a mostly racist and oppressive America. To the degree that Dreams from My Father enhanced that narrative, then all of what was in it was “true” — even the literary agent’s bio attesting that the exotic author was born in faraway Kenya.
For the fabulist Obama, the past is a vague mess with shifting narratives that can serve noble contemporary causes.
Absolutely right. I'm appalled at how credulous Christians have been toward this unaccomplished professional campaigner rising from the bowels of the south side of Chicago hoisted by the buoyancy of his own hot air. Their credulity was obvious from the beginning of his first presidential campaign. His facile tongue on a light-skinned face was perfect pitch to rich white Evangelicals with a bad conscience who wanted to repent of racism rather than fornication, greed, and pride...
Lies, and lies upon lies--this is what we've become. Nothing nowhere is any part true. The depth of our being goes no deeper than our latest update on Facebook and how pathetic is that? Who has time to read the Word of God any more, let alone Calvin or Knox or Luther or Augustine or Watson or Baxter?
"Oh yeah, didn't someone tweet something about preachers dying last week? I think the quote was from a guy named Baxter. Death and preaching--there's a pair. Deep! I love tweets. They remind me how good reading is. They make me think. When I read stuff like that, I'm like--wow!"
We chose the perfect Facebook president. President Obama is a glib updater who has condescended to take upon himself the mantle of Supreme Civil Servant so we, his charges, may be changed into all we're meant to be. Our President, Our Selves.
Dear brothers and sisters, don't use updates or tweets to tell anyone who you aren't. Lying is wrong and FB and Twitter are nothing but lies. They're People and Us magazine for all the little guys who'll never be a movie star or Olympic athlete. If you need fellowship (and every Christian does), go over to someone's house and eat with them. Let them see your face and hear your intonation and smell your breath. Watch their children and see if they're obedient and speak respectfully to their mother without interrupting her conversation.
Get it? Stop wasting time copping a false posture on your FB page. Be real. Be here now. Let your yea be yea and your nay nay.
If you want to trade cute anecdotes about your children, FB is perfect.
But if you want to know others and be known, to rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn, get up off your lazy you-know-what and do something bodily--which is to say, do something real and true.
And the election this November?
I'd really like to have someone in the White House with something to commend him beyond his mulatto skin, glib tongue, and Harvard degree. How 'bout a smooth-talking, handsome, hectomillionaire Mormon who got along famously with Teddy Kennedy?
Tim serves Clearnote Church, Bloomington, Indiana. He and Mary Lee have five children and big lots of grandchildren.
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