House of Eratosthenes

Conventional wisdom says the pomp and ceremony have something to do with the duty of the President spec’d out in the United States Constitution. Specifically Article II, Section 3, which says…

He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient…

The circus clown show we see today, therefore, may trace its roots back to the founding. We make a mistake in assuming that this means it’s faithful to it. We should be reassessing this. To coin a phrase, we “need a national dialogue” on it. There’s been an awful lot of patchwork replacing the original quilt here.

The President does not tell Congress what to do, for starters. You can read “recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary” in a lot of different ways, but “recommend” is something you do when the other guy has the final say. Our current President doesn’t seem to understand this, although to be fair about it, the perversion started long before we ever heard about Him.

Also, to continue to be even more fair about it, the damage Obama is doing to the country typically results from an unhappy situation in which He really is the best president for our times. So our problems with Him, really have to do with the problems of our times. Implicit in His job as He understands it, and to be realistic about it His understanding is not a problem of misinterpretation by any means, is: Drag the country leftward, as far as possible and as fast as possible. Flank the enemy. Out-maneuver all who will oppose You, outnumber them, geld them, pressure them, bully them, dilute their influence.

This previous November, it was established that a slim majority of the country likes this. Or, a slim majority of those who bothered to show up to vote, anyway. That’s something. We still have a governmental system filled with checks-n-balances though, and those checks and balances are there for a reason. If President Obama wants to make Congress’ votes go a certain way, as opposed to simply supplying recommendations, He can always run for His old seat in the Senate.

But, of course, there are television cameras. When politicians appear in front of television cameras, they use the appearance to swing the public toward their point of view, to put the pressure on their opposition in the most contentious matters. That is what politicians are going to do. Every time. It’s just a fact of life.

And so it could very well be that if we could have a “do-over,” with the constitutional verbiage left the way it is and all politicians and cameramen and news producers acting on their incentives the way they do, but the history scrubbed clean, we’d end up precisely where we are now. And, a hundred times more, with a hundred more do-overs. That could very well be the case. But if it is, then it isn’t cause for celebration.

In our system of governance, the President is not a dictator. He is not even the star of the show. You do realize this, right? In our system, He is merely one of several players. The Constitution grants Him this monopoly in the discourse for a time, based on the premise that He is working in concert with the rest of the executives and legislators. It’s no different than the pilot of your aircraft, in fulfillment of a part of his duties as Captain, “monopolizing” the sound space for a minute or so while he addresses you over the P.A. system. If he has some kind of conflict with the co-pilot, or the stewardesses or whatever you call ’em nowadays, or the deck crew or the luggage crew or the fuel crew, and uses this sound-space monopoly to settle that conflict in his favor, then obviously that would be an abuse of the system. I mean, I can imagine all sorts of scenarios for that, and some of them are quite entertaining. But it still is an abuse of the system. Improper utilization, for something other than its designated purpose.

Well, that’s exactly what we’re seeing happen here every year.

So why the applause?

So why the applause?

My guess is: Because we as a society so sunk in narcissism that we can no longer meaningfully distinguish between talking about something and actually doing something.

An example: December 1 is World AIDS Day. Like colleges everywhere, the local eggheadery near where I live organizes all kinds of “awareness raising” events for it. Which would be fine, I suppose, if there really were an HIV problem on campus. But there’s not. This is an institution so bourgeois, it makes Karl Marx’s butt hurt in the afterlife. I’d wager that the total number of students here who have HIV is the same as the total number of their friends, family, coworkers, Facebook pals, and pets who do: Zero.

They are, in other words, about as aware of AIDS as it’s possible to get.

Normally I’d write this off as typical leftist self-congratulation, and no doubt there’s a good bit of that too. But students and even professors, who really should know better, act as if marching around with signs actually lowers the HIV infection rate. I always overhear people gushing, with all apparent sincerity, about the difference they’ve made.

They honest-to-God don’t know how to separate words from action. They don’t grok to cause and effect. It’s scary.

But they love them some Obama.
- Severian | 02/14/2013 @ 07:57
Yeah, I remember being a captive audience, riding shotgun in a car populated 67% by libs. We were discussing the eco-cup somehow, which I compared to rock concerts put on to “raise awareness” of climate change. I suggested that at this late date, which I think was about 2007, all the awareness that ever needed raising was pretty much raised, and if it really was necessary to take some action on this then the raising-of-awareness would be toward the bottom of the list of things that needed doing.

My suggestion was not accepted. But to this day, I have not been presented with a convincing argument as to why it wasn’t.
- mkfreeberg | 02/14/2013 @ 08:06
Comes back to your item 8, doesn’t it? (Which I think should have proper noun status, and its own entry at RC: Item Eight). Talk and action are not the same; they are, in fact, nearly polar opposites. Talk alone accomplishes nothing (even those “treaties” with third world thugs so beloved of the left require signatures); action in complete silence still accomplishes something.

My question is: Why does the left seem to deliberately choose causes that highlight and exacerbate this difference?

The only thing that stops a genocide, for instance, is outside military intervention*. An analogous boots-on-the-ground effort would be required to lower AIDS infection rates in Africa (or in certain communities right here in the USA, though the left seems not to care about that). Yet if anyone in power actually tried to implement these types of measures, as sure as the sun rises, the left would drop their “raise awareness of AIDS” posters and pick up their “stop neo-imperialism” signs.

It’s as if highlighting their causes’ ineffectiveness is the whole point. Which has a whole John Calvin-lite psychological feel to it that’s way beyond my pay grade….

Any thoughts?

*the only other thing that stops a genocide, of course, is the genocidaires’ complete success…. which is what the left functionally agitates for, when you come right down to it.
- Severian | 02/14/2013 @ 15:06
Watching Deadly Women right now, about Genene Jones, Beverly Allitt and Kathleen Folbigg. There’s no question about it, these murdering bitches are virtue junkies. It is absolutely shocking how far they got before anybody figured out what they were doing.

I think we, as a species, tend to be blind to the phenomenon of virtue-junkie-ness. We have trouble acknowledging its very existence, let alone the enormous damage it does. And, for those who are part of it, how incredibly addicting it can be.
- mkfreeberg | 02/14/2013 @ 15:40
Legally the President does not have to make the speech in person and in the past some presidents sent a clerk or secretary. If I were president I’d do it that way with the explanation that I didn’t like to sit in a room of idiots.
- Fai.Mao | 02/14/2013 @ 17:20
My guess is: Because we as a society so sunk in narcissism that we can no longer meaningfully distinguish between talking about something and actually doing something.

I think it’s worse than that. We can no longer meaningfully distinguish between talking about something and blurting out a jumble of words that relate in some way to a topic. What difference does it make?
- Texan99 | 02/15/2013 @ 08:43

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Let’s Abolish This Dumb, Stupid State of the Union TraditionThursday, February 14th, 2013

Let’s Abolish This Dumb, Stupid State of the Union Tradition
Thursday, February 14th, 2013