We will not Apologize

Obama's inaugural address has been received with near universal acclaim. It was indeed very well conceived, well-written, and of course brilliantly executed. But I fear that there are monsters lurking in its rhetorical shadows. In some senses, it reads as a "not guilty plea" at a time when we need to be praying for atonement, seeking redemption.

Tom Engelhardt, has a similar read. Before the inaugural he wrote a column on the history of inaugural addresses, and outlining what he would like to see. He explains that in the early days of the Republic - when Empire was only a twinkle in the eyes of the Founders - it was traditional to call attention to the limits of American power, and the limits to the capacity of the state's Chief Executive. But as America's power grew, its humility and modesty shrank. The election of JFK marks an important symbolic turning point - a moment in which the US grew Mad with Power. The pomp and ceremony of the contemporary spectacle are accouterments of what he describes as a "victory culture."

He explains:

They [contemporary inaugurals] must, in fact, sing hymns to our strength, as well as to our unquestioned "mission" or "calling" in the world. In the first moments of a presidency, they must summon Americans to do great things, as befits a great power, not just on the national, but on the planetary stage.

By the time John F. Kennedy came along, there was no more talk of shrinking from contemplation. "In the long history of the world," he said in his inaugural address, "only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility -- I welcome it." He then sounded a "trumpet" to call on Americans to engage in "a long twilight struggle… against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself," not to speak of Soviet Communism.

The one exception to this trajectory was Jimmy Carter. Only Jimmy Carter had the moral strength to speak honestly about the kind of world we live in. No self-aggrandizing fictions, no "necessary lies" (as Chomsky might call them) - a call to reckon honestly with our past and present, which do not always conform neatly to the post-Enlightenment discourse of progress.

Again, Engelhardt:

Jimmy Carter's 1976 inaugural address, coming in the wake of Watergate, the Nixon presidency, and the disaster of defeat in Vietnam, called Americans to "a new spirit," a new way of thinking about the country, which was to include a recognition of "our recent mistakes" and a realization that "even our great Nation has its recognized limits, and that we can neither answer all questions nor solve all problems."

This would be a theme of his presidency, most famously in his "malaise" address to the nation in July 1979 in which he called on Americans to face their "intolerable dependence on foreign oil" and to recognize the limits of their "worship" of "self-indulgence and consumption."

The "malaise" address (actually entitled "Crisis of Confidence") was prophetic, a searing soul search for sources of our modern afflictions. The Carter revision is only now beginning to take shape. The documents have only just begun to be released. History will look kindly on Carter. (For a preview of what that revision will look like see the first chapter of Andrew Bacevich's recent The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.)

But unfortunately, this kind of honest self-examination, has no place in a modern politics so deeply rooted in deceit. As we all know, Carter was annihilated in 1980 by, as Engelhardt explains, "a candidate who imagined a very different kind of "morning in America," involving a nation without global limits."

With all this in mind, Engelhardt sat down before the inaugural to think about what he would like to hear from our 44th president. Engelhardt's voice of reason offers an insightful lens for interpreting what Obama ended up saying. Engelhardt admits that what he would like to hear "may be an address which no American president would care to give, centering as it does on an apology." Indeed, as Obama made clear in his address: "We will not apologize for our way of life; we will not waiver in its defense." But as Engelhardt explains it is an apology which we need more than anything else:

I remain convinced that the Vietnam War has dogged this country for endless decades largely because most Americans and their leaders were never willing to come to grips with what we had done, and so never offered a word of apology or any restitution for the damage caused. What is not reckoned with, not acknowledged, not atoned for, haunts us.

This last line bears repeating and emphasizing: "What is not reckoned with, not acknowledged, not atoned for, haunts us." This gets to the heart of what frustrates so many radicals and progressives, who are not yet ready to turn the page on what Obama calls the "stale arguments of the past." As an historian, I can't help but take exception to the notion that a nation can move forward without an honest assessment of its past. As Martin Luther King Jr. said in 1967, "The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit." If the US continued to "ignore this sobering reality," Dr. King predicted that the US would be condemned to repeat its experience in Vietnam with every new generation. How did we get from Vietnam to Iraq- to so many other places? How did we get from the Gulf of Tonkin to WMD? Answering such questions, in the words of Dr. King, "demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people."

In this sense, Obama's address, while marking some important discontinuities with the Bush years, remains an exercise in evasion. Our problems are much deeper than George W. Bush. The universal castigation that that dark soul receives serves only to scapegoat what is in truth a malady of our collective soul. Bush is not the problem. Bush has never been the problem.