Mockumentary Extraordinaire

Painful Embarrassment

In the comedy Dumb and Dumber we are treated to the spectacle of two idiots succeeding because of their relentless stupidity.  During the course of the movie the characters manage to mouth just about every inane cliche known to man.  To get comedy sharper and more sophisticated than this is a challenge.  Well, not really.  There is always a ready supply of sublimely ridiculous clichés  from every aspiring politician "positioning" himself  as a statesmen.

Take the following:

This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet.  Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands.  Senator Barack Obama, Berlin, July 24, 2008.

This has to rank right up there as one of the greatest chains of  dumb clichés ever strung together by a politician.
  If Dumb and Dumber were to have a sequel, this speech should be in it, and the movie called, "Dumb, Dumber, and Dumbest."  Where would we begin to critique this fatuousness?  How does one dissemble a cliché?

Surely this was self-parody, you protest.  We suspect not.  On the other hand, if Obama were serious--it would make him not just dumb, but pitiable. We would have to feel sorry for the guy.  It would represent relentless stupidity without the comedy.

What on earth would lead someone reputedly as sharp as Obama to mouth such inanities?  Maybe he sees himself as following in the train of the great rhetoricians of old.  Maybe he had a dream, and his mentor is Martin Luther King.  But with King, one always sensed that the meant it.  Moreover, King was sufficiently grounded that he spoke of aspirational goals.  He told us what he dreamed about, what he hoped for.  Obama proclaimed a portentous moment when the planet could be "saved" and it was now.  We could actually come together to stop "terrible storms" devastating the land. 

Well, we need to remember that Obama is the product of an advanced education in some of the most prestigious schools of learning in the United States.  Maybe he was too dumb to sort out the reality from the pablum.  Maybe he really believed all that pseudo-millenarianism that passes for hard-headed scrutiny in the hallowed halls of Columbia and Harvard.  Maybe the rube from Hawaii was not sophisticated enough to work out that Dumb and Dumber was a comedic parody. 

It is all too easy to let slogans substitute for scrutiny in the progressive halls of learning.  Maybe Obama was impressed by F. W. Hegel when that worthy announced:

"The State is the actually existing, realized moral life. . . . The divine idea as it exists on earth."  As he proclaimed in The Philosophy of History: "[All] worth which the human being possesses--all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." [Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (New York: Sentinel/Penguin, 2012), p.152.]

Government, the State, really is the manifestation of God.  If that be true, then it makes sense for Obama to claim that by "coming together"--resolving through ballot box and law--the entire planet could be healed.  But why would Obama be so dumb as to believe something like that?  Ah, gentle reader, it's what the intellectual Progressives in the United States have always believed.  It is the standard fare of Harvard and Columbia and the rube from Hawaii was not sufficiently sophisticated to see through it. 

Richard Ely was an intellectual mentor to Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, both Progressive lions.  He pronounced,

God works through the State in carrying out His purposes more universally than through any other institution. . . . [It] is religious in its essence . . . a mighty force in furthering God's kingdom and establishing righteous relations.  (Ibid).

Such nostrums are commonplace in the Progressive schools. 

We fear that Obama did not perceive any irony while he was orating from the podium in Berlin that July day in 2008.  He was deadly serious.  Which makes for a completely different kind of comedy--more suited to the painful mockumentary punchlines of The Office.  Either way, it's all a joke.  A pitiable one at that.  How embarrassing.