Obama v. Lincoln, Churchill et al.

This latter-day adoration of Lincoln by Barack Obama, and his worshipful party and press, is flummoxing. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if you didn't care for George W. Bush then Abraham Lincoln would've had you fit to be tied. Look at the anti-war, surrender-ist Democrat Party platform of 1864, and the fire-and-brimstone indictments of Lincoln and the Union cause by the "Copperhead" Democrats and their many allies in the "international community" of the time, and you'd think you were reading the war against President Bush translated into Victorian. The 21st Century Left -- with Obama as their new philosopher-king -- are the very reincarnation of those 19th Century Lincoln-haters. It is the "neo-con warmongers" who are the legitimate heirs of Lincoln and his war to save the Union and free the slaves.

Following is a representative specimen of the Obama-as-Lincoln genre, this one from the Obama-ist Canadian Press newswire service, and specifically Lee-Anne Goodman, the swooning bobbysoxer whose reporting belongs in Tiger Beat: "Lincoln, Obama’s political hero, also figured prominently during the day’s events.... The man who came to be known as the Great Emancipator was also a lanky Illinois politician with a gift for oratory when he became president." Oh, well then: Both lanky, both associated with Illinois, both politicians, and both handy at public speaking. What matter if they would have been on opposing sides of the major issues of the day at least as often as not? Why, did you know they both enjoyed pie? Clear a space on Mount Rushmore!

Roosevelt and Kennedy are venerated in the popular culture and press, but I find the pair of them to have been miserable presidents, and I'm confident that would've been my appraisal in their times, so I couldn't in good conscience appropriate their latter-day veneration. (Roosevelt much more than Kennedy, incidentally. Roosevelt saw the United States and its government as his personal fiefdom, extended the Great Depression by seven years, and was almost uniformly wrong in his many disagreements with Churchill; whereas Kennedy was at least for across-the-board tax cuts and a strong, anti-Communist defense. Kennedy's problem was his remarkable knack for doing exactly the wrong thing, from the Berlin Wall to Cuba to Vietnam to Iraq.)

But the Left has this "thing" about celebrities and hero-figures, and just can't help themselves. A historical figure's hero-status will trump any pesky 180-degree disagreements of worldview for the Left, and they invariably try to claim inheritance of any celebrated hero-figure, including the ones from the Right.

And, for absolutely anyone who is on the Left in this 21st Century and presumes to carry the mantle of Churchill, may lightning strike them. You'd have been baying for Churchill's blood had you been alive in his time. Churchill is today understood to be the greatest statesman of the 20th Century, so there are plenty of pretenders who want to wrap themselves in the Churchill flag. But if you are still on the Left after the 9/11 attacks, then had this been the 1930s, you may be assured that you would have considered Churchill a reckless, dangerous, vile warmonger and imperialist, completely devoid of humanity, and you have no right ever claiming Churchill as a spiritual ally.

You may be assured that Churchill was an arch conservative, an English imperialist, a Zionist, and the foremost advocate in the English-speaking world for the efficacy of force in international relations; In other words, you leftists would have hated his ever-living guts and wished earnestly for his untimely demise. And it says something about Churchill's worldview that he is so indisputably the greatest statesman of the 20th Century, and absolutely towers over his more leftward contemporaries, Roosevelt chief among them. It's as George Orwell said of Rudyard Kipling: He holds up, while his leftist contemporaries become unreadably dated, because his brutal, natural conservatism brought him closest to understanding the world as it actually is and will be. Or, as Margaret Thatcher explained, "The facts of life are conservative."

"Turning in their graves" is the right expression. Poor Messrs. Lincoln and Churchill, appropriated to promote politicians and causes they would have fought against tooth-and-nail, by people who would have torn them down and subverted their efforts at every turn.

Another unfunny comedy documentary

Leave it to PBS to make a 6-hour documentary series on comedy, and step all over the punchlines with their accustomed axe-grinding. Make 'Em Laugh: The Funny Business of America is the suitably-lame title for a politicized Baby Boomer's Canon of Comedy.

There can be few things more insufferable than unfunny comics putting on their serious faces and haranguing America about how important they are, how "courageous" and "dangerous" they are, and how they're leading all us lesser mortals to a more enlightened plane by "making us uncomfortable with institutions we've become comfortable with."

How "courageous" or "dangerous" is it for Chris Rock to make fun of white folks in the 21st Century? Making fun of Muslims could get a fellow killed; making fun of American WASPs fetches tens of millions of dollars, uniformly-fawning press, and international celebrity status.

And what does it say about the sort of comedy venerated by the PBS documentary-makers, that the only time anyone watches the stuff is on tedious documentaries, where some Boomer producers and directors patch together old clips and contemporary interviews with a lot of self-righteous comedy-retirees, preening about how outrageous and important they were?

No-one today is watching Your Show of Shows. No-one watches Laugh In. No-one will watch the Daily Show or Colbert Report once they're retired, any more than anyone watched Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher as of the day after it was cancelled.

Even Saturday Night Live -- by far America's oldest running TV comedy institution -- has a best-before date: Reruns go back only about half a decade. Try watching an episode from the '70s or '80s or early-'90s: Nothing in American society is any more dated than an episode of SNL. A fellow might laugh at a 30-second clip of "Wookin' Pa Nub" from 1981, but would he care to sit through the entire 90-minute episode it appeared in?

And yet Monty Python's Flying Circus -- 40 years old this year -- is still being broadcast, in primetime. So the problem is not that comedy just gets stale: only trendy, weak comedy goes bad. And the species of comedy venerated most by PBS is that trendy, weak stuff -- fleeting pop culture mediocrity.

"Whoever's in power, you go after them," one comedy authority explains. Ha. Democrats had controlled both houses of Congress for two years, and the comics went after Sarah Palin. Barack Obama is President of the United States, and still they're going after the last president: SNL's Weekend Update of February 7 made exactly one, skirting reference to Obama's flailing, and the punchline was, "That's your mistake? The last guy broke the world." No doubt the good folks at Weekend Update were hungover on the previous Sunday, and couldn't reasonably be expected to have noticed the provincial elections in Iraq: Over 14,000 candidates ran for over 400 seats, Iraqi forces managed the security, and the day passed without a single attack anywhere in the country. (The good thing about Seth Myers anchoring Weekend Update, incidentally, is no Seth Myers in the sketches. The bad thing is that he is clearly aping Jon Stewart and has reduced Weekend Update to an unfunny Saturday installment of the Daily Show. That Lorne Michaels allows Seth Myers to anchor Weekend Update is an injustice to tens of thousands of funnier Americans.)

Comics take on the institutions, sure enough: Institutions that they helped tear down decades ago. What these comfortable revolutionaries can never seem to get through their heads is that they are the establishment now. Who are the TV executives and movie producers in 2009? Who are the newspaper and magazine editors and publishers? The college professors? Senior bureaucrats? Baby Boomers, Democrats, and 1968-vintage Hippie Lefties to a man. But still these fearless self-professing iconoclasts shake their fists at The Man, who either passed on sometime in the 20th Century or is attached to an oxygen tank in an assisted living facility. For the Baby Boomers and their younger disciples, it will forever be 1968, they will forever be raging insurgents, and the enemy will forever be Eisenhower's America with its Levittown and Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Even when it's 2009 and the epitome of establishment is Hugh Hefner.

None of these comics are ever made to be "uncomfortable". None of the "institutions" they're "comfortable" with are ever assaulted. If they truly meant what they said about the importance of making one uncomfortable with institutions, then the first bubble they'd prick would be their own. No-one could be any more pompous, more pretentious, more sanctimonious, more dogmatic, more monolithic, more in thrall to celebrity and power -- provided it's sufficiently leftist -- than the kind of pop culture establishment honored by PBS in this waste of National Endowment for the Arts taxpayer dollars.

NB: I make an honorable exemption from this diatribe for Carol Burnett and her like. They were only out to be funny, they were, and they hold up.