By Ankush
I should’ve taken Charles Kaiser’s advice and skipped Andrew Sullivan’s cover story for The Atlantic, about how Barack Obama
is the second coming of Christ. It is a stunningly bad piece of work
— reductive, overwrought, bloated, and, perhaps above all,
patronizing.
The setup doubles as an example of numerous overblown passages in the piece:
At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the
war in Iraq, which now has a momentum that will propel the occupation
into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed
since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a
nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the
world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about
religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers
the possibility of a truce.
Needless
to say, Sullivan can hardly provide actual proof for all of the steps
in this argument, even if you substituted more modest adjectives for
the grandiose ones he’s used. But proof, in a piece like this, is
beside the point. The Atlantic
is giving us access to the mind of a serious thinker who is writing
about Big Ideas. The exercise needn’t be marred by serious reporting
or self-reflection.