Their Name Is Legion

Pace the plausible deniers, there exists a blog devoted to exploring, in a spirit that is a ghastly echo of secular openmindedness, the idea that Obama is the Antichrist, and its readers take McCain’s recent web ad “The One” very much in earnest. In the comments section of this blog, a woman reports describing her enthusiasm over the news about the Antichrist to her psychiatrist, who then “gave me more meds.” Perhaps the McCain campaign would like to reimburse her health insurer? And then there’s the commenter “Assasinforfather” [sic], who is angry because the world is controlled by Satan and because, in what seems to have been a special revelation, he discovered that at the end of the world there will be no rapture, only universal tribulation. He writes that of “all the men in my lifetime who have been accused of being THE antichrist, Obama is the only one that the Spirit of Father has warned me of,” and warns that “I know who will give the beast the deadly wound.” Perhaps the McCain campaign would like to reimburse the Secret Service for the cost of paying this fellow a visit?

Under the cover of unacknowledged messages, a contribution can be made to the pool of irrationality in a culture. I’m not blaming the internet, by the way. Nixon was able to summon the silent majority from the vasty deep long before the internet existed. It is thanks to the internet, in fact, that one may see the process of summoning at work. One may watch an advertisement preying on superstition and fear one day, and then read the words of the mentally unstable, as they take courage from it, the next. The mentally unstable cannot be held to account, but the suits who stir them up may be.

PS: There’s a comprehensive round-up of Obama-as-Antichrist-alia here.

No forwarding address

Reading the chapter on cemeteries in Dell Upton’s Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic (Yale, 2008), I learned that eternal rest beneath a headstone was originally the exception not the rule:

Burying grounds were commons in the traditional sense. Anyone could use them but no one could own them or appropriate them for their exclusive use. They were places to return the dead to dust, not to preserve and celebrate them. By law and custom, public burying grounds were a kind of consecrated waste-disposal plant, processing the abandoned cadaver after the soul of the deceased had gone on to another realm. As an English judge noted, in deciding a case in which a family sought to bury one of its members in an iron coffin that would slow or prevent decomposition, a graveyard was “not the exclusive property of one set of persons, but was the property of ages yet unborn. . . . All contrivance, therefore, to prolong the duration of the body, was an act of injustice, unless compensation was made for such encroachment.”

In such a cemetery, bodies were buried willy-nilly, one grave overlapping another. “When a new tomb is dug, an old one is laid open; and one body that has been slumbering a few years in peace, is removed from its resting place to make room for another,” wrote a horrified nineteenth-century reformer. Once the earth had done its work, graves were reopened to provide space for subsequent users. In European cemeteries and some American ones the skeletal remains were removed to charnel houses. In the light of its grisly function and high religious purpose, the cemetery was, in theory, a “garden of equality,” a place of “modest simplicity.”

Long before America was founded, though, the simplicity began to be undermined by elites, who insisted on privatizing a few spots for themselves. The rest of Upton’s book is not so morbid, by the way; it’s about early American urban design, and ranges from street noise to office architecture, with special attention to Philadelphia, New Orleans, and New York.

The Rove style

In his recent ads, John McCain has forfeited any claim he may once have had to a high-minded, statesman-like character. I am persuaded by Bob Herbert’s argument, in a New York Times op-ed published on August 2, that the McCain campaign was playing on the lowest racial stereotypes when it featured Paris Hilton and Britney Spears in its recent anti-Obama ad, “Celeb.”

McCain campaign, The One, 2008 (still from TV ad)

But evidently the gratuitous coupling of an ambitious black man with two highly sexed white women was not low enough for the McCain campaign. Now, as Scott McLemee, Maud Newton, and a number of others have been quick to perceive, the McCain campaign is toying with nothing less than armageddon. The new McCain ad, titled “The One,” suggests, in its imagery and language, that Obama is the Anti-Christ. The ploy is either blasphemy, an attempt to prey on religious fears, or both, depending on your convictions.

Left Behind, 2001 (still from movie trailer)

Some people will no doubt claim that those who see apocalypse-mongering in the ad are seeing things, and that it’s just a bit of humor. But humor and apocalypse-mongering aren’t irreconcilable; jokes often have unseemly subtexts. Just to call out one detail, I don’t think it’s an accident when, toward the end of the ad, the words “But Is He Ready” remain on the screen by themselves for a few moments. Eventually they are followed by “. . . To Lead?” but until then, they’re bound to raise a different possible ending in the minds of some viewers. I wish I could also claim that the style of the ad, as seen in the screen shot above—the stentorian mixture of caps and small caps, superimposed on an ominous cloud pattern—was unique, but alas, portentousness is widespread, and the resemblance to the screen shot to the left, from the trailer to Left Behind, may be no more than coincidental.

The difficulty with an “English department”

In The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (1969), John Gross describes the troubles associated with turning English literature into an academic discipline, as that problem was understood in Britain in the late nineteenth century, where the experiment was first attempted:

How do you organize the wholesale teaching of imaginative literature, without putting the bird in a cage? How do you construct a syllabus out of the heart’s affections, or award marks for wit and sensitivity? Candidates will be expected to show a knowledge of human nature—which, human nature being what it is, represents an open invitation to wander on at random, to drain the subject of intellectual content. And since nobody wants that, a strong countervailing current is inevitably set in motion. Teachers turn with relief to the small, hard, ascertainable fact; they become preoccupied with sources, or analogues, or backgrounds, or textual cruces, or other interesting but secondary considerations. Such problems are of course by no means unique to English studies. They exist in many other academic fields as well. But they do present themselves with peculiar force and intimacy when studying the literature of one’s native language, and it could be argued that, armed as we are with microfilm and computer, we have not entirely solved them even now.

Obama examines the constitutionality of anti-gay legislation

This afternoon, the New York Times released an article by Jodi Kantor on Obama’s career as a law professor. In a sidebar, the Times posts a syllabus of his and quite a few of his exam questions, along with the corresponding answer memos.

Not that there was any doubt, but the new evidence suggests Obama has a formidably sharp mind. I didn’t expect, however, that the academic documents would cause me to tear up. In 2003, the first question on the final exam in Prof. Obama’s Constitutional law class asked for a brief on behalf of a monogamous gay couple in a relationship of ten years’ standing who want to challenge their state’s defense-of-marriage act and its legal restrictions on gay adoption. Of course the question, like most legal questions, could be answered merely as an intellectual exercise, but after the way that gays have been hung out to dry in recent elections, it moved me to discover that Obama, who supports the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act, knows the legal terrain in such fine detail.

To wit: According to the answer memo for the exam (I at first thought that this answer memo had to have been written by Obama himself, but a commenter on the NYT‘s Caucus blog points out that law professors often distribute the best student answer in lieu of writing an answer memo themselves, so its authorship is uncertain), the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment will likely prove a stronger basis for the hypothetical couple’s case than the same amendment’s due protection clause. Because homosexuals are not considered a protected class under current interpretations of the amendment, the rationale for a law that singles them out need not be narrowly tailored to a legitimate state interest, but it does have to be “rationally related” to such an interest. “However, antagonism or a bare desire to harm a politically unpopular group cannot constitute a legitimate governmental interest (Romer).” The answer memo concludes that “if the [Supreme Court] finds that denying homosexuals marriage demeans their existence, it is likely that this statute, as written, will fail rational basis review.”

UPDATE, 11:50pm: The New York Times has deleted its link to the answer memo that I quoted above (though the link above still seems to be working) and has added a note reading, “In a previous version of this post, student answer memos were posted in addition to Mr. Obama’s memos.” So it seems that the answer memo was not written by Obama personally, though it remains true that he chose it as the best answer any of his students were able to provide.