As we say farewell to a dreadful year and decade, this much we can agree upon: The person of the year is not Ben Bernanke, no matter how insistently Time magazine tries to hype him into its pantheon. The Fed chairman was just as big a schnook as every other magical thinker in Washington and on Wall Street who believed that housing prices would go up in perpetuity to support an economy leveraged past the hilt. Unlike most of the others, it was Bernanke’s job to be ahead of the curve. Yet as recently as June of last year he could be found minimizing the possibility of a substantial economic downturn. And now we’re supposed to applaud him for putting his finger in the dike after disaster struck? This is defining American leadership down.
If there’s been a consistent narrative to this year and every other in this decade, it’s that most of us, Bernanke included, have been so easily bamboozled. The men who played us for suckers, whether at Citigroup or Fannie Mae, at the White House or Ted Haggard’s megachurch, are the real movers and shakers of this century’s history so far. That’s why the obvious person of the year is Tiger Woods. His sham beatific image, questioned by almost no one until it collapsed, is nothing if not the farcical reductio ad absurdum of the decade’s flimflams, from the cancerous (the subprime mortgage) to the inane (balloon boy).
I often have disagreements with Mr. Rich but this is a tour de force in my view. He is honing in on the failure to distinguish between appearance and reality.
An interesting question is where does the heart of the blame lie? For me it is with the churches. So many of these people were involved in Christian communities, and one of the key hallmarks of discipleship is exactly this kind of discernment:
“But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their faculties trained by practice to distinguish good from evil.”
–Hebrews 5:14
If the churches had done one thing – teach people a profound skepticism about politicians who claimed to represent the Messiah and the values so many churches endorsed (power, money, “success”), we might (though I have my doubts) not have fallen into so deep a moral pit. Sadly, too many churches of an evangelical stripe still think salvation comes from embracing the politics of the Republican Party, and politicians who believe that the poor must necessarily be sacrificed to the powerful profiteers of corporate America.
I am ok with you Dan, as long as you do not restrict it to one party, but also–I do not just wish to restrict the skepticism to “politicians.”
How about church leaders and others as well, never mind what you read, etc. etc.
The Bereans set a good example in the book of Acts.
We all fall woefully short here. Think of the woman at the well in John 4–how many of us would have seen her spiritual potential?
Rich has (certainly unintentionally) identified the anger and disgust that has formed the burgeoning Tea Party movement.
One might blame the media for not covering truth where truth is found. Look how the American people were fed a steady diet of JFK as the consummate family man because photos of Jackie and the kids sold newsmagazines. One might add Episcopal bishops to the list of people who now are more widely perceived as having feet of clay, as commentator Sarah Hey has noted. The news travels so fast today, though, that one diocese with a new bishop-elect is evidently villifying the character of folk who are carrying forward with a minority viewpoint. It is as if we want to keep propping up the veil Rich is rending. Then too there is the irony of Madison Avenue serving as a moral arbiter.
Though I am likewise generally unsympathetic to Mr. Rich’s views, I am inclined to agree with Canon Harmon regarding this piece, with one particular caveat: whereas most of Mr. Rich’s examples are of rosy scenarios being overtaken by the harsh realities of a broken and sinful world, the WMD imbroglio is of a different order. Surely, it was not excess of optimism that resulted in the Iraq war, but the willful obfuscation of the Hussein regime that led its people to disaster. It was simply impossible to believe anything the regime’s officials said and there was ample evidence of previous use of WMD. The Bush Administration made a considered decision, in light of these facts, that, given what could be known (and yes, there were well-publicized counters to the justifications given for going to war), seemed the most conservative course at the time. Such decisions are made to be second-guessed and were at the time and continue to be now. It was never obvious what the right decision was, any more than it is obvious that the Bomb should not have been dropped on Nagasaki.
The point, of course, is not to defend President Bush so much as to note that Mr. Rich seems in this regard to display the exact lack of distinction-making that is one of the hallmarks of the cardinal virtue of Prudence, which I would have thought to be the whole point of his article. Still in all, a good piece. Thanks for posting it.
I have to thank Kendall for posting this one — I shared the link with a number of friends, and registered agreement from both conservatives and liberals. No one likes to be played for a fool.