Читаем After America полностью

And not for the Latin scores. Our students are certainly expert at applauding themselves, with levels of “self-esteem” growing ever more detached from more earthbound measures of achievement. A 2003 OECD study asked pupils of many lands whether they got “good marks in mathematics.”⁵⁸ Seventy-two percent of U.S. students said yes. Only 56 percent of Finns did, and a mere 25 percent of Hong Kong pupils. Yet, according to another OECD study of the world’s Ninth Graders, Hong Kong has the third best math scores in the world, Finland the second, and the top spot goes to Taiwan (which didn’t participate in the earlier feelgood study, presumably because their self-esteem levels are so low they’re undetectable).⁵⁹ Where do all those Americans so confident of their “good marks” in math actually rank in the global Hit Parade? Number 35, between Azerbaijan and Croatia. We barely scrape the Top 40 in actual math, but we’re Number One in self-esteem about our math.

Lillian Katz made her observations in the early Nineties. Fifteen years later, a generation expertly trained in tinny self-congratulation went out and voted for a candidate who told them:

There’s a lot of it about in the age of self-esteem. No satirist could invent a better parody of solipsistic sloth dignified as idealism than a bunch of people sitting around waiting for themselves. Hey, man, you’re already there.

What are you waiting for?

Many electors voted for Barack Obama in order to check “vote for a black president” off America’s to-do list. Framed like that, it sounds worthy and admirable. But one could also formulate it less attractively: they voted for Obama in order to feel good about themselves. Which is what “celebrating diversity” boils down to.

As for feelings in general, Obama himself is the perfect emblem of the Age of Empathy. Unlike the hard-faced Bush regime, he “cared.” After all, he told us so. Asked what he’s looking for in a Supreme Court justice, he gave the correct answer: “The depth and breadth of one’s empathy.”⁶⁰

In a TV infomercial a few days before his election, Obama declared that his “fundamental belief” was that “I am my brother’s keeper.”⁶¹

Hmm. Back in Kenya, his brother lives in a shack on 12 bucks a year.⁶²

If Barack is his brother’s keeper, why can’t he shove a sawbuck and a couple singles in an envelope and double the guy’s income? Ah, well: When Barack Obama claims that “I am my brother’s keeper,” what he means is that the government should be his brother’s keeper. Aside from that, his only religious belief seems to be in his own divinity:

“Do you believe in sin?” Cathleen Falsani, the religion correspondent for the Chicago Sun-Times, asked then Senator Obama.

“Yes,” he replied.

“What is sin?”

“Being out of alignment with my values.”⁶³

That’s one convenient religion: Obama worships at his own personal altar at the First Church of Himself. Unlike Clinton, he can’t feel your pain, but his very presence is your gain—or as he put it in his video address to the German people on the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall:

“Few would have foreseen on that day that a united Germany would be led by a woman from Brandenburg or that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent.”⁶⁴

Tear down that wall… so they can get a better look at me!!! Is there no one in the White House grown-up enough to say, “Er, Mr. President, that’s really the kind of line you get someone else to say about you”? And maybe somebody could have pointed out that November 9, 1989, isn’t about him but about millions of nobodies whose names are unknown, who led dreary lives doing unglamorous jobs and going home to drab accommodations, but who at a critical moment in history decided they were no longer going to live in a prison state. They’re no big deal; they’re never going to land a photoshoot for GQ. But it’s their day, not yours.

Is all of human history just a bit of colorful backstory in the Barack Obama biopic? “Few would have foreseen at the Elamite sack of Ur/Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow/the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand/the passage of the Dubrovnik Airport Parking Lot Expansion Bill that one day I would be standing before you talking about how few would have foreseen that one day I would be standing before you.”