[Vision2020] Inaugural address

[Ron Force]

Peggy Noonan has an interesting column on the speech in today's Wall Street
Journal:

http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=110006184

Way Too Much God
Was the president's speech a case of "mission inebriation"?

excerpt:

...The inaugural address itself was startling. It left me with a bad
feeling, and reluctant dislike. Rhetorically, it veered from high-class
boilerplate to strong and simple sentences, but it was not pedestrian.
George W. Bush's second inaugural will no doubt prove historic because it
carried a punch, asserting an agenda so sweeping that an observer quipped
that by the end he would not have been surprised if the president had
announced we were going to colonize Mars.

A short and self-conscious preamble led quickly to the meat of the speech:
the president's evolving thoughts on freedom in the world. Those thoughts
seemed marked by deep moral seriousness and no moral modesty.

No one will remember what the president said about domestic policy, which
was the subject of the last third of the text. This may prove to have been a
miscalculation.

It was a foreign-policy speech. To the extent our foreign policy is marked
by a division that has been (crudely but serviceably) defined as a division
between moralists and realists--the moralists taken with a romantic longing
to carry democracy and justice to foreign fields, the realists motivated by
what might be called cynicism and an acknowledgment of the limits of
governmental power--President Bush sided strongly with the moralists, which
was not a surprise. But he did it in a way that left this Bush supporter
yearning for something she does not normally yearn for, and that is: nuance.

The administration's approach to history is at odds with what has been
described by a communications adviser to the president as the "reality-based
community." A dumb phrase, but not a dumb thought: He meant that the
administration sees history as dynamic and changeable, not static and
impervious to redirection or improvement. That is the Bush administration
way, and it happens to be realistic: History is dynamic and changeable. On
the other hand, some things are constant, such as human imperfection,
injustice, misery and bad government.

This world is not heaven.

The president's speech seemed rather heavenish. It was a God-drenched
speech. This president, who has been accused of giving too much attention to
religious imagery and religious thought, has not let the criticism enter
him. God was invoked relentlessly. "The Author of Liberty." "God moves and
chooses as He wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent
hope of mankind . . . the longing of the soul."

It seemed a document produced by a White House on a mission. The United
States, the speech said, has put the world on notice: Good governments that
are just to their people are our friends, and those that are not are,
essentially, not. We know the way: democracy. The president told every
nondemocratic government in the world to shape up. "Success in our relations
[with other governments] will require the decent treatment of their own
people."

The speech did not deal with specifics--9/11, terrorism, particular
alliances, Iraq. It was, instead, assertively abstract.

"We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of
liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other
lands." "Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self
government. . . . Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation's security,
and the calling of our time." "It is the policy of the United States to seek
and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every
nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in the world."

Ending tyranny in the world? Well that's an ambition, and if you're going to
have an ambition it might as well be a big one. But this declaration, which
is not wrong by any means, seemed to me to land somewhere between dreamy and
disturbing. Tyranny is a very bad thing and quite wicked, but one doesn't
expect we're going to eradicate it any time soon. Again, this is not heaven,
it's earth.

There were moments of eloquence: "America will not pretend that jailed
dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and
servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies."
"We do not accept the existence of permanent tyranny because we do not
accept the possibility of permanent slavery." And, to the young people of
our country, "You have seen that life is fragile, and evil is real, and
courage triumphs." They have, since 9/11, seen exactly that.

And yet such promising moments were followed by this, the ending of the
speech. "Renewed in our strength--tested, but not weary--we are ready for
the greatest achievements in the history of freedom."

This is--how else to put it?--over the top. It is the kind of sentence that
makes you wonder if this White House did not, in the preparation period,
have a case of what I have called in the past "mission inebriation." A sense
that there are few legitimate boundaries to the desires born in the goodness
of their good hearts.

One wonders if they shouldn't ease up, calm down, breathe deep, get more
securely grounded. The most moving speeches summon us to the cause of what
is actually possible. Perfection in the life of man on earth is not.

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Ron Force          Moscow ID USA
rforce at moscow.com
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