Did President Obama violate the precepts of etiquette and display raging narcissism at the funeral of Daniel Inouye?

It's pretty much what everyone is saying, notably Emily Yoffe at Slate (where one ordinarily expects support for the Prez). When I encounter a controversy at this late stage of one-sidedness, my instinct is to develop the other side. Law school class is like that, you know. If there's a case that everyone just somehow knows is rightly decided, the way to have a discussion about it isn't to remark upon its obviousness, but to figure out how someone — someone intelligent, educated, and sane — could think it wasn't right. That's what I do.

Read Yoffe's description of Obama's eulogy, which dwells on Obama's own life, growing up in Hawaii, the state Inouye represented in the Senate. Obama talks about his family vacations, where they stayed in motels, and the motel rooms had TVs, and — "as the people must have been twitching in the pews wondering where this was all going" — the Watergate hearings were on TV, and so he saw Inouye, and because Inouye did not have that typical white person look, the young mixed-race Obama was inspired to imagine "what might be possible in my own life."

A funeral for a very old person — Inouye was 88 — is not an occasion for deep mourning or soothing profound shock. It can be an occasion to look back on the era, to indulge one's own personal connections to the time and the man who has passed on. And if the President of the United States speaks at the funeral, that in itself is a phenomenal honor for the deceased. The President should not read a typical eulogy, a conventional account of the dead man's achievements and wonderful personal traits. This is something different. And when the President is specifically noted for his oratory, something special is anticipated.

No one — I submit — was "twitching in the pews wondering where this was all going." They were rapt, experiencing the gift of a unique presentation, The Story of a Boy — that boy! — and how his individual history merged with The Story of America — A Story of Race. They knew, as they surrendered themselves into the hands of our storyteller-in-chief, that they would be cared for and rewarded. The threads would come together, the yarns would be knitted into a beautiful eulogy blanket, under which Daniel Inouye could be laid to rest and all would be comforted.

How dare you snatch that comfort away by counting the "I"s and "me"s in that speech?!

About David Petraeus: "The man falls in love with... himself!"

That's what I wrote, when I first saw that the man's love interest was the woman who wrote a fawning biography about him. It reminded me of John Edwards, falling for the woman who was trotting around after him videographing what her trotting around videographing made seem like the amazing wonder of his very being.

A reader emails:

"The man falls in love with... himself!"

And that is at the center of what an affair is about.

Here's Shirley Glass, who before her death a few years ago was considered one of the top experts on infidelity:

There is an attraction in the affair, and I try to understand what it is. Part of it is the romantic projection: I like the way I look when I see myself in the other person’s eyes. There is positive mirroring. An affair holds up a vanity mirror, the kind with all the little bulbs around it; it gives a nice rosy glow to the way you see yourself. By contrast, the marriage offers a make-up mirror; it magnifies all your wrinkles and pores, every little flaw. When someone loves you despite the fact that they can see all your flaws, that is a reality-based love.

In the stories of what happened during the affair, people seem to take on a different persona, and one of the things they liked best about being in that relationship was the person they had become. The man who wasn’t sensitive or expressive is now in a relationship where he is expressing his feelings and is supportive.

Petraeus's woman: his biographer!

What does it say about a man that he falls for the woman who cranks out the PR about what a swell guy he is?

It's so... John Edwards and Rielle Hunter.

The man falls in love with... himself!

"Twitter is unspeakably irritating. Twitter stands for everything I oppose."

"It's hard to cite facts or create an argument in 140 characters … It's like if Kafka had decided to make a video semaphoring The Metamorphosis. Or it's like writing a novel without the letter 'P'… It's the ultimate irresponsible medium. People I care about are readers… particularly serious readers and writers, these are my people. And we do not like to yak about ourselves."

Said big-shot writer Jonathan Franzen, which led to the Twitter fad #JonathanFranzenhates:

According to tweeters' yakking, the novelist hates everything from "Emoticons, because it takes 600 pages to accurately convey emotion", to puppies, people who hate Jar Jar Binks, and cameras, because "real pictures should be painted".

Hey, wait. Those tweeters are not yakking about themselves. Franzen threw in that extra concept: narcissism, self-obsesssion, inwardness. It wasn't just about how long or short writing good writing ought to be. It was also a moralistic judgment about what should absorb a decent person's attention. Ah! But Mr. Novelist, what about you? Could you yak about yourself long enough to tell the truth about whether your lengthy scribblings are about yourself?

I've only read one Jonathan Franzen book, "The Discomfort Zone," and it was all about him, him yakking about himself. That's why I read it. It's a memoir. He's more famous for novels, and I tend to read nonfiction, so I've read his memoir. But those novels... I'm guessing they involve all sorts of fictional characters who are more or less processed versions of himself. And they yak... for 600 pages.

Meanwhile, many tweeters look outward and are not self-absorbed at all.

A Meadhouse conversation about blogging/broadcasting and marriage.

I read that last post out loud and said "I sent that to Glenn."

Meade: "Oh, you emailed it to him." I see the concerned look on his face.

Me: "I wrote it as a post, and then I emailed the link to Glenn. What?! That look! What if Rush Limbaugh ran everything past his wife before he said it on the air? 'I'm thinking of saying this... what do you think?' His show would be horrible!"

Meade: "You should post that. This conversation. Exactly that."

Me: "Shhh!"

Meade: "You..."

Me: "Shhhhhh! Don't say anything. I won't remember the quotes."

ADDED: Actually, I can imagine that Rush's Fluke floundering did involve some consultation with his wife. I can imagine a woman egging him on, making him feel licensed to attack a woman in a truly bitchy way. My other theory about Rush — which Meade doesn't want me to publish — is that he just had to seize the spotlight back from Andrew Breibart, who'd gotten so much attention by dropping dead at the age of 43. Everyone was talking about Breitbart, as if Breitbart had been the biggest thing in right-wing media. We'll never see his like again... and Rush felt compelled to say something truly outrageous. He's always saying he knows how to play the media, to do his "media tweak of the day":

This was our Media Tweak of the Day yesterday, April. You know, what we do here on this program is, purposely, play the media like violin, like a Stradivarius. And I love tweaking them. I love irritating them, and I love upsetting them and all you do is take words uttered by liberals and apply them to current events.

And he tweaked his damnedest.

IN THE COMMENTS: James correctly points out that Rush started talking about Fluke on his February 29th show, and we did not hear of Breitbart's death until the morning of March 1st. So the basic "prostitute" idea was out there already, but Rush, having heard criticism, pushed back hard on the March 1st show, and then again on March 2nd.

George Lucas is "moving away from the business, from the company, from all this kind of stuff."

He's not going to make movies anymore? It seems to me he bowed out of movie-making a long time ago. But he's back and saying I'm not going to play anymore because movie executives weren't interested in the movie he made. Don't they know who he is?! Don't they care about about black people?! The movie's about the Tuskegee Airmen, and Lucas is acting as if a historically and racially important subject means that the movie is important and as if executives should bow down when a movie is important when there's no reason to think anything other than that they care about whether a whole lot of people want to see a movie and historical and racial importance is not what brings out the big crowds.

Lucas's whining is too funny. It was his "Star Wars" that ended the great movie period of the early 1970s and got the business focused on giant blockbusters. And now he's supposedly going to "to devote the rest of his life to what cineastes in the 1970s used to call personal films. They’ll be small in scope, esoteric in subject and screened mostly in art houses." Well, fine. I look forward to seeing more ironies pile up on top of each other.

Side question: Is the Tuskegee Airmen movie — "Red Tails" — any good?

All preview screenings are wildly optimistic celebrations of the possible. But this was different. This was a rally. “On Jan. 20,” an 89-year-old Tuskegee ace named Roscoe C. Brown Jr., told the crowd, “every African-American in this country ought to go see ‘Red Tails.’ ” Desirée Rogers, who is now C.E.O. of Johnson Publishing Company, said she was splashing “Red Tails” on the cover of Ebony. And Al Sharpton, sounding like a “Star Wars” fanboy in 1977, later insisted that “it’s probably one of the best movies I’ve ever seen!”

In other words, it's medicinal. It's medicine that "every African-American in this country" is supposed to take. The rich white man made it. Buy it!

He slipped into a kind of Socratic conversation with an imaginary studio head.

“I’m making it for black teenagers.”

“And you’re doing it as a throwback movie? You’re not going to do it as a hip, happening-now, music-video kind of movie?”

“No, that’s not a smart thing to do. There’s not really going to be a lot of swearing in it. There’s probably not going to be a huge amount of blood in it. Nobody’s head’s going to get blown off.”

“And you’re going to be very patriotic — you’re making a black movie that’s patriotic?”

“They have a right to have their history just like anybody else does,” Lucas said. “And they have a right to have it kind of Hollywood-ized and aggrandized and made corny and wonderful just like anybody else does. Even if that’s not the fashion right now.”

They have a right to their history... made into a craptastic Hollywood blockbuster? That is, you appropriated black history and absorbed it into the kind of overblown bullshit you made America love? This is all about George Lucas. It's not about rights for black people. It's about you, and if it's awful, it's because you made an awful movie. And you made the movies awful. And now you're going to flounce off and make art movies....

Please just go away.

Obama processing doubts about running for reelection.

Here's the moment in Obama's "60 Minutes" interview that struck us:



Transcription:

PRESIDENT OBAMA: ... And as Michelle reminds me, "You volunteered for this thing."...

KROFT: Have you and Michelle ever had a conversation about whether you should really seek a second term? Have there been any doubts in your mind about not running again?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: No. Not because our quality of life might not be better if I were not president. Not because Michelle is so enamored with me being President. But because we both think that what we're doing is really important for a lot of people out there.

Hearing that, what stunned me was the way Obama processed the question in terms of his personal life with Michelle and seemed to reveal that he's not enjoying life as President and that Michelle isn't happy about it. Then he yanks himself out of that personal brooding and plugs in the appropriate, conventional, and utterly bland assertion that he's doing important things for people. And even that appropriate statement involves Michelle. Michelle and the "people out there."

People out there... what a phrase. It's so... Norma Desmond....

"In a weird way the country is not commensurate with [Obama's] gifts."

"That's a harsh thing to say but I have a feeling in the dark night of the soul, that's what he feels. I think he thinks that this is a[n] eighteenth century constitutional republic that needs s-s-significant updating."

So said Jon Meachum, the former Newsweek editor and present Random House editor on MSNBC the other day. Rush Limbaugh was delighted:

That's how you do it! That's how you get rid of him. That's how you convince him to move on. You tell him that he's so, so above this chump country. That's how you do it, folks. They listen to me. They did listen to me.

A few weeks early, Limbaugh had criticized Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen for telling Obama he should — for the good of the country — step aside and let Hillary be the 2012 Democratic Party nominee.

Now, the Schoen-Caddell plan comes down to putting the country above personal ambition.... Obama is a narcissist.  If you want Obama to step aside, you have to flatter him.  You have to tell him the office is beneath him.  If you tell Obama -- well, it's too late now. ...

Messrs. Caddell and Schoen, this, I'm afraid, will guarantee that he will stay.  But if you had flattered him, if you had told him that there are greater things, that the reason things are going the way they are is because he's just not challenged, this is just too small, that you can tell he's bored, you can tell he's not interested.  We all can see that he and Michelle don't like the White House.  They don't like living there.  They would rather be anywhere else.  Running this country is so uninteresting to him, so beneath his stature, so beneath his skill set, so beneath his intellect. The world is crying for a leader now, not just America, the world is crying for a leader, a leader that the United States will listen to.  Then maybe you guys coulda gotten him to quit.  I wish you'd-a called me. I wish you'da sent me a note.

ADDED: By the way, my reaction to the Schoen-Caddell column was similar to Rush's — and I was first:

... I can see Obama choosing to withdraw, with some magnificent long-term life plan. But pressure him out? Ridiculous! 

Getting attention/avoiding attention.

I'm just noticing that the blog — by accident — has a theme today. So far.

Are you trying to get attention or sneaking around?

Are you looking for attention?
	Yes, and getting it.
	Yes, please notice me.
	No. Not that I'm avoiding it.
	No, I'm flying under the radar... for a reason.
pollcode.com free polls

"Perhaps it would be helpful to imagine me as the White Rock girl..."

"... kneeling on a boulder in a nightgown, either looking for minnows or adoring her own reflection."

That's the last sentence of the preface to Kurt Vonnegut's "Welcome to the Monkey House." He's purporting to explain himself, writing in a style that appeals to me more than anything I've read in a long time. Here's the White Rock girl, by the way. Here's Vonnegut.

He's saying that in response to The New Yorker magazine saying that one of his books was "a series of narcissistic giggles."

ADDED: Here's one of the essays that appears in the "Monkey House" collection — one of the 3 things I read in the middle of the night last night. It's a 1966 review of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language, which was new back then. Here's the part about the business of unabridged dictionaries:

Whoever decides to crash the unabridged dictionary game next--and it will probably be General Motors or Ford--they will winnow this work heartlessly for bloopers....

Have I made it clear that this book is a beauty? You can't beat the contents, and you can't beat the price. Somebody will beat both sooner or later, of course, because that is good old Free Enterprise, where the consumer benefits from battles between jolly green giants.

And, as I've said, one dictionary is as good as another for most people. Homo Americanus is going to go on speaking and writing the way he always has, no matter what dictionary he owns.

"'I couldn’t be a woman,' Steve Martin once joked, 'because I’d play with my breasts all day.'"

"Now he has written a novel about a young woman, but nearly the only thing he can imagine about her is wanting to play with her breasts. The Object of Beauty is a nasty exercise in narcissism, particularly in the narcissism of the famous."

A nasty review that considers a book nasty because it seems only to say look at my breasts begins with 2 sentences that say look at my breasts.

"In Fifty Years We'll All Be Chicks: ... And Other Complaints from an Angry Middle-Aged White Guy."

A book title... on the list of things readers have bought via my Amazon portal...




... which I encourage you to use, of course, in case you're looking for a way to show your love for Althouse, the blog... and Althouse, the chick.

Now, I'm doing a search inside that book — it's by Adam Corolla — and — what can I look for? — shorts! What does Corolla have to say about men in shorts?

When the Patriot Act cam back in the news in 2005, every single one of my faggoty, lefty Hollywood friends squealed like a stuck pig. "I don't want the government eavesdropping on my e-mail exchanges or listening in on my cell-phone conversations." Everyone had their cargo shorts in a bunch over it. I was the only one I knew who was like, "Hey, Agent Double-O Douchebag, if the government intercepts any of your e-mails all they're going to find out is that you're not funny. And how about spending a little less time worrying about the government and a little more time focusing on your narcissistic disorder, the one that leads you to believe the government actually gives a shit about you."

It's dangerous for a comedian to do a riff about how other people are not funny. He'd better be seriously funny at that point or he's asking for it.

Anyway, cargo shorts... wear them, guys, to walk toward the future in which you will all be chicks.

Depriving people who crave attention from getting attention?

DSM-5 eliminates narcissism as an official personality disorder.

The conflict is nowhere near as amusingly ironic as my post title or the headline at the link suggests.

"Bellesiles’s piece reads as if it were a short story (perhaps inspired by a real case) with himself playing the part of the sensitive, caring professor."

Layering suspicions of narcissism on top of suspicions of lying.

The unnatural complexities of marriage and motherhood.

A new translation of Simone de Beauvoir's "Second Sex" is reviewed by Francine du Plessix Gray. Here's a paragraph about marriage and motherhood:

Wedding nights “transform the erotic experience into an ordeal” that “often dooms the woman to frigidity forever.” It isn’t surprising, she adds, “that ‘conjugal duties’ are often only a repugnant chore for the wife.” “No one,” she argues, “dreams of denying the tragedies and nastiness of married life.” Conjugal love, in Beauvoir’s view, is “a complex mixture of attachment, resentment, hatred, rules, resignation, laziness and hypocrisy.” Even marriages that “work well” suffer “a curse they rarely escape: boredom.” Already alarmed? Wait until you come to the discussion of motherhood. A woman experiences the fetus as “a parasite.” “Maternity is a strange compromise of narcissism, altruism, dream, sincerity, bad faith, devotion and cynicism.” “There is nothing like an ‘unnatural mother,’ since maternal love has nothing natural about it.” It is significant that the only stage of a woman’s life Beauvoir has good things to say about is widowhood, which, in her view, most bear quite cheerfully. Upon losing their spouses, she tells us, women, “now lucid and wary, . . . often attain a delicious cynicism.” In old age, they maintain “a stoic defiance or skeptical irony.”...

[A] pivotal notion at the heart of “The Second Sex” ... is her belief that... “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” This preposterous assertion [is] intended to bolster her argument that marriage and motherhood are institutions imposed by men to curb women’s freedom....

De Beauvoir herself, did not marry. But her longtime companion Jean-Paul Sartre did propose to her. She told him he was being "silly."

"Every murderous totalitarian government of the 20th century began with some insulated group of faux-intellectuals congratulating each other on how smart they are..."

"... and fantasizing about how, if they could just install a dictatorship-for-a-day, they could right all the wrongs in the world. It is the ultimate fantasy of the narcissist. And we’ve got whole generations of them, in control of our media and our government, all intent on 'remaking America.'"

The bookishness of Presidents.

Apparently, our Presidents tend to read a lot, but not necessarily to good effect. Like, for example, Jimmy Carter:

Presidential reading backfired on Jimmy Carter.... In the summer of 1979, with the economy struggling and the presidency shaken by the Iran hostage crisis, Carter delivered his infamous speech proclaiming a "crisis of confidence" in America. It became known as the "malaise" speech and is widely regarded as a major political mistake. The address, written mainly by adviser Pat Caddell, was inspired by Christopher Lasch's best-selling book "The Culture of Narcissism." Lasch had come to the White House for a dinner about six weeks before the address, and his ideas apparently stayed behind. Two days after the July 15 speech, Carter fired several Cabinet members, adding to the sense of drift that seemed to define the era. (In 1993, during the fourth season of "The Simpsons," Springfield unveiled a Carter statue; the inscription at the base read "Malaise Forever.")

First, the obligatory foray into YouTube:



Anyway, did you read Christopher Lasch's "Culture of Narcissism" back in the 1970s when it was a best seller? If it was such a best seller, why didn't America appreciate Carter's "Crisis of Confidence" speech?  I just watched that speech again at the link. I heard it in real time back in 1979. I must confess that it appealed to me at the time, but it's scarily bizarre by present-day standards.

Here's the spiffy, non-lugubrious way we talk about narcissism today — a fun-loving article, not a scolding, depressing book.

Which politician is the greater believer in his/her own cult of personality?

Barack Obama or Sarah Palin? If you had to say one actually believes the hype and the other is knowingly exploiting the nonsense, what would you say?

This is a hypothetical. Do not change the hypothetical. Answer the question asked.

Marty Peretz on the President's narcissism.

"What I suspect is that the president is probably a clinical narcissist. This is not necessarily a bad condition if one maintains for oneself what the psychiatrists call an 'optimal margin of illusion,' that is, the margin of hope that allows you to work. But what if his narcissism blinds him to the issues and problems in the world and the inveterate foes of the nation that are not susceptible to his charms?"

Poor Obama! All his life people projected their hopes onto him and he learned how to step up and be a bright clear screen for these projections. What looks like narcissism is, perhaps, the realism that develops when you are immersed in an environment that is so persistently and consistently distorted to give you the feedback that you are magnificently and magically effective through your sheer presence.

The man who voted present and became President is tragically — touchingly — flawed.

ADDED (after an emailed suggestion): We're Always Touched by Your Presence, Dear President.

"Caribou Barbie is one nutty puppy," says Maureen Dowd, who wants to be sure you know that Sarah Palin is crazy.

Yes, yes, Palin is crazy. I'm hearing it and hearing it, and naturally, my working theory is that Palin's opponents are taking advantage of the opportunity to paint a vivid picture in the public mind. Crazy, crazy, cah-ray-zeeeee.

Dowd does the diagnosis, plucking a term out of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or rather plucking a term out of Todd Purdum's Vanity Fair hit-piece:

And so it was, Todd Purdum learned, as he traveled Alaska reporting on Palin for Vanity Fair, that the governor’s erratic and egoistic behavior has been a source of concern for people there.

“Several told me, independently of one another,” Purdum writes, “that they had consulted the definition of ‘narcissistic personality disorder’ in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — ‘a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy’ — and thought it fit her perfectly.”

Oh! Lord help us! There were people there! There were several. Oh, my lord. Several! Several told Purdum that they were the sort of jackasses that go flipping through the DSM to leverage their displeasure with a powerful person in their vicinity.

Memo to Purdum, Dowd, and the several people there in Alaska: Everybody who runs for high office will have a lot of check marks on the DSM list of symptoms of "narcissistic personality disorder."

I mean, maybe Fred Thompson didn't, but you see, it's a problem if you don't have these things. Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, etc. etc. — who among them lacks a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, blah blah blah? Oh, but they have empathy, you burble. Bullshit! Watch all the Democrats try to claim the empathy loophole to the narcissistic personality disorder diagnosis. Ha! Bullshit! They all have it. And don't throw your money at a prospective candidate who doesn't. He'll poop out, like Fred.

Memo to the good folks who construct the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual: Consider constructing an official disorder definition that will perfectly fit the kind of people who try to understand human individuals in their vicinity by consulting DSM checklists.

***

The link goes, of course, to the NYT, so there's no link to the Vanity Fair article upon which Dowd relies so heavily. Link withholding — a symptom on what DSM disorder checklist?