Enough blog foreplay: time to get down to the business of specifics, of details, which is where not only the proverbial devil dwells, but much else besides. I have thus far introduced myself a bit, had a word or two to say about the new President, even ruminating on the extent to which he might be a closet temperamental conservative, and had a little fun with names and Semitic languages. I promised, however, that once certain preliminaries were given their due -- you might call it prolegomena if you want to be fancy, or simple throat clearing if you want to be more honest--I'd get down to the day-to-day chronicle and commentary that is, I have been led to believe, the lifeblood of a daily blog.

But first another preliminary!  I actually don't feel all that comfortable with the whole idea of blogs. Essays, which until recently required actual paper and ink, connote some rigor as to logic and presentation, some attention to rules of evidence, and some respect for actual knowledge. There is no such thing as a first-draft ready essay.  Blogs, which require only electrons, connote instead intellectual impressionism rather than rigor, little or no attention to facts or evidence, and no respect for actual knowledge. Blogs are antithetical to the qualities of temperamental conservatism, and there seems to be no such thing as anything but a first-draft ready blog. 

I don't like the whole subculture, and I don't like the premise that seems to lurk below the whole affair--namely, the postmodern nonsense that there is no reality that can be plumbed, no facts, no foundation for any non-relativist epistemology. If it were true that there are no facts, only narratives, then the difference between informed analysis and opinion and analysis and opinion based mainly on anal wind would disappear. 

I say this is nonsense because it plainly is. Not even a postmodernist lit-crit fanatic would take a sick child to just anyone with an opinion about how to save the child's life instead of to a credentialed medical professional. When it matters, science is trump, and romantic gibberish takes a back seat. If it were really true that there are no facts and no way to establish causality, then none of the machines we use could exist. Where did this nutty idea come from? Some say it came from young anthropologists looking for a convenient pretext for not having to do actual fieldwork--that was the late Ernst Gellner's suspicion, in any case. But it probably came from a misunderstanding coupled with the widespread academic malady of wanting to be outrageous in order to be different in order to get noticed in order to maybe get tenure in order to persuade said academic that his or her professional life actually mattered to someone. In any event, what was the misunderstanding?

To simplify some, before Immanuel Kant came along, people used to think that human senses simply discovered reality. What people saw was what was really out there. Our senses simply copied reality, as it were, and conveyed it as such. It then dawned on some people that the human senses shape and filter sensory impressions, and that societies collectively shape reality for people through the assumptions they bring to it. As one man put it (Erving Goffman, an old teacher of mine), "social life takes up and freezes into itself the conceptions we have of it." In other words, human cognitive processes and the social psychology of groups meet reality half way. This means that different cultures will over time construe the world differently--will adopt different symbolic systems and means of categorizing reality, as they clearly do. This is called idealism, in the broadest philosophical sense of the term (not to be confused with that word's more common meaning). Now, it's one thing to say that our brains interpret the objective world and help to constitute it in our heads through language and other symbols, and quite another to say that our brains create the world irrespective of objective reality. This is what postmodernists seem to be actually claiming, or at least that's what it really comes down to despite their occasional protestations otherwise. This is silly, of course. It's a little like imagining a condom working properly with nothing inside of it, something that, as best I can tell, cannot be.

All that said, my blog, this blog, is not an implicit endorsement of postmodernism in any shape or form. It is not an implicit endorsement of the view that logic, rules of evidence and knowledge really don't matter because, hey, what the heck, all opinions are pretty much equally valuable or worthless, depending on one's view of the human species. I don't believe any of that. So why the blog at all? I already told you, in the first post: I need to shed words during the day so that I won't burden my family and friends with my incessant babbling. 

OK, now, a week after President Obama may be said to have gotten down to work, we have something of a track record to examine. People pay excruciatingly close attention to beginnings, searching them solid to find some indication of deeper meanings that might allow prediction and better understanding of things to come. Sometimes people read too much into things; they "fill in" excessively, and that's natural. So for example my friend Fouad Ajami saw (in yesterday's Wall Street Journal)  in a few phrases in Obama's inaugural address the abandonment of democracy promotion in the Arab and Muslim worlds as part of American policy.  I don't doubt that Obama's understanding of this issue differs from that of his predecessor, and thank God for that (I am long on record opposing the Bush-style "forward strategy for freedom" as counterproductive and liable to lead to disaster, as it has in Gaza and arguably elsewhere, but never mind....). But I think Fouad reads too much into the language Obama (and his speechwriter) chose, and he ignored other language that might suggest the opposite, if you're looking to find it. "To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit based on the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history", he said, adding: "But that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist." That can be read as pro-democracy promotion language if you want to read it that way. 

So we do have the Inaugural address to go on. We also have the President's interview with Al-Arabiya, the first he gave as President. And we have the President's comments on Capitol Hill yesterday, and of course the stimulus bill itself. We have, too, some behaviors in foreign policy, like drone attacks on Pakistan's Pashtun region and a willingness to let the U.S. Navy board a ship carrying Iranian weapons to Syria, presumably for re-routing to Gaza for Hamas. Secretary of State Clinton, too, has spoken some of Iran, North Korea and Pakistan. There have been some authoritative leaks about a new approach to Afghanistan and its erstwhile President, Hamid Karzai. There's actually a lot to talk about, a lot to reckon at the beginning of the journey that, like all such journeys, establishes the origins of a path dependency. 

Indeed, so much has happened so fast that one hardly knows where to start. So let me just speak very briefly and telegraphically about a few items that, to me stand out as interesting and potentially important. 

First, the Inaugural was not a particularly good speech. It was mercifully and properly brief, and it did contain by my count three paragraphs (out of more than two dozen) that qualify as Presidential-level stuff. The rest of it was sort of clunky in places, a lot of it was excessively vague, and no overarching and memorable theme can be taken from it. I wrote speeches for Colin Powell and a few for Condoleezza Rice, so I sort of know what this black art, as Peggy Noonan, one of President Reagan's speechwriters once called it, is about. After the campaign, during which Obama could be mesmerizing and electrifying, the Inaugural was a let-down for me.  Of course if you voted for the man and love him to pieces you won't agree. You know the old saw: Love a man, love his wart; hate a man, hate his wart. But as someone who did not vote for him (or McCain) but still very much wants him to succeed, I say it wasn't a very good speech. 

Why? Some say he did it on purpose, so as not to raise expectations too high. But I think that a 27-year old speechwriter who captured Obama very well as a politician and campaigner did not succeed in capturing him as President on day one. Good morning, folks: This is not the same thing! Writing for a President is a fundamentally different kind of task than writing for a candidate, even if the two are the same flesh-and-blood human being. It's not easy to do, and it's not easy to make the switch effortlessly. 

The Al-Arabiya interview, also, I found troubling. His impromptu speech in it was not especially eloquent, which is surprising considering how eloquent that man usually is. As others have also noted, his toss-off phrase that we had good, mutual respectful relations with the Arab and Muslim world "as recently as twenty or thirty years ago" suggests that he doesn't know much about that part of the world. The period between 1979 and 1989 was not exactly calm and lovely for U.S.-Arab relations. He also said that a Palestinian state should be "contiguous." What does that mean--that the West Bank and Gaza should be connected by a slice of Israeli territory, which would (look at a map, and you'll see) make Israel discontinuous, dividing Beersheba off from direct access to Eilat? Evelyn Shuckberg of the British Foreign Office cooked up a truly mad idea back in the 1950s, called "dancing triangles" at the time, to reconcile this problem, but I am reasonably sure Obama has never heard of this this particular piece of archival esoterica. So I have no idea what he means by contiguous in this case. 

Most of the interview was fine, at least in the sense that he did not say anything genuinely gaffe-like. Some of it was pretty tough, too, which is good, since that compensated for a remark toward the beginning in which Obama criticized previous American approaches. That's not presidential. He can believe whatever he likes, but a President cannot just say out loud whatever he believes.

What irked me most, perhaps, is that three or four times he did something George Bush frequently did that drove me crazy: He spoke of himself in the effective third person, speaking about himself as a kind of object. Bush used to start off little impromptu talks by saying things like "I'm here today to tell you that....." instead of just telling them. This dissociation of Presidential authority from the person of the President is always a bad idea. It diminishes Presidential authority. It's a kind of schizophrenia to publicly refer to the purpose of one's own efforts, of one's own job. Obama did it repeatedly: "Now, my job is to communicate the fact that the United States has a stake in the well-being of the Muslim world."  Why not just say, "I believe that the United States has a stake...."? And then he said, "And so what I want to communicate is. . ." and "And my job is to communicate. . ." and so on. He's the President. It's not a job; it's a role. His authority needs to be portrayed as unitary and indivisible. He needs to stop calling attention to what he is doing while he is doing it, as with theatrical asides, because it diminishes the drama, and that in turn diminishes his own power. Someone needs to take him aside and tell him to knock this stuff off.

The stimulus plan, as I said in an earlier post, is disappointing. It doesn't touch the transactional K-Street culture; it feeds it. It's not creative or well thought through. Our civil engineers are deeply disappointed with the infrastructural parts. I like Alice Rivlin's idea that we vote the tax cuts and the simple, immediate stuff now, but wait and and be more careful with the longer-term aspects of the plan. Divide the thing into two, in other words--excellent idea. We will surely waste a lot of money if we don't stop to think through the consequences of what we're doing right now. It's not every day--thank God, again--that the government goes and spends $800 billion.

As for all the rest, just one comment. I think the hard power drone strikes into Pakistan are meant to balance out the impressions created by the "soft" decision in principle to close down Guantanamo. Or at least I hope some thought was given to balancing impressions, to the orchestration of words and deeds which is, whatever else it is, what diplomacy is largely about. One can, after all, hope.