Something Is Wrong

There's something odd happening in the national psyche. As we celebrate the inauguration of our 44th President, the mood of the country has taken on a bizarre schizophrenia.

On the one hand, pessimism about the state of the nation is everywhere. You can't turn on the TV, listen to the radio or read a newspaper without being assaulted with doom and gloom. But it goes beyond just the media. There is a sense in the American people that I can't describe as anything other than fear.

There is a cloud of fear, no... more than that, of dread. There is a vague sense of foreboding in the air. Part of that is understandable. The economy took quite a frightening shock with the collapse of the financial markets. Unemployment is going up, as are home foreclosures. It's appropriate that people would be concerned.

But what I'm sensing goes beyond that. It's as if something terrible has happened in our lives while we are just beginning to wake from a pleasant dream. At that moment of semi-consciousness where you can't quite tell which reality is real and which is the dream, you hope and cling to the dream because it is the more pleasant. Yet, as you move towards consciousness and begin to realize that the happy dream is false, for a moment you cling to it even more desperately.

Perhaps it's a fear that all our prosperity and success as Americans is not as secure as we once believed. Perhaps everything can be snatched away from us in an instant. Perhaps it's the suspicion that the strong foundation of our country is nothing more than sand.

To be fair, we have been under unusual psychological stress for the past few years. 9/11 destroyed our innocence that we were immune from harm. We tried to go on with our lives as usual, but somewhere beneath the surface, as hard as we tried not to think about it, we knew.

The sudden and dramatic crisis in our economy, showing that our prosperity is also fragile may have just been the triggering event to bring a more general level of anxiety to the surface.

Regardless of the source of our insecurity, contrast it with the growing glorification of Barack Obama. Obama is a charming and skilled politician. Placing a modest degree of “hope” in the new President is normal. What is not normal is the growing level of worship, approaching idolatry. There is a feverish quality to the praise being heaped upon him. His emulation of the trappings of Lincoln seems even humble by comparison to the image of him as messiah.

What has he done to warrant this frenzied exaltation, other than to simply exist? He has a relatively brief history of public service, of no extraordinary note. He has proposed no revolutionary new policies, it's all fairly standard Democratic boilerplate. He was a leftist in the primaries, then a centrist in the general election, and throughout he studiously refused to take positions on most controversial issues at all. Do we even know him?

I think that may be the point. We don't know him. Obama is an enigma. Onto his blank canvas we are projecting our desperate need for... something. Perhaps a savior to banish all our fears and make that pleasant dream we cling to our reality.

As Americans, we used to believe in our country and in ourselves. Now we are placing our faith in a man. Not even a man, but the image of a man that we have created, but does not exist.

What this bodes for our nation and our future, I do not know. But it frightens me, because something is wrong.