Fouad Ajami Deflates the Tires of Redeemer Obama

Fouad Ajami and I first met in 1979, when he arrived in DC to start teaching at SAIS. He stayed in my DuPont Circle condo for a week and was reading The Raj Trilogy on India and Sigmund Freud. Fouad adored India as the perfectly tolerant society and was reading Freud to understand the strange spell this semi-fraud had thrown over psychiatry---except for C.G. Jung whom I told Fouad was the perfect antidote to Freud's family drama introspection.

Three years later, after I married Marilyn, my condo on N St., N.W, a different place in the same neighborhood near SAIS, became available and Fouad rented my place while I shacked up with my spouse in Wesley Heights. Fouad was "dating" the personal secretary of the Saudi Ambassador, a very attractive young woman, at the time and we had some social interactions [I had been Embassy Pol Officer in Jidda for three years and knew the Amb & a lot of her bosses in the Saudi Foreign Ministry.]

I sold the condo and we stayed in touch for a while, but one of our last meetings I recall vividly. Fouad had sent his son to Ann Arbor to study under Ali Mazrui, a famous African [Kenyan, I believe] intellectual, and I reminded Fouad of my three formative years in Ann Arbor in the late sixties. Fouad then opened up with an outburst of great praise, the only way to describe his observations, concerning the REAL America he had discovered in Michigan and the rest of the Middle West. [Shades of Sarah Palin!] Fouad said he now understood America's greatness and that the immense latitudes between New York & Los Angeles were not simply what he had imagined them to be---a combination of Europe & Anatolian countrysides.

Fouad has always been aware of the immense self-deceptions political cultures inflict on subject populations---and there is no other way to describe Obama's crowds except throngs begging for redemption after being brainwashed into believing they are GUILTY---of everything imaginable that flaky decadent intellectuals of the left accuse them of. Guilty of leaviing a carbon imprint merely by breathing. Guilty of productive labor while millions shirk and become stoned slackers. Guilty of consuming and gaining a bit of excess weight.

There are analogies in American history to the kinds of crowds Fouad notes flow towards Obama seeking equality. The Great Awakenings of the late 18th century and the early 19th centuries with their "burnt-over districts" in upstate New York spawned new millenarian cults [Joseph Smith par exemple] and a burst of religious fervor filled with missionary appeal that turned huge numbers of Americans into Methodists and Baptists----faiths underrepresented before. This religious tone gave Lincoln's greatest speeches their universal validity.

Perhaps Obama in his vague undefined and remote persona exemplifies another American Great Awakening, this time seeking protection by Big Brother and ushering in an era when War is Peace, Love is Hate, and Ignorance is Everywhere.

Perhaps the Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, a book by Charles Mackay in 1841 which to this day is perhaps the most accurate description of what Fouad eloquently describes in Canetti's Nobel Peace Prize effort. In Mackay's quaint words which describe the ridiculous sight of the British Parliament debating Global Warming measures during the first October snowfall in London since 1922:

"Of all the offspring of Time, Error is the most ancient, and is so old and familiar an acquaintance, that Truth, when discovered, comes upon most of us like an intruder, and meets the intruder's welcome."

and Mackay's other great line is equally true as Americans go ga-ga about to vote in a fraud as fraudulent as Freud:

"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one!"

The American people are straining at the McCain/Palin gnat while they swallow the Obama/Biden camel.