Now that the birther episode is behind us — we pause here for a knowing chuckle; of course it’s not really behind us — it’s fair to ask what it all means.
Why did (do?) a significant number of people, um, cling to the belief — against all reason — that Barack Obama was born somewhere other than Hawaii?
There is no shortage of theories, even if most of them aren’t conspiracy theories. But, hey, not all of us grow up to be Oliver Stone.
• Race. The basic liberal theme is that many white people could never accept the notion of a black president and therefore had to find a reason for him to not be legitimate. I’ve always found that a little simplistic. Bill Clinton, who is extremely white, was impeached, after all. We’re in an era where delegitimizing the sitting president, of any race, creed or color, has become a national sport.
And yet, it seems that The Donald — who calls himself a great friend of “the blacks” — must believe “the race” is central here. Why else would he have transitioned immediately to the affirmative-action, how-could-a- guy-like-Obama-get-into-Harvard question? It was as if Trump were trying to convince us that, yes, of course, it has to be about race.
• Class. This is the theory of the New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg and one that, to me, makes a great deal of sense. He writes: “Obama’s erudition, his ivy-league-ness, his urbanity, his citizen-of-the-worldness, his foreign-sounding name, his respect for the authority of reason and science, his ‘aristocratic’ ‘aloofness’ . . . are equally or more part of the package.”
• Red-blue divide. This theory says that red and blue are the colors that matter. Once they were a handy way to differentiate states voting Republican or Democratic on a map. Now the divide is a choose-up-sides split in the country, where the other guys’ leader must be taken down.
There’s evidence here. As I mentioned, there was Clinton’s impeachment, which was more like an attempted coup. Bush had his truthers, of course, but the closeness of the 2000 election left him illegitimate-seeming to many, which was followed by the belief that he must have stolen the 2004 election. And so Obama, a liberal pragmatist, becomes to people like Tom Tancredo and Newt Gingrich a radical danger to our community.
• OK, conspiracy. You you can’t discount the American (human?) romance with conspiracy theories, now enabled by talk radio and the Internet, meaning we no longer have the guy sitting by himself in a basement waiting for the black helicopters or the red bikes. Now the guy in the basement can log on and find people who think the exact same thing.
Conspiracy theories have a long history. FDR knew about Pearl Harbor. McKinley blew up the Maine. Maybe you know of Occam’s razor, put forward by a guy named Occam or Ockham in 14th century England. He said that, all things being equal, the simpler explanation is the more likely one, unless there’s a really, really good reason to think otherwise, which there usually isn’t.
So, Occam wouldn’t believe, for instance, that Bush blew up the Twin Towers and that thousands of Americans were involved. And he wouldn’t believe someone put false birth announcements in the Honolulu newspapers on the chance that a mixed-race baby would grow up to be president 40-odd years later.
What you have to remember about the “Manchurian Candidate” is that the candidate wasn’t Manchurian. If you wanted to somehow sneak an anti-American Marxist, socialist Muslim into the Oval Office, would you try a guy named Barack Hussein Obama whose father was Kenyan? I’m going with a guy who looks like Laurence Harvey.
• Polls. The recent birther poll says 45 percent of Republicans believe Obama was foreign-born. Could that possibly be true? If you take a poll, I’m voting no.
Polling shows, for example, that fewer people now believe that global warming is real. But most of the change has been from Republicans and little from independents or Democrats. Is the change really about global warming or it is about politics?
We have faith in little else, but believe every poll that confirms what we already believed.
• Truth. This, I believe, is where the question really turns. If you’re of a certain age — as I am — you grew up believing in truth, justice and the American way. It was taught to us by the Superman announcer who saw no irony — yes, it was a simpler time — in an illegal alien promoting the American way.
But what is true is that we understood exactly what the announcer meant. It was the ’50s and dissent was frowned upon. But even if you were a skeptic, you knew what the stakes were.
Now, there’s truth and there’s truth. This is, on balance, a good thing. We have more ways to get at the truth — and therefore more ways to understand it. But it’s not all good. If we doubt all our institutions — and the polls say we do — what do we share? If there’s a democratization of truth, it has to mean more than reading one article on climate science and thinking you’re qualified to deconstruct the work of a scientist who’s spent his entire life studying it.
And it has to mean more than deciding that Obama’s birth certificate must be a forgery, if only because you’d then have to believe that the government isn’t smart enough even to put one over on a morning radio talk show host.Maybe. But that’s not the America I want to live in.
E-mail Mike Littwin at mlittwin@denverpost.com.
