Of Mice and the Need for Men

The mighty men and women of yore have always had to face their inevitable decline. Very few have gone out in a blaze of glory at their peak, like the heroes in most movies. Hitler committed suicide while hunkering in a bunker. He had almost conquered Europe. Saddam Hussein, who only a decade before was running wild over the Middle East, was found in a hole and subsequently hanged. The same anti-climatic demise has held true for many heroic figures. The great missionary/scientist Livingstone died in the African bush. Twentieth-century theologian J. Gresham Machen died of pneumonia in a barren stretch of North Dakota. Ronald Reagan, after one of the most consequential presidencies in American history, was slowly dragged away by Alzheimer's.

Yet many mighty men and women of the present forget history's lessons and desperately cling to legacies which are quickly slipping away. Two such figures are very different in their politics--Dr. James Dobson and the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Both of these men were pivotal in the political landscape for a time, but now are mice in the hands of the movements they created. Dr. Dobson increasingly finds himself out of touch with younger evangelicals, who are becoming more heterodox in their theology and liberal in their ideology. Rev. Jackson has quickly aged beyond his usefulness, representing an era of civil rights pioneering that is lost on an increasingly heterogeneous population.

Both of these men have looked puny when up against the presumed man of the hour--Barack Obama. The presumed heir to the presidency represents and connects with the present generation's moral listlessness and vague platitudes. Along with the younger generations, he disdains those moral causes represented by figures like Dobson and Jackson in the name of a moral unity that merely seeks out the lowest common denominator. Dobson and Jackson both fought for substantive change in eras when change was needed--the family structure was under attack and people were still not treated as equals. The present populace, on the other hand, has embraced a restless contentment instead of guilt and a vacuous call for "change" rather than anything substantial.

Young people--blacks and evangelicals included--are embracing Barack Obama because he speaks in the "parsel tongue" (to borrow a Harry Potterism) that opens the door to modern (or rather, postmodern) affections. His hollow rhetoric and warm smile is exactly what many people want--the ability to feel good about themselves without any sense of responsibility. The time for Dobson and Jackson's demise has come and their adherents must make their peace with that reality. The more scary prospect is the demise of moral causes in America. The War on Terror demands moral resolve, as does a variety of domestic causes during a time of unprecedented prosperity. To relinquish ourselves to Obamian ambiguity at this juncture could prove fatal.