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Quo Vadis: Obama reopens Kennedy's New Frontier
By Brother Bede Vincent Curley
For I stand here tonight facing west on what was once the last frontier. From the lands that stretch three thousand miles behind us, the pioneers gave up their safety, their comfort and sometimes their lives to build our new West. They were not the captives of their own doubts, nor the prisoners of their own price tags. They were determined to make the new world strong and free -- an example to the world, to overcome its hazards and its hardships, to conquer the enemies that threatened from within and without. John F. Kennedy, 1960 Nomination acceptance speech  Now that it is official. Not only can the US but Europe too can bathe in the smiles of Obama's hope. The selection of Senator Barack Obama and Senator „MasterCard" Biden to lead the Democratic ticket offers war-weary US Americans the prospect of some sanity directing the War Office and Foggy Bottom (although its impact on Langley is by no means clear).
In Europe those who have spent the past four to eight years wondering how Americans could inflict the cretinous Republican president on the rest of the „Free World" have been infected by the hope that finally the US electorate may have the opportunity to vote for a candidate who actually exhibits those intellectual attributes which they believe US elite universities exist to cultivate. Barack Obama really has created a kind of enthusiasm in Germany that has not been delivered since John Kennedy stood in Berlin. With few exceptions most people here have come to recognise that Ronald Reagan's attempt to imitate the New Frontiersman was cynical kitsch. That embarrassing episode has sunk into well-deserved obscurity.The comparison between Senator Barack Obama and then Senator John F. Kennedy is probably more accurate than initially appears. We know now—if it was not apparent in 1960—that John Kennedy was an anti-communist and a Cold Warrior. While an outsider for the WASP elite he worked very hard as US Senator to earn their acceptance. This acceptance was by no means universal among the US electorate. His victory over Richard Nixon was very narrow. Considering that this was the US before the Civil Rights Acts and Voting Rights Acts, there is no reason to be sanguine as to how representative that election actually was. Yet with his assassination or martydom, he has long been beatified in US politics while he was canonised in most of Europe. The relationship of Kennedy to African-Americans and the poor in the US can be seen in the reactions both of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. Those who praise Kennedy see him educated by the Civil Rights movement while critics see him as a dubious bystander at best. He called the Alliance for Progress and Peace Corps into existence and became the patron of the US Army Special Forces. When Senator Obama delivered his acceptance speech at the close of the Democratic National Convention last week he was compared with Kennedy and King—as if these had been partners before joining the communion of American saints. Yet only a couple of months before, he renounced the person and words of his own pastor—someone who knew the substance and spirit of King's day from personal experience not from films or textbooks. The reason given—that his pastor's words were the angry residue of the past. Here too, the comparison with Kennedy is unfavourably accurate. By all accounts Kennedy and King did not agree on either the language or intent of civil rights in the US. Despite the build-up to Obama's acceptance emphasising the 45th anniversary of the March on Washington and King's speech there, Obama actually offers far more Kennedy than King. Kennedy said: We stand at the edge of a New Frontier—the frontier of unfulfilled hopes and dreams. Beyond that frontier are uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered problems of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus. Obama realigns this message after referring to the middle-class jobs he wants to promote in new technologies: Instead, it is that American spirit, that American promise, that pushes us forward even when the path is uncertain; that binds us together in spite of our differences; that makes us fix our eye not on what is seen, but what is unseen, that better place around the bend. Obama does not claim as Kennedy did that the world is divided by three. But he does leave the question of the condition of the rest of the world unaddressed. Kennedy told the convention that those who were not under communist rule were suffering from poverty and disease as if these were natural conditions. However, Obama does not even mention them. Kennedy states the challenges for all Americans as does Obama but there is no longer even the pretense of a peaceful world beyond US borders. Instead there are the threats of terrorism and the challenges of Russian, Chinese and Indian power. Like Kennedy, Obama sets a tone for heightened US aggression but without acknowledging that the US has any culpability let alone responsibility for the conditions that the US treats as threats. He then shifts into the Martin Luther King mode, not available to Kennedy at the time of the latter's nomination, worth quoting at length: You have shown what history teaches us, that at defining moments like this one, the change we need doesn't come from Washington. Change comes to Washington. (APPLAUSE) Change happens -- change happens because the American people demand it, because they rise up and insist on new ideas and new leadership, a new politics for a new time. America, this is one of those moments... You know, this country of ours has more wealth than any nation, but that's not what makes us rich. We have the most powerful military on Earth, but that's not what makes us strong. Our universities and our culture are the envy of the world, but that's not what keeps the world coming to our shores. Instead, it is that American spirit, that American promise, that pushes us forward even when the path is uncertain; that binds us together in spite of our differences; that makes us fix our eye not on what is seen, but what is unseen, that better place around the bend. That promise is our greatest inheritance. It's a promise I make to my daughters when I tuck them in at night and a promise that you make to yours, a promise that has led immigrants to cross oceans and pioneers to travel west, a promise that led workers to picket lines and women to reach for the ballot. (APPLAUSE) And it is that promise that, 45 years ago today, brought Americans from every corner of this land to stand together on a Mall in Washington, before Lincoln's Memorial, and hear a young preacher from Georgia speak of his dream. (APPLAUSE) The men and women who gathered there could've heard many things. They could've heard words of anger and discord. They could've been told to succumb to the fear and frustrations of so many dreams deferred. But what the people heard instead -- people of every creed and color, from every walk of life -- is that, in America, our destiny is inextricably linked, that together our dreams can be one. "We cannot walk alone," the preacher cried. "And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back."
America, we cannot turn back... (APPLAUSE) ... not with so much work to be done; not with so many children to educate, and so many veterans to care for; not with an economy to fix, and cities to rebuild, and farms to save; not with so many families to protect and so many lives to mend. America, we cannot turn back. We cannot walk alone. At this moment, in this election, we must pledge once more to march into the future. Let us keep that promise, that American promise, and in the words of scripture hold firmly, without wavering, to the hope that we confess. Thank you. God bless you. And God bless the United States of America. Those who did not see the King deliver his speech at the time can compare the dramaturgy by going to YouTube. Obama seems not only to have studied the text but also the gestures—reducing them to the scale appropriate to a Northerner with only a weak feeling for the African-American preaching tradition (as could be seen by his disowning of Jeremiah Wright). Still there remains something authentic in the Obama speech. Like the Kennedy speech in 1960, Obama is precise in what he says and what he omits. His honesty, an honesty erroneously attributed to Kennedy after his canonisation, emerges because the omissions and the choice of words can be traced very accurately to the positions—conservative positions—for which he voted as senator and which he has defended with increasing vehemence since his nomination was secure. Although the US is at war, Obama did not choose King's Riverside Church sermon and his one allusion at the beginning to King's last Memphis sermon was nearly facetious. Those who want to hear Obama preaching a perhaps slow but certain end to the war in Iraq should not confuse this with an end to White House guided war. Observers in Britain, perhaps because of the remarkable affinity both between Downing Street and the White House that has prevailed for the past 16 years, appear to focus on Iraq as a benchmark for Obama's foreign policy. However, this is misleading. Since the German government then under Gerhard Schroeder refused to support the US-UK coalition in the Iraq invasion, the biggest country in NATO and the EU has been under constant pressure by the US to contribute both financially and militarily to US war efforts. The current chancellor was at the White House decrying Schroeder's position. Schroeder still won narrowly. However, by the time the next election came around—and despite the fact that left of centre parties took a majority of the vote—Ms Merkel was made federal chancellor in a coalition painstakingly improvised to assure that the Green Party and the Democratic Left were excluded. Since then Germany has been increasing its military participation—not in Iraq but in Afghanistan. The message of Barack Obama, borrowing from the Berlin mayor during the Airlift, Ernst Reuter, and imitating Kennedy at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, was that Afghanistan and the borders of the former Soviet Union were going to be the „new frontiers". This is the moment when we must renew our resolve to rout the terrorists who threaten our security in Afghanistan, and the traffickers who sell drugs on your streets. No one welcomes war. I recognize the enormous difficulties in Afghanistan. But my country and yours have a stake in seeing that NATO's first mission beyond Europe's borders is a success. For the people of Afghanistan, and for our shared security, the work must be done. America cannot do this alone. The Afghan people need our troops and your troops; our support and your support to defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda, to develop their economy, and to help them rebuild their nation. We have too much at stake to turn back now. By shifting to Afghanistan the US can open the doors to greater EU military cooperation, esp. that of Germany. The German Bundeswehr is already there. The corporations that support Germany's foreign policy were behind its leading role in the destruction of Yugoslavia. They have not ceased looking for leverage against Russia—esp. in the quest for primary commodities. The recent saber-rattling in Georgia led to Merkel's call for rapid extension of NATO membership to another part of Russia's border. Merkel, who grew up in the GDR, has often been given a certain „East Bonus" when it comes to dealing with the former COMECON/ Warsaw Pact countries. However, she apparently has no recollection of the massive opposition to medium-range nuclear weapons (Pershing/ cruise missiles) during the 1980s which even extended to some in her Christian Democratic party. This movement was fueled by the awareness that Germany had been destroyed in a conventional war and theatre nuclear weapons would lead to its final destruction. Today Merkel's foreign policy bears no trace of this historical reticence. Nearly twenty years since the GDR collapsed, we are just as far from the „peace dividend" as in 1989. Maybe the US ought to remember how many lives Americans took to reach the old frontier, how many lives were taken for the New Frontier and then ask what „Renewing America's Promise" really means to the world. If Obama is to be believed, and I think there is every reason to take his speeches at face value, King would roll over in his grave and Kennedy would give his blessing. Brother Bede Vincent, a former teacher, educated in the US, Brazil and Europe, is working in a project the working title of which is "An Ecclesiastical History of the United States". He is affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Cultural Studies ( www.maisonneuvepress.com) in College Park, MD and can be reached at bede[at]maisonneuvepress.com.
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