From "Obama And The History Alibi": Obama’s use of the history excuse is eerily and ironically reminiscent of the great novelist Robert Penn Warren’s perceptive discussion, in his short but penetrating little book on The Legacy of the Civil War (1961), of how The War gave white Southerners “The Great Alibi” that explained all their shortcomings and hence excused them. “By the Great Alibi,” Warren wrote, ". . . the South explains, condones, and transmutes everything…. By the Great Alibi pellagra, hookworm, and illiteracy are all explained, or explained away, and mortgages are converted into badges of distinction. Laziness becomes the aesthetic sense, blood-lust rising from a matrix of boredom and resentful misery becomes a high sense of honor…." “The Southerner, with his Great Alibi,” Warren explains, unwittingly foreshadowing Obama, “feels trapped by history.” Even the entire problem of race, “according to the Great Alibi, is the doom defined by history — by New England slavers, Midwestern abolitionists.” Explanation that assigns responsibility for attitudes and behavior to social forces always bears the risk of absolving people of responsibility for their own actions, of sliding inexorably from explaining to explaining away. The view, moreover, that blacks are somehow uniquely still controlled by their own history is ultimately patronizing and insulting, trapping them in perpetual victimhood. For both blacks and whites, in short, history — make that History — can sometimes explain, but it can never excuse. In a New York Times (of all places) column six years ago, “History As Alibi,” Maureen Dowd (of all people) concluded with what turns out to be a prescient comment on our current president’s use of the history alibi: “History is just the fanciest way possible of wanting to deny or distract attention from what’s happening now.”
Posted on: Mon, 22 Jul 2013 05:15:40 +0000