Curb your enthusiasm

Without completely dismissing the influence of bodily nuances in geopolitics, President Obama’s impromptu handshake last month with the gimcrack Bolivarian unifier Hugo Chavez didn’t bother me. Not as much, anyway, as the more consequential corporeal actions Chavez has taken, directly by punishing dissidents and indirectly by arming the FARC kidnappers (where are the Left’s demands that FARC’s hostages receive bibles unstained by the touch of their infidel captors’ hands? I digress). Nor as much as his homo-erotic actions on behalf of the incorporeal: he pathetically reserves a chair for the ghost of Simón Bolivar at his meetings.

But in Argentina the headline was “The Handshake That Wasn’t,” and the story was even more frantic. Had President Obama snubbed President Cristina Kirchner’s outstretched hand at the same G20 summit?

Answering a recent question about Argentina’s state-stifled mess-of-an-economy, Cristina evaded pesky economic algorithms with a two sentence answer about the inevitable shocks of the global market’s failure. Ha, just like the failure of your handshake with Obama, a reporter quipped, thereby raising an “issue” that actually interested her:

Cristina: No, far from it, we had had a meeting, he came over to me, he shook my hand, he gave me a kiss, far from it.
Reporter: We all saw it, don’t feel bad. This can happen.
C: I swear I didn’t see it, I didn’t realize. Where was this?
R: We have a picture
C: It must be photo shopped
R: (Reporter returns with picture in hand) Here’s the picture of when Obama didn’t want to shake your hand!
C: I wasn’t extending – give me that, you’re a bigger idiot than I thought - I wasn’t extending my hand to him. I already shook his hand the day before. You’re an idiot, you’re such a fool. The night before I was with him and Michelle, we shook hands for ten minutes!
(Translation mine. Talk about exclusive content at Founders’ Porch).

If only she would apply this insecurity to her socialist nationalization schemes, perhaps Argentina would be starting some long due introspection.

This enthusiasm for gewgaw trifles has an opportunity cost, for it steals time and energy from the competition of reasonable ideas. This is what conservatives dislike about Fox News, for its viewers can learn the name of the President’s dog but not the names of the Enlightenment fathers that warned of this very tragedy of capitulating reason to passion.

The founders, heeding John Locke’s warning of “the dangers of enthusiasm,” were fixated on checking lawmaking powers. The Senate would be a cooling saucer for the House’s vim, and state sovereignty would effectively quarantine the overzealous whims of each mini laboratory of democracy to itself. They had to compensate for the appeal of enthusiasm that Locke described:

… the ease and glory it is to be inspired, and be above the common and natural
way of knowledge, so flatters many men’s laziness, ignorance, and vanity, that
when once they are got into this way of immediate revelation, of illumination
without search, and of certainty without proof, and without examination; it is a
hard matter to get them out of it

Those who mean to conserve the Enlightenment’s gifts of reason, liberty, and individual rights should never be “sure, because they are sure,” nor take comfort in the majority. “If freedom is lost in America,” Alexis de Tocqueville prophesized, “that will be due to the omnipotence of the majority driving the minorities to desperation and forcing them to appeal to physical force.”

Our ideal president is so boring that foreign leaders find ten personal minutes with him unbearably dull. So boring that fixing the nationalized economy, for instance, is a more interesting prospect than reading the president’s biography. He is a quiet, expressionless, pro-fundamentals Ron Gardenhire of government. As Goldwater reminded conservatives, “My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them.” We want an Old Man Marley shoveling “salt” on the front porch of the White House and striking a death glare into the eyes of rascals that dare say something as stupid as “I’m just for action and change."

Passions have their place in politics, such as giving people the courage to face terrors. Benazir Bhutto’s fierce arm waving speech minutes before her assassination, when she said to cheers of long live Bhutto, “These extremists have set up an unauthorized government. We will handle them. I will handle them. You will save the country, and so will I,” is an instance of fighting the passion of fear with hopeful enthusiasm. Yet typically the best bet is the temperament of “silent” Calvin Coolidge or depressed Abraham Lincoln, “one of the most diffident and worst plagued men I ever saw,” according to a friend. Marching forward united and inspired is not inherently noble: “Humanity is so constituted that it prefers to stay still rather than march forward without independence toward an unknown goal,” Tocqueville wrote. Boring? Indeed. But it is the plight of the anti-populists to elect someone too dry to be fought over for handshakes.