Victor Davis Hanson
The three great stories of 2008 were the financial meltdown, the turn-about in Iraq, and the Chicago Way. All of them conveyed a certain sense of the surreal — whether the vaporization of the nation’s 401(k)s in a few hours, or Harvard Law School graduate Barney Frank asking Harvard Law School graduate Franklin Rains of the soon-to-be bankrupt Fannie Mae whether he felt under-regulated, or Tony Rezko making a cameo appearance in almost every Illinois scandal of the last decade.
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What happened in mid-September not only destroyed the classical concept of trust and fair-dealing, but the entire Wall Street premise that those with MBAs from Ivy League business schools, or years of work with the SEC, or long tenure with brokerage houses with 19th-century pedigrees know anything. In other words, goodbye to all those titles and business cards. We are now back to hometown insurance agents and the local tow-truck driver offering just as insightful stock tips.
Greed and excess gave way to panic, as the primordial emotions broke free from their thin veneer of culture. Without a blink, we went back to 1929 — the only difference being that the baby-boomer generation blames everyone but themselves, under oath and amid clicking cameras, rather than privately and quietly jumping out the window.
In the aftermath of the financial meltdown, 50 years’ worth of careful thinking and hard-won wisdom were erased, as the Reagan Revolution, the work of Milton Freidman, and the classical free-market ethos were suddenly Trotskyized. In their place, the government printed more money to cover its hourly check-writing. The only entertaining element of the tragedy was the sheer shamelessness of a Barney Frank and Chris Dodd — who both once peddled their wares to banks and Freddie/Fannie at Ground Zero of the meltdown — now with flashing eyes and sagging craws pontificating each evening about Wall Street greed and excess.
After Bernie Madoff (the “by the way, $50 billion is sorta gone” guy), Wall Street finance will have its chronology delineated by BM and AM. It calls to mind a group of five-year-olds scrambling when the song cuts out during a game of musical chairs, or those smudged mimeographed pyramid scheme chain-letters that we used to receive, or those bizarre e-mails from “Sir Reginald Oboke, esquire, a barrister representing a Nairobi Bank who wishes to deposit $1 billion in your name if you can please supply me with your necessary social security and banking routing numbers.”
Well over halfway through the month of December, only two Americans have been lost in combat operations in Iraq — about the daily body count in a major American city. What is incomprehensible is not just that Gen. David Petraeus turned around an entire theater — Americans from William Tecumseh Sherman to Matthew Ridgway had done just that amid media gloom and doom — but that his efforts when begun were so roundly demonized, and when nearly ending in success so roundly ignored.
We forget that the Democratic primary once hinged on who was to apologize the loudest for authorizing the war, that the Sen. Majority Leader in mediis rebus declared the war lost, that the New York Times once ran at a discounted rate the “General Betray Us” Moveon.org ad, that Sen. Clinton once derided the general’s testimony as requiring a “suspension of disbelief” (i.e. “you are lying”), and that President-Elect Obama once all but said the surge would make things worse — and when it began to work claimed that it hadn’t.
Quite suitably we end the war year with an Egyptian-based Iraqi journalist trying to hit the president of the United States with his two shoes — being canonized by the Arab Street and not-sot-secretly appreciated by the American Left (far more interested in the Miranda rights of the assailant than the breach of security that allowed not one, but two projectiles to target their president). The irony was not just that, had he tried that with Saddam Hussein he would have been brush shredded in the basement, but that such a self-described crusading journalist would not even dare such theater in Mubarak’s authoritarian Egypt. It was more of the same old, same old from the blame ‘em Middle East: “We hate you for doing business with our oppressive dictators; and we also hate you for losing blood and treasure to liberate us from our oppressive dictators and fostering democracy, and we also just hate you since so many of you seem to want us to hate you.”
The year 2008 also reintroduced us to Bill Ayers, Hot Rod Blagojevich, Rahm Emanuel, Father Pfleger, Tony Rezko, the Right Rev. Wright and the rest of the Chicago Pals. What was so uncanny about them all was not just that they were proverbial spokes to Barack Obama’s hub, but that each revealed how the Chicago Way proved so interdisciplinary in nature.
