Tim Hawkins Things you don't say to your wife

Subway by Tim Hawkins

Chick-fil-A song

President Hamlet

After a youth spent as the indulged and inevitable prince, he has become the king that Hamlet would have been had he enjoyed the services of Axelrod and Plouffe, instead of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
by Sam Schulman
03/09/2009, Volume 014, Issue 24

To the relief of his friends and the consternation of his doubters, President Obama found his presidential voice last week in his congressional address. "It came a bit late, but Barack Obama finally gave his inaugural address," Richard Cohen rejoiced on his Washington Post blog. "He is president at last--and not a minute too soon." The speech's magniloquence and grandeur only partly account for the jubilation of Obama's admirers. The balance is their expression of relief. They hope that his oratorical performance proves that Obama has recovered from the first 40 days of his administration, in which he acted not like a triumphant winner, but with a defeated joy. Five weeks of disappointments followed in grim procession. There was the great disappointment that, despite the boasts of a grand and visionary plan for economic recovery in his inaugural morning coat, he hit the ground delegating. As he said last week, "as soon as I took office, I asked this Congress to send me a recovery plan by President's Day." Rather than present a Goolsbeean masterstroke, Obama beguiled Nancy Pelosi to give us more of what had caused so much woe. And the cabinet! Instead of the brain trust we expected, Obama ennobled a long procession of ethically tainted and self-interested men and women. But if it was not done well, it was not done quickly either. Fruits of office were offered and then withdrawn, as with General Zinni, or spit back on the presidential silver salver, as with Senator Gregg. Worst of all, the president seemed edgy, unsure of himself, every bit as irritable as his press secretary, indecisive about dog breeds, short-tempered with reporters, impatient with Joe Biden. What about the flurry of executive orders which flew like angels and ministers of grace off the president's desk in the first days? After a few weeks, they all now have missed their target or fallen flat--and clearly there was no Plan B. Iran responded to Obama's hand of friendship by setting preconditions of its own for a meeting and running more centrifuges. Our NATO allies, asked nicely for more support in our Afghan venture, replied, nicely, that they would prefer not to. Guantánamo turns out to be completely in harmony with the letter and spirit of the Geneva Accords--and, according to the attorney general, a nice place to visit even if you wouldn't want to live there. Bush's anti-terror policies remain largely in place. Worst of all, Obama's magnificent instrument of power, his voice and tone, seemed to have escaped his control. He frightened small children and investors with his dark prophecies of doom should the stimulus bill not be passed without delay, review, or criticism of any kind. He frightened grown men by his insouciance when he fled to Chicago for a yuppie family weekend of shopping and gossip, leaving the vital bill unsigned on his Oval Office desk. I suspect that Obama was as disappointed in himself as we were--and even more puzzled. He expected that his bold words would produce bold action. Instead, he finds himself appointing committees of graybeards to study at leisure the very Gordian knots that his snazzy executive orders were meant to slice through. None of us--not even those who wanted him to fail--expected this kind of incompetence and inelegance, mirth in funeral and dirge in marriage. I think we are seeing something very different, and very special, and to those who know their Shakespeare as well as they know their Obama, something poetic. Obama is not a hypocrite, a programmatic radical, or an incompetent--anyone with the patience to read his books can see that he is a 20th-century liberal of a very conventional type: incurious, superior, and vain. What is unique about him is what is unique about Hamlet. Obama avoided the path that so many ambitious men of his own generation have followed--Eliot Spitzer and Andrew Cuomo--from law school to bigger and bigger government offices. Instead, he followed Hamlet's course. He deliberately prolonged his youth, avoided responsibility and serious challenges, put his great gifts to work in the tiniest possible ways--all in order to protect his illusions from contact with very much reality. And now, in this particular job, he is up against the real world for the very first time. Obama's trajectory is Hamlet's, a youth spent as the recognized, indulged, and inevitable Prince, untrammeled by responsibility or experience. But now he is a character in a play that Shakespeare never wrote: Obama has become the king that Hamlet would have been had he enjoyed the services of Axelrod and Plouffe instead of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. I don't mean to suggest that Obama is the Hamlet of the newspaper cartoons--indecisive, melancholy, of antic disposition. He is something very different. He is Shakespeare's Hamlet as he saw himself, a man of action who knows himself through and through--but is neither. Both princes have spent their youth waiting for an opportunity that is worthy of their talent to take off their inky cloaks and reveal themselves. Obama is precisely like Hamlet in his conviction that his eloquence proves his leadership ability and his self-knowledge. And, like Hamlet's, his preparation for high office consisted of playacting, speechmaking, and self-examination. Hamlet is obsessed with finding and playing a role--and uncertain that he is quite up to the task. Such is the Obama we have watched for the first 40 days. For Hamlet, the role he must play is rather simple: He does not expect to combine in himself the qualities of Lincoln and Roo-sevelt, as our unenviable president does. Hamlet only has to be an avenger. Hamlet's dream of his father assigns him this role in the first act, and, for the rest of the play, poor Hamlet repeatedly tries and fails to live up to it. Instead of taking action, Hamlet whiles away the time until his death despising, envying, and imitating the single-minded souls who can play their appointed role in life without agonizing self-consciousness. He tries to imitate them all--young Fortinbras, Laertes, his dead father. To do so, he devises over-complicated rhetorical tricks--writing speeches for the strolling company of actors, pretending to be mad, writing love letters, ordering secret renditions for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, throwing Polonius and Ophelia under the bus. Hamlet dies--and inadvertently achieves his revenge--only because he is so jealous of Laertes's fencing skill that he agrees to the fatal one-on-one that ends the play. Hamlet's trajectory describes exactly what is unique about Obama's pathway to power--what he didn't do. Most young men of Obama's generation with presidential yearnings have tried putting their hands on the steering wheel of a smaller vehicle, like an attorney-generalship. A state AG's office is an excellent place to practice the swordsmanship that a president needs. Eliot Spitzer and Andrew Cuomo prepped this way. Rudy Giuliani matriculated as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Spitzer was the most presidential of all, because he didn't bother with actual lawyering but merely harried and bullied businessmen with something to lose--no indictment necessary. At the same stage of his life, Obama--skill, intelligence, and training outmatching Cuomo's and Spitzer's, and with even more ambition--didn't burden himself with such responsibilities. He prepared himself purely through the exercise of rhetoric. A brief speech at a student anti-apartheid demonstration gave him a vision of power, he took an assistant professor's salary from a charity to become an organizer of community protest for such causes as asbestos removal. Most of all, he wrote autobiographies. In his books he rehearsed a vision of himself as leader, solving problems with ease that no one had ever solved before. And the key to leadership, he discovered in his very first autobiography, was not the exercise of authority but the telling of stories. He argues that black people in America do best for themselves when they stick to the truth of things, when they share the "absence of delusions [perhaps he means illusions] that continued to operate in the daily lives of most black people" that he had met as a neighborhood organizer. So he decides that what will save his community--preserve its self-esteem and bring about a better world--is to write down his own life story. Or as he puts it more eloquently, to "struggle to align word and action, our heartfelt desires with a workable plan." "Our sense of wholeness" must find root in "Mrs. Crenshaw's story and Mr. Marshall's story, in Ruby's story and Rafiq's"--and, most of all, the prince's own. When rival princelings like Spitzer and Cuomo were accumulating executives' scalps, the future President Hamlet was rehearsing his own story in a couple of bestsellers. Within their covers he could count himself a king of infinite space. As a storyteller and speechifier, Obama didn't need to come up with new plans--his new budget is pretty much what Stevenson, Humphrey, McGovern, Mondale, and Kerry would have shown us. Nor did he waste his time assembling allies among the movers and shakers, as Hillary did. Instead of superdelegates, Obama, like a real prince, assembled around him a court and filled it with courtiers--hundreds and hundreds of his closest and cleverest friends. During the campaign, Obama admitted to having over 300 unruly knights among his official foreign policy advisers. And each of these courtiers regarded himself or herself as valued for a unique insight and point of view. Among so many, is it any wonder that the courtiers include Zionists and anti-Semitic crackpots, free-traders and protectionists, education reformers and ed-school apparatchiks? And even today, the Obama administration draws names from among the courtiers seemingly at random--Israel-lobbyist Hillary Clinton yesterday, Saudi-lobbyist Chas Freeman today. The jobs to which they are appointed are as symbolic as the members of a coronation procession. Dennis Ross, the long-promised "point man on Iran," might have been happier as a Guardian of the Royal Robe than he will be trying to live down his new job description: What Dennis is going to be charged with doing, is trying to integrate policy development and implementation across a number of offices and officials in the State Department. .  .  . He will be also trying to ensure that there's a coherence in our policies and strategies across the region. Let me be clear, he's not an envoy. He will not be negotiating. He'll be working on regional issues. He will not be--in terms of negotiating, will not be involved in the peace process. .  .  . To the untutored eye, the Obama administration can seem merely lazy. Economic stimulus? Let Nancy do it. Give a heavyweight like Bob Gates a job that would affront the dignity of a Guildenstern--make him plead with the Europeans to help us in Afghanistan, but force him to admit that his boss hasn't made up his mind about whether to protect NATO members against the new Iranian/North Korean missiles. Close Guantánamo one of these days soon, decide even later what to do with its population. But it's not laziness; it's the way that a Hamlet thinks the world works. To a Hamlet, a leader like himself "who can inspire the American people to rally behind a common purpose" issues a decree. And that's all that needs to be done. For Hamlet and Obama, leadership is something that one can imagine or speechify oneself into. Hamlet feels that the only thing that stops him from being as effective a king as Fortinbras--or the Player-king--is that he lacks their sincerity and self-delusion. Obama thinks that being FDR is a matter of making FDR-like speeches--so FDR-like that Richard Cohen had a vision of an amber cigarette-holder while Obama spoke! He needn't bother to study how FDR connived, threatened, charmed, lied, and manipulated to get his way. In Obama's Hamlet-like world of leadership, he has no need for men like the grumpy, incorruptible Harold Ickes to serve as reality principle and enforcer. There is no brilliant, vain, and unreliable Harry Hopkins to stimulate the economy. There are certainly no fixers like Tommy the Cork or Jim Farley to make things happen in the states and cities. Instead, the administration is filled with Poloniuses. There's one sitting in the vice president's chair in the Senate. Another runs the EPA. And Rosencrantzes and Guildensterns fill the high offices at State and Treasury. Only Shakespeare could write the mise-en-scène of my lords Summers and Geithner on their knees before the Earl of Dodd, entreating him not to ruin the king's money-lenders with a salary cap--and failing. To our new and unseasoned King Hamlet, it must have seemed like a good idea. FDR would have sent Harold Ickes and Jim Farley, and Dodd would take a long weekend at his Irish cottage, half frightened out of his wits, half convinced he was the next appointment to the Supreme Court. Obama could fill half a dozen New Deal-era brain trusts with the courtiers still hanging around without appointments. But our President Hamlet takes the estimable people he attracts and turns them into airy nothings. He does so not out of malice or cunning, but from utter innocence of how the world works. The weakness of the Obama administration is not that it is a permanent campaign, but it is a permanent court, in particular with the fecklessness and jealousy that characterizes the court of a crown prince unsure of his power. Whatever the talent of the courtiers, what they learn to study most of all is caution. That is why there was no one among them with the courage to tell the king that if he doesn't deal with our foreign enemies now, there will be no way to cut military spending later. Fear about their futures meant that no one had the nerve to point out to Obama that raising taxes on the rich will produce not more income but less. And none was suicidal enough to remind Obama that undoing welfare reform would return the urban black population--the great beneficiary of reform--to its prior misery. Hamlet never became a king in his own eyes, or even managed, except by accident, to avenge his father's death. A Hamlet, prince or king, can never overcome his own self-doubt, and Obama's self-doubt, unresolved by his books, may remain impervious to the fact that he has indeed made himself president. I fear our president will only fitfully be a president to himself. This fitfulness, coupled to his deeply held belief that heartfelt desire, gorgeously expressed, must inevitably lead to workable plans, will set the pattern for his administration. I expect four years of drama, muddle, and self-regard. Hamlet was a tragedy, but fortunately for Denmark Hamlet died in the last act. We perhaps reluctant playgoers will have the privilege of seeing its sequel. Sam Schulman, a writer in Virginia, was publishing director of the American and publisher of Wigwag.

Geithner-Obama Economics: A Joke That's Not Funny

The Obama depression

A prodigal administration on its way to wasting a national heritage | Marvin Olasky

Washington news keeps marching in like a lion, and only t

Illustration by Krieg Barr

he Lamb can stand against it.

Throughout the election campaign I wanted to think the best of Barack Obama. Because of his stand on abortion and other matters I opposed him, but still kept in mind a big positive: Obama as role model, showing some among our most alienated the fruits of education, hard work, and marriage.

I hoped that maybe, just maybe, a President Obama would graduate from campaign mode and apply cool rationality not just to winning votes but to strengthening our economy and America's position around the world. That hope has evaporated.

Obama's role model is Franklin D. Roosevelt, yet Obama evidently is not familiar with Amity Shlaes' fine book, The Forgotten Man (Topical Depression, March 8, 2008). Obama says he is embracing "experimentation—if that doesn't work, then you do something else." Shlaes shows that what FDR called "bold, persistent experimentation" deepened and lengthened the 1930s Depression: Businesses faced with ever-changing rules didn't know whether to invest or hunker down.

At least, though, FDR famously said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." He tried to raise the nation's spirits. Obama, though, has repeatedly dampened them with his self-fulfilling prophecies of gloom. Why? Well, look at what the Bush recession did for Obama: It got him elected president, and it has now given him hundreds of billions to spend pretty much as he and his appointees see fit.

If a recession offers such privileges, what about a depression? Imagine an Obama Corps with millions of workers. Imagine, if much of the nation's wealth dissolves, the opportunity to educate children in the virtue of government requiring everyone to "share."

Ah, isn't there political danger here? Won't Democrats pay at the polls in 2010 and 2012 if the economy doesn't improve? Not if Obama and his media soulmates play it right. Already the drumbeat has begun: The problem with the stimulus bill is not pork and the power it gives to Obama to reshape America in his own image. The problem, according to New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, is that the stimulus bill should have been twice as big.

Look at Newsweek's March 2 cover story. Jonathan Alter wrote that Obama "can look successful even as hard times continue. . . . The package is so big, and stretches across so many states, that it provides him at least four years of photo ops. . . . Once these mental pieces are fastened in place and we're fully 'in recovery,' to use therapy lingo, the enduring problems won't seem so terrifying anymore. . . . The longer the recession lasts, the more points Obama will put on the board. . . . Obama will likely package and sell health-care reform, a new energy policy and even national service as 'recovery and reinvestment.'"

Obama has billions of reasons to keep us in a state of crisis. Every time through the end of February that Obama opened his mouth, the stock market went down: Accidental? One equities manager, Peter Kenny, explained an afternoon decline on Feb. 25: "As we came close to the bell we got the curveball: our president came on TV."

Some evangelicals are responding to Obamania by heading to the hills: Y2K hysteria in 1999 was a false alarm but this new administration is a four-alarm fire. Maybe, but if you're tempted that way, read one of the Bible's great history chapters, Hebrews 11, and then its conclusion in chapter 12: "Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus. . . . Consider Him who endured from sinners such hostility against Himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted."

Is our present situation painful? Hebrews 12 continues, "Do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary when reproved by Him. For the Lord disciplines the one He loves, and chastises every son whom He receives. . . . For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it."

If you have a question or comment for Marvin Olasky, send it to molasky@worldmag.com.

Obama's Poll Numbers Are Falling to Earth

It is simply wrong for commentators to continue to focus on President Barack Obama's high levels of popularity, and to conclude that these are indicative of high levels of public confidence in the work of his administration. Indeed, a detailed look at recent survey data shows that the opposite is most likely true. The American people are coming to express increasingly significant doubts about his initiatives, and most likely support a different agenda and different policies from those that the Obama administration has advanced.

Polling data show that Mr. Obama's approval rating is dropping and is below where George W. Bush was in an analogous period in 2001. Rasmussen Reports data shows that Mr. Obama's net presidential approval rating -- which is calculated by subtracting the number who strongly disapprove from the number who strongly approve -- is just six, his lowest rating to date.

M.E. Cohen

Overall, Rasmussen Reports shows a 56%-43% approval, with a third strongly disapproving of the president's performance. This is a substantial degree of polarization so early in the administration. Mr. Obama has lost virtually all of his Republican support and a good part of his Independent support, and the trend is decidedly negative.

A detailed examination of presidential popularity after 50 days on the job similarly demonstrates a substantial drop in presidential approval relative to other elected presidents in the 20th and 21st centuries. The reason for this decline most likely has to do with doubts about the administration's policies and their impact on peoples' lives.

There is also a clear sense in the polling that taxes will increase for all Americans because of the stimulus, notwithstanding what the president has said about taxes going down for 95% of Americans. Close to three-quarters expect that government spending will grow under this administration.

Recent Gallup data echo these concerns. That polling shows that there are deep-seeded, underlying economic concerns. Eighty-three percent say they are worried that the steps Mr. Obama is taking to fix the economy may not work and the economy will get worse. Eighty-two percent say they are worried about the amount of money being added to the deficit. Seventy-eight percent are worried about inflation growing, and 69% say they are worried about the increasing role of the government in the U.S. economy.

When Gallup asked whether we should be spending more or less in the economic stimulus, by close to 3-to-1 margin voters said it is better to have spent less than to have spent more. When asked whether we are adding too much to the deficit or spending too little to improve the economy, by close to a 3-to-2 margin voters said that we are adding too much to the deficit.

Support for the stimulus package is dropping from narrow majority support to below that. There is no sense that the stimulus package itself will work quickly, and according to a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, close to 60% said it would make only a marginal difference in the next two to four years. Rasmussen data shows that people now actually oppose Mr. Obama's budget, 46% to 41%. Three-quarters take this position because it will lead to too much spending. And by 2-to-1, voters reject House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's call for a second stimulus package.

While over two-thirds support the plan to help homeowners refinance their mortgage, a 48%-36% plurality said that it will unfairly benefit those who have been irresponsible, echoing Rick Santelli's call to arms on CNBC.

And although a narrow majority remains confident in Mr. Obama's goals and overall direction, 45% say they do not have confidence, a number that has been growing since the inauguration less than two months ago. With three-quarters saying that they expect the economy to get worse, it is hard to see these numbers improving substantially.

There is no real appetite for increasing taxes to pay for an expanded health-insurance program. Less than half would support such an idea, which is 17% less than the percentage that supported government health insurance when Bill Clinton first considered it in March of 1993.

While voters blame Republicans for the lack of bipartisanship in Washington, the fact is that they do not believe Mr. Obama has made any progress in improving the impulse towards cooperation between the two parties. Further, nearly half of voters say that politics in Washington will be more partisan over the next year.

Fifty-six percent of Americans oppose giving bankers any additional government money or any guarantees backed by the government. Two-thirds say Wall Street will benefit more than the average taxpayer from the new bank bailout plan. This represents a jump in opposition to the first plan passed last October. At that time, 45% opposed the bailout and 30% supported it. Now a solid majority opposes the bank bailout, and 20% think it was a good idea. A majority believes that Mr. Obama will not be able to cut the deficit in half by the end of his term.

Only less than a quarter of Americans believe that the federal government truly reflects the will of the people. Almost half disagree with the idea that no one can earn a living or live "an American life" without protection and empowerment by the government, while only one-third agree.

Despite the economic stimulus that Congress just passed and the budget and financial and mortgage bailouts that Congress is now debating, just 19% of voters believe that Congress has passed any significant legislation to improve their lives. While Congress's approval has increased, it still stands at only 18%. Over two-thirds of voters believe members of Congress are more interested in helping their own careers than in helping the American people. When it comes to the nation's economic issues, two-thirds of voters have more confidence in their own judgment than they do in the average member of Congress.

Finally, what probably accounts for a good measure of the confidence and support the Obama administration has enjoyed is the fact that they are not Republicans. Virtually all Americans, more than eight in 10, blame Republicans for the current economic woes, and the only two leaders with lower approval ratings than Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are Republican leaders Mitch McConnell and John Boehner.

All of this is not just a subject for pollsters and analysts to debate. It shows fundamentally that public confidence in government remains low and is slipping. We face the possibility of substantial gridlock along with an absolute absence of public confidence that could come to mirror the lack of confidence in the American economy that the Dow and the S&P are currently showing.

Mr. Schoen, formerly a pollster for President Bill Clinton, is the author of "Declaring Independence: The Beginning of the End of the Two Party System" (Random House, 2008). Mr. Rasmussen is president of Rasmussen Reports, an independent national polling company.

Increased Number Think Global Warming Is “Exaggerated”

The Obama Rosetta Stone

Barack Obama has written two famous, widely read books of autobiography -- "Dreams from My Father" and "The Audacity of Hope." Let me introduce his third, a book that will touch everyone's life: "A New Era of Responsibility: Renewing America's Promise. The President's Budget and Fiscal Preview" (Government Printing Office, 141 pages, $26; free on the Web). This is the U.S. budget for laymen, and it's a must read.

Turn immediately to page 11. There sits a chart called Figure 9. This is the Rosetta Stone to the presidential mind of Barack Obama. Memorize Figure 9, and you will never be confused. Not happy, perhaps, but not confused.

One finds many charts in a federal budget, most attributed to such deep mines of data as the Census Bureau or the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The one on page 11 is attributed to "Piketty and Saez."

Either you know instantly what "Piketty and Saez" means, or you don't. If you do, you spent the past two years working to get Barack Obama into the White House. If you don't, their posse has a six-week head start on you.

Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, French economists, are rock stars of the intellectual left. Their specialty is "earnings inequality" and "wealth concentration."

Messrs. Piketty and Saez have produced the most politically potent squiggle along an axis since Arthur Laffer drew his famous curve on a napkin in the mid-1970s. Laffer's was an economic argument for lowering tax rates for everyone. Piketty-Saez is a moral argument for raising taxes on the rich.

As described in Mr. Obama's budget, these two economists have shown that by the end of 2004, the top 1% of taxpayers "took home" more than 22% of total national income. This trend, Fig. 9 notes, began during the Reagan presidency, skyrocketed through the Clinton years, dipped after George Bush beat Al Gore, then marched upward. Widening its own definition of money-grubbers, the budget says the top 10% of households "held" 70% of total wealth.

Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute criticized the Piketty-Saez study on these pages in October 2007. Whatever its merits, their "Top 1%" chart has become a totemic obsession in progressive policy circles.

Turn to page five of Mr. Obama's federal budget, and one may read these commentaries on the top 1% datum:

"While middle-class families have been playing by the rules, living up to their responsibilities as neighbors and citizens, those at the commanding heights of our economy have not."

"Prudent investments in education, clean energy, health care and infrastructure were sacrificed for huge tax cuts for the wealthy and well-connected."

"There's nothing wrong with making money, but there is something wrong when we allow the playing field to be tilted so far in the favor of so few. . . . It's a legacy of irresponsibility, and it is our duty to change it."

Wonder Land Columnist Daniel Henninger on the latest autobiographical work from Barack Obama.

Mr. Obama made clear in the campaign his intention to raise taxes on this income class by letting the Bush tax cuts expire. What is becoming clearer as his presidency unfolds is that something deeper is underway here than merely using higher taxes to fund his policy goals in health, education and energy.

The "top 1%" isn't just going to pay for these policies. Many of them would assent to that. The rancorous language used to describe these taxpayers makes it clear that as a matter of public policy they will be made to "pay for" the fact of their wealth -- no matter how many of them worked honestly and honorably to produce it. No Democratic president in 60 years has been this explicit.

Complaints have emerged recently, on the right and left, that the $787 billion stimulus bill will produce less growth and jobs than planned because too much of it goes to social programs and transfer payments, or "weak" Keynesian stimulus. The administration's Romer-Bernstein study on the stimulus estimated by the end of next year it would increase jobs by 3.6 million and GDP by 3.7%.

One of the first technical examinations of the Romer-Bernstein projections has been released by Hoover Institution economists John Cogan and John Taylor, and German economists Tobias Cwik and Volker Wieland. They conclude that the growth and jobs stimulus will be only one-sixth what the administration predicts. In part, this is because people anticipate that the spending burst will have to be financed by higher taxes and so will spend less than anticipated.

New York's Mike Bloomberg, mayor of an economically damaged city, has noted the pointlessness of raising taxes on the rich when their wealth is plummeting, or of eliminating the charitable deduction for people who have less to give anyway.

True but irrelevant. Mayor Bloomberg should read the Obama budget chapter, "Inheriting a Legacy of Misplaced Priorities." The economy as most people understand it was a second-order concern of the stimulus strategy. The primary goal is a massive re-flowing of "wealth" from the top toward the bottom, to stop the moral failure they see in the budget's "Top One Percent of Earners" chart.

The White House says its goal is simple "fairness." That may be, as they understand fairness. But Figure 9 makes it clear that for the top earners, there will be blood. This presidency is going to be an act of retribution. In the words of the third book from Mr. Obama, "it is our duty to change it."

Write to henninger@wsj.com

U2/Apple

U2's 'Horizon' sales bring band back to Earth

First-week sales of U2’s “No Line on the Horizon” brought the superstar rock band back down to Earth. The album, given the band's stature and sales history, was essentially preordained to debut atop the U.S. pop charts when it was announced last year. The only question was how many it would sell.

The Interscope album sold a brisk 484,000 copies in the U.S., according to data from Nielsen SoundScan. It’s the biggest first-week tally since Britney Spears’ “Circus” sold 505,000 copies during the holiday season last year.

But the number everyone will talk about is 840,000. That’s what U2’s “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb” sold when it debuted at No. 1 in 2004. Another recent barometer, the U2-influenced band Coldplay's album "Viva la Vida," sold more than 700,000 units when it was released last year.

Though the 356,000-unit sales gap can certainly be attributed to year after year of double-digit declines in album sales, a closer look at U2’s recent sales stats suggests that “Atomic Bomb” was a bit of an aberration in the career of the Irish superstars.

“Certainly this is not the 800 [thousand] that the last album did, but that was more than four years ago -- in a different kind of economy, a different kind of music-buyer landscape, and it came out Thanksgiving week,” said Billboard chart analyst Keith Caulfield.

U2’s 2000 release “All That You Can Leave Behind” opened with sales of 428,000 copies. Prior to “Behind,” U2's highest debut in the pre-file-sharing era was 1993’s “Zooropa,” which launched with 377,000 copies. SoundScan began tracking sales data in 1991.

“Behind” reestablished U2 as a force on rock radio, spawning hits such as “Beautiful Day” and “Elevation.” The trend continued into the release of “Atomic Bomb,” as the single “Vertigo” topped Billboard's modern rock chart and was the cornerstone of an inescapable Apple iPod commercial. When “Atomic Bomb” was released, “Vertigo” was a top-40 hit on the U.S. singles chart.

That kind of radio success has thus far eluded U2 with “No Line,” despite a massive U2 marketing campaign that has taken the act to the Grammys and a weeklong stint on “Late Show With David Letterman.” When Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends" topped the U.S. pop chart with sales of 721,000 copies in June, the title cut was on its way to hitting No. 1 on the U.S. singles charts.

By comparison, U2’s recent release, “Get On Your Boots,” has spent only sporadically appeared on the chart and most recently was hanging on at No. 96. SoundScan reports the cut has sold 188,000 digital copies to date, a number that seems rather quaint when rapper Flo Rida is setting digital sales records with one-week totals such as 636,000.

U2's “last album was kind of an anomaly,” Caulfield says. “Could they have done more? Sure. Lil Wayne did 1 million, but I don’t think this is going to drop off the chart next week.”

Perhaps not, but the real test for U2 is likely to come this summer, when the band begins its upcoming U2360 stadium tour. A Los Angeles date has not yet been announced for the Live Nation-produced endeavor -- the first tour as part of U2's 12-year, multifaceted arrangement with the promoter. The band’s last tour, tied to the release of “Vertigo” in 2005, was the second-highest-grossing tour ever, bringing in $389 million, according to Billboard.

Economists give Obama failing grade for their effort to revive the economy

U.S. President Barack Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner received failing grades for their efforts to revive the economy from participants in the latest Wall Street Journal forecasting survey.

Economists Give Obama an "F"

In striking contrast to President Obama's popularity with the public, a new Wall Street Journal survey of economists gives the president and his treasury secretary failing grades. WSJ's Phil Izzo and Kelly Evans discuss.

The economists' assessment stands in stark contrast with Mr. Obama's popularity with the public, with a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC poll giving him a 60% approval rating. A majority of the 49 economists polled said they were dissatisfied with the administration's economic policies.

On average, they gave the president a grade of 59 out of 100, and although there was a broad range of marks, 42% of respondents rated Mr. Obama below 60. Mr. Geithner received an average grade of 51. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke scored better, with an average 71.

Charts and Full Results

• See forecasts for growth, unemployment, housing and more. Plus, views on the auto industry, ranking Fed chairmen, grading policymakers and more. Survey conducted March 6-10. (Or download all data as .xls)
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The economists, many of whom have been continually surprised by the depth of the downturn, also pushed back yet again their forecasts for when a recovery would begin. On average, they expect the downturn to end in October. Last month, they said the bottom would arrive in August. They estimate that U.S. gross domestic product will continue to contract in the first half of this year, with slow growth returning in the third quarter.

Economists were divided over whether the $787 billion economic-stimulus package passed last month is enough. Some 43% said the U.S. will need another stimulus package on the order of nearly $500 billion. Others were skeptical of the need for stimulus at all.

However, economists' main criticism of the Obama team centered on delays in enacting key parts of plans to rescue banks. "They overpromised and underdelivered," said Stephen Stanley of RBS Greenwich Capital. "Secretary Geithner scheduled a big speech and came out with just a vague blueprint. The uncertainty is hanging over everyone's head."

Mr. Geithner unveiled the Obama administration's plans Feb. 10, but he offered few details, and stocks sank on the news. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is down almost 20% since the announcement, as multiple issues have weighed on investors' confidence. The Treasury secretary has since appeared before Congress and offered more specifics but has said action on key parts of the plan still is weeks away.

"We have taken an unprecedented level of action toward economic recovery, accomplishing in weeks what took other countries years to do," Treasury spokesman Isaac Baker said. "While Wall Street and investors were disappointed when they didn't get a sweeping bank bailout, we've laid out a plan to stabilize the financial system while protecting the taxpayer and ensuring government funds are spent wisely. This crisis was years in the making, and it will take time to solve."

Treasury has started implementing a housing-recovery plan, moved forward on a joint program with the Fed to boost consumer lending, and has begun stress-testing banks in an effort to determine which institutions will need additional capital from the government. The results of the stress tests won't be known for a few weeks. Meanwhile, a key part of the plan -- a public-private partnership to take toxic assets off bank balance sheets -- remains in the planning stages.

The economists' negative ratings mark a turnaround in opinion. In December, before Mr. Obama took office, three-quarters of respondents said the incoming administration's economic team was better than the departing Bush team. However, Mr. Geithner's latest marks are lower than the average grade of 57 that former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson received in January.

Mr. Geithner, who is relying on a skeleton crew of advisers in the Treasury Department as the administration struggles to make key appointments to his staff, is encountering the same problems as his predecessor in dealing with the complexities of a bailout plan. Richard DeKaser of Woodley Park Research, who gave high marks to Messrs. Obama and Geithner, admitted disappointment in the delay in action but said he appreciated the magnitude of the task. "I don't know what's holding it up," he said. "But I'm assuming it's not just because they're hitting the golf course."

There was widespread initial support for the appointment of Mr. Geithner, who as president of the New York Federal Reserve had been on the front lines of the crisis since it erupted. However, in the ensuing weeks Mr. Geithner has had to deal with tax troubles and criticism from those opposed to any bailouts as well as those who think the government needs to be doing more.

Meanwhile, the economists surveyed this month predict that the economy will shed another 2.8 million jobs over the next 12 months as the unemployment rate climbs to 9.3% by December, up from the 8.1% rate recorded in February. Economists also see nearly a one-in-six chance that the U.S. will fall into a depression, defined as a decline in per-person GDP or consumption by 10% or more.

"We just keep moving the date [when the recession will end] out, hoping at some point in time we will be able to move the date back in," said Diane Swonk of Mesirow Financial.

The economists didn't just single out the U.S. for criticism; 70% of participants said the response of governments around the world to the global recession has been inadequate. "The Europeans or Japanese don't seem to be doing near enough to kickstart their economies," said Nariman Behravesh of IHS Global Insight. "It could be we've done all the right things, but the rest of the world goes down the tubes."

Despite the growing criticism elsewhere, the respondents were broadly supportive of the Fed. More than 85% of the economists agreed that the central bank's proliferating lending programs are well-designed, well-executed and helping the economy. And while grades for Mr. Bernanke remain off of their 2007 highs, the average has stabilized after falling as low as 69 in the November survey.

Amid all the gloom, there is a bright spot: Four-fifths of the economists said now is a good time to buy equities, especially if the investor has a long-term view.

About the Survey

The Wall Street Journal surveys a group of 54 economists throughout the year. Broad surveys on more than 10 major economic indicators are conducted every month. Once a year, economists are ranked on how well their forecasts have fared. For prior installments of the surveys, see: WSJ.com/Economist.

Surrendering to Vision over Visibility: No Lines on U2’s Spiritual Horizon

March 10, 2009

U2’s latest, No Line on the Horizon, includes quite a bit of aural experimentation. The layering of sounds and the idea of “the sound” echo and repeat over and over. However, the exploration of the latter is a fascinating remix of themes U2 has covered before. Is “the sound” something as carnal as the babble of humanity in all its forms of expression secular and overtly sexual? Yes. Is “the sound” something sacred, reflecting the vibrations of a phenomenon that is soulful and spiritually connective? Yes.

One of the reasons this band is so entertaining, so captivating, comes from an amazing ability to combine the secular with the spiritual in a musical mix that operates on multiple levels. “Get on Your Boots” has a great beat and you can really dance to it - but it also has these weird little lyrics that can be both meaningless and/or philosophical depending on how seriously you are willing to take it all. “I got a submarine/You’ve got gasoline” - playful sexual imagery of the war between the sexes or a comment on the relationship between Western militarism and the oil rich Middle East?

Well, it doesn’t really matter because one way or the other, “I don’t want to talk about war between nations/Not right now.” One of the lessons of this album is that to everything there is a season; a time to be melancholy, a time to meditate, and a time to put on your sexy boots, realize your inherent beauty, and dance knowing that “Laughter is eternity/if joy is real.”

And here is the twist. How do we know if “Joy is real?” How do we enter eternity, the place where no line on the horizon means a world without end, a world with endless possibilities where forward momentum continually carries the soul and spirit onward? The struggle to answer those questions and then to deal with the consequences of the answers is a theme that is a continuation of the band’s previous exploration and expression of their own spirituality. They have found their answers, however, imperfect as they may seem at times, through Christianity, and so, their music and lyrics are bound to the discourse of that faith. Christian ideals float and pair with the secular in combinations unexpected and inspirational.

A perfect example of their ability to speak in duel discourses is “Magnificent.” Although the song never mentions Christ by name, and so could be interpreted to be about a person, it is also a psalm begging to be joyfully sung, to be proclaimed actually, by those who believe in the higher spirit of love that heals hurts, justifies souls, and unifies hearts.

There are several examples of this kind of “double-discoursed” song on the CD. One of the most obvious is “Unknown Caller” which could be read as a type of sinner’s prayer for the cellular age. It begins with the ambiguous phrase “Sunshine” that could be a homophonic play on “son shine,” if, that is, you read the rest of the song as a salvation story. There is the return to “the scene of the accident” where the repentant man reviews with great sorrow his current state after desperately trying to speed dial, to reconnect with anyone he’s had a relationship to previously, without a signal.

He receives a call to “Hear me, cease to speak that I may speak.” Then, the narrator receives the command lines “Force Quit and move to trash”- in Christian lingo, to repent and turn from sin. “Restart and re-boot yourself/You’re free to go” or exercise your free will and if you choose, be born again not forgetting to “Shout for joy, if you get the chance.” The last message is to “[type in your] password and enter here.” The password - the acceptance of the message - allows for a new relationship to occur, one of peace for the receiver and a promise of direction from the caller.

“I’ll Go Crazy if I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight” covers another theme familiar to Christians, the idea of pressing on in your spiritual journey. However, instead of the remorseful longing of still not finding what I’m looking for, this piece of “the sound” acknowledges the hard work of finding your way on the path, but also the joy in it as well. “Perfect love drives out all fear” - a line cribbed directly from scripture pairs with the declaration that it’s okay to appear ridiculous sometimes. It doesn’t take away from the journey or the connection to others on the path.

Here, ridiculous has a duel meaning. It could just be the right to appear silly, or in Bono’s case, the right to put on the trappings of a rock n’ roll star, but for certain Christian communities, it’s considered positive if the world “marks it strange” or thinks you are crazy or ridiculous in your faith. It demonstrates your commitment to living in an upside down kingdom where it is better to give than receive and to serve rather than be served. Like the verse in Hebrews which instructs believers to encourage each other until the day, or return, of the Lord, the song is one of joyful assurance that we will make it to the perfect light and that we’re not alone, even if sometimes the best you can hope for is to “squeeze out sparks of light” into the darkness.

Squeezing out sparks of light into darkness has been Bono’s mission, his vision, since the band first appeared in the spotlight decades ago, and of course, for the last few years, that vision has had a white hot focus on issues of disease and extreme poverty in Africa. It is in this context that “Moment of Surrender” becomes more than a song about surrender to love, to circumstance, or salvation; and yes, this marvelous song can be about any or all of those things. What it also captures is the epic struggle of not only having the faith to hear and believe, but also to act. “It’s not if I believe in love/But if love believes in me.” It’s about surrendering to the vision.

Bono has a vision. We know that because he shares it with everyone he comes in contact with. He also gets more backlash for it than one person should possibly be able to bear. This song gives us insight into what it takes to answer the call of the social prophet, and how difficult it is to stop worrying about appearing ridiculous, to stop worrying about the hypocritical money paradox that a wealthy man finds himself in when he begins to preach against poverty, and to stop worrying about the demands of celebrity. In the moments he surrenders to the vision, his desires, his money issues, his immediately recognizable persona, his visibility, all become moot. The only thing that matters is the vision.

Without that epiphany, none of the joy of the other songs is possible because Bono is always tied to the conflict inherent to who he is as performer - and who he is as a believer in a God who demands justice along with love and mercy. Without surrender, the believer is still bound by the demands of this world and its incessant need to categorize people and to set limits on vision and identity. The challenge is to see the line on the horizon, and then, go beyond it anyway. However, in order to achieve that victory, you have to surrender to what is beyond that line first.

It is important that there is more than one moment of surrender in this particular track, and that there are more moments of surrender, insight, and joy embedded into others on the CD. That repetition is vital because, as we are constantly reminded in this collection, “the sound” is complex and beastly in its ability to confuse, but it is also limitless in possibility and promise.

Flashback: Carville Wanted Bush to Fail

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, just minutes before learning of the terrorist attacks on America, Democratic strategist James Carville was hoping for President Bush to fail, telling a group of Washington reporters: "I certainly hope he doesn't succeed."

Carville was joined by Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg, who seemed encouraged by a survey he had just completed that revealed public misgivings about the newly minted president.

"We rush into these focus groups with these doubts that people have about him, and I'm wanting them to turn against him," Greenberg admitted.

...In 2006, 51 percent of Democrats wanted Bush to fail, according to a FOX News/Opinion Dynamics poll.

U2 Tops The Billboard 200

U2 scores its seventh No. 1 on The Billboard 200 as "No Line on the Horizon" bows in the top slot. The Interscope album moved 484,000 copies in the U.S., according to Nielsen SoundScan, the best sales week for an artist since Britney Spears' "Circus" arrived at No. 1 in early December with 505,000. U2 is now tied with Led Zeppelin for the second-most No. 1s, behind only the Beatles' 19.

U2 first topped the Billboard 200 in 1987 with "The Joshua Tree," spending nine consecutive weeks at No. 1. The group followed it with four No. 1s in a row: "Rattle and Hum" (1988), "Achtung Baby" (1991), "Zooropa" (1993) and "Pop" (1997). The band returned to No. 1 again in 2004 with "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb." That album was released during Thanksgiving week of 2004 and bowed with 840,000.

Heads should roll - Obama's clumsy, smirky staff is sinking him

Free Barack!

Yes, free the president from his flacks, fixers and goons -- his posse of smirky smart alecks and provincial rubes, who were shrewd enough to beat the slow, pompous Clintons in the mano-a-mano primaries but who seem like dazed lost lambs in the brave new world of federal legislation and global statesmanship.

Heads should be rolling at the White House for the embarrassing series of flubs that have overshadowed President Obama's first seven weeks in office and given the scattered, demoralized Republicans a huge boost toward regrouping and resurrection. (Michelle, please use those fabulous toned arms to butt some heads!)

First it was that chaotic pig rut of a stimulus package, which let House Democrats throw a thousand crazy kitchen sinks into what should have been a focused blueprint for economic recovery. Then it was the stunt of unnerving Wall Street by sending out a shrill duo of slick geeks (Timothy Geithner and Peter Orszag) as the administration's weirdly adolescent spokesmen on economics. Who could ever have confidence in that sorry pair?

And then there was the fiasco of the ham-handed White House reception for British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, which was evidently lacking the most basic elements of ceremony and protocol. Don't they read the "Iliad" anymore in the Ivy League? Check that out for the all-important ritual of gift giving, which has cemented alliances around the world for 5,000 years.

President Obama -- in whom I still have great hope and confidence -- has been ill-served by his advisors and staff. Yes, they have all been blindsided and overwhelmed by the crushing demands of the presidency. But I continue to believe in citizen presidents, who must learn by doing, even in a perilous age of terrorism. Though every novice administration makes blunders and bloopers, its modus operandi should not be a conspiratorial reflex cynicism.

Case in point: The orchestrated attack on radio host Rush Limbaugh, which has made the White House look like an oafish bunch of drunken frat boys. I returned from carnival in Brazil (more on that shortly) to find the Limbaugh affair in full flower. Has the administration gone mad? This entire fracas was set off by the president himself, who lowered his office by targeting a private citizen by name. Limbaugh had every right to counterattack, which he did with gusto. Why have so many Democrats abandoned the hallowed principle of free speech? Limbaugh, like our own liberal culture hero Lenny Bruce, is a professional commentator who can be as rude and crude as he wants.

Yes, I cringe when Rush plays his "Barack the Magic Negro" satire or when he gratuitously racializes the debate over Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb, who is a constant subject of withering scrutiny for quite different reasons on sports shows here in Philadelphia. On the other hand, I totally agree with Rush about "feminazis," whose amoral tactics and myopic worldview I as a dissident feminist had to battle for decades. As a student of radio and a longtime listener of Rush's show, I have gotten a wealth of pleasure and insight from him over the years. To attack Rush Limbaugh is to attack his audience -- and to intensify the loyalty of his fan base.

If Rush's presence looms too large for the political landscape, it's because of the total vacuity of the Republican leadership, which seems to be in a dithering funk. Rush isn't responsible for the feebleness of Republican voices or the thinness of Republican ideas. Only ignoramuses believe that Rush speaks for the Republican Party. On the contrary, Rush as a proponent of heartland conservatism has waged open warfare with the Washington party establishment for years.

And I'm sick of people impugning Rush's wealth and lifestyle, which is no different from that of another virtuoso broadcaster who hit it big -- Oprah Winfrey. Rush Limbaugh is an embodiment of the American dream: He slowly rose from obscurity to fame on the basis of his own talent and grit. Every penny Rush has earned was the result of his rapport with a vast audience who felt shut out and silenced by the liberal monopoly of major media. As a Democrat and Obama supporter, I certainly do not agree with everything Rush says or does. I was deeply upset, for example, by the sneering tone both Rush and Sean Hannity took on Inauguration Day, when partisan politics should have been set aside for a unifying celebration of American government and history. Nevertheless, I respect Rush for his independence of thought and his always provocative news analysis. He doesn't run with the elite -- he goes his own way.

President Obama should yank the reins and get his staff's noses out of slash-and-burn petty politics. His own dignity and prestige are on the line. If he wants a second term, he needs to project a calmer perspective about the eternal reality of vociferous opposition, which is built into our democratic system. Right now, the White House is starting to look like Raphael's scathing portrait of a pampered, passive Pope Leo X and his materialistic cardinals -- one of the first examples of an artist sending a secret, sardonic message to posterity. Do those shifty, beady-eyed guys needing a shave remind you of anyone? Yes, it's bare-knuckles Chicago pugilism, transplanted to Washington. The charitably well-meaning but hopelessly extravagant Leo X, by the way, managed to mishandle the birth of the Protestant Reformation, which permanently split Christianity.

Stocks turn in worst performance for new president

The Dow Jones industrial average has fallen 21 percent during Obama's first seven weeks in office. Count back to Election Day and the results are even bleaker: That afternoon, the Dow closed at 9,625. Now it stands at 6,547, a loss of 32 percent...Stockholders have lost $1.4 trillion during the young administration.

Before Obama, the worst Dow performance for the first seven weeks of a new administration was an 18 percent plunge in 1974 after Gerald Ford was sworn in, during a severe bear market triggered by the Arab oil crisis.

Ronald Reagan presided over a Dow decline of more than 20 percent from April 1981 through the end of the 1982 bear market. And in 2001, George W. Bush's first year in office, the Dow plunged from a peak above 11,000 to a low below 8,300 after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Market analysts usually play down the influence of presidents on the market but say this time could be different as taxpayer dollars prop up private companies and Obama's first proposed budget stands at $3.6 trillion, with a gaping deficit.

In this case, said Wachovia Securities chief market analyst Alfred E. Goldman, investors are saying "they have no confidence in the stimulus package doing much stimulation anytime soon. And they're greatly concerned about the size of the budget."

U2'S SACRED PILGRIMAGE: 'I FOUND GRACE, IT'S ALL THAT I FOUND'

A rock band shouldn't....

While I see the main task of this blog as tracking theologically-informed discussion of U2's work, I think I am ready to take a break from being a guide to others' Christian or Biblical reflections on No Line on the Horizon and make a few posts myself this week. Not a review, but some things that have struck me personally.

First, a more general comment on the black and white reactions to the album. One of the many very negative reviews complained that throughout it, "Bono usually sounds like he's speaking for us on subjects we wouldn't bother to consider." This comment has come to mind several times as I've gotten to know an album which definitely speaks for me, and on subjects that I consider constantly -- subjects which in my worldview are so central that I can't think of many I'd rank higher.

Now in one sense that disconnect is nothing new. It's no secret that some of the preoccupations traditionally seen as appropriate to pop culture have never been of much artistic interest to U2, whereas some of the preoccupations seen as gauche or taboo draw them in -- nor is it a secret that many people can't stand that fact. If you are one of those people, my guess is that you will especially hate NLOTH. As I have said to some friends, this is U2 distilled, 120-proof U2, synthesizing their previous work and considering very U2ey subjects in a very U2ey way. (As opposed to in a "classic U2 sound" way or a "the 90s redux" way or a "gotta get on the radio" way. See, I also think people who prefer to interpret the band through only one of the diverse titles under which they get pegged down -- U2 of the Joshua Tree, U2 of ZooTV, U2 of the Stadiums -- are less likely to enjoy this album. You gotta accept it all this time.)

But the particular NLOTH red flag to the bull, I'm beginning to think, is not just its distillation of the essence of U2 (bad enough!), but also its, if you'll forgive a technical Biblical studies term, Sitz-im-leben. This album speaks quite clearly from where the band actually stand: men nearing 50, mostly with long-term families, long-term experience in discipleship, long-term experience in staying in community, and enough perspective to have not just sorted through priorities but also reflected on different modes of addressing them. Statistically, this Sitz-im-leben is pretty rare in the West these days, and vanishingly tiny among the rock 'n' roll world. How many people today create or consume pop culture from the context of even one 33-year relationship, let along a whole gang of them? How many people today create or consume pop culture from the context of a complex spiritual worldview that's been slowly ripening in subtlety and breadth of application for even one decade, let alone three? If you already really like U2, you'll follow them there anyway and see what's on offer, but if you don't....

So no wonder listeners to whom that Sitz-im-leben is foreign, who don't resonate with its insights or imagine it having a valid place in rock 'n' roll, would find connecting with No Line on the Horizon very difficult, and see its whose essence as uninteresting and remote from anything anyone normal would "bother to consider."

This doesn't explain all the negative press, but I think it explains some, and really, it isn't that big a surprise. One of the reactions to U2 has always been "a rock band shouldn't do this." But in the end, haven't their violations of the list of things "a rock band shouldn't do" been the source of their power? From my vantage point, what's going on now is one more example.

...In my last post I talked about the perception that NLOTH deals with "subjects [many people] wouldn't bother to consider," and I commented that I am very interested both in these subjects that U2 are considering and in the way they are considering them. But let me clarify (in case the focus of this blog might contribute to any confusion on this point) that by this I do NOT mean I've been hoping to hear U2 sing about God more, or that I like NLOTH because it has many Christian references. That doesn't seem like a very reliable criterion for assessing art to me. As far as I can see, the band have brought the same basic worldview to all their work over the past three decades, whether or not recognizably Christian language was being used or identifiably "religious" topics were being addressed.

Now, naturally I am touched to hear any fellow believer giving wholehearted love to Someone I also love -- but I personally don't feel any special excitement purely upon discovering that U2 have chosen to record a song with that focus. ("Magnificent," for example, did little for me on my first several hearings, and I still don't really enjoy "Yahweh.") I don't much care how many times the texts directly quote the Bible along the way, either (although being able to recognize such allusions when they come is guaranteed to increase your appreciation of U2 songs). But what I do care about, and what so far seems to me to be near the heart of NLOTH, is seeing them (to paraphrase a former homiletics professor of mine) take the issue/moment/situation they want to present and integrate it with everything they have so far learned as Christians about the universe.

It seems to me that what U2 have to give at this point is not "We can be cooler than the Killers" or "We consider Fordham students our contemporaries" (which made me cringe on Friday). What they have to give in their chosen genre is a much larger than usual pool of resources for that integration.

Stop Helping God Over the Road - A Meditation Using Lyrics from U2’s New Album, No Line on the Horizon

U2’s NLOTH spiritual resonances (pt 3)

U2’s NLOTH spiritual resonances (part 3)

The 3rd instalment…In my mind, these 2 songs go together - they’re both counter-cultural.

- Stand up for your love which is emphatically NOT RIGHTS (Stand Up Comedy)
- [then what appears to contradict the previous quote, there is one right that does still matter] the right to appear ridiculous is something I hold dear. (I’ll Go Crazy) For this is essential if one is prepared to love.

But the important thing is that they counter the culture of both the world and the church (see the little old lady below) - because of LOVE! Which in many ways puts them on a more biblical trajectory than any of us might care to realise. But then, if there is the prophetic and psalmic in the songs on this album, this should not be surprising. And someone who speaks such a message is bound to get brickbats flung at them - from everybody. Just as well there is the personal relationship that supersedes all others - a question of vision taking precedence over visibility… (Moment of Surrender). That’s not to say that Bono takes himself too seriously - fortunately there are hints that he doesn’t… (although sometimes, one might wish he would take himself even less seriously than he does!).

Stand Up Comedy

Well, this is the song that makes ‘love’ come out so big on the wordle (see previous NLOTH post). It’s repeated over and over, despite being chanted almost inaudibly. It’s ramming the point home. But this is no soppy romanticism; it’s a call, not to arms of course, but to action. Or perhaps even better, it is a call to arms opened wide.

The tempo, driving rhythm section, the almost retro 70s feel (you can almost see Steve McQueen accelerating over a San Francisco rise) all serve to galvanise and propel us out … to love. This is the MLK dream. But there is an aspect of comedy to this standing up - because self-sacrificial love gets you into the most surreal, even absurd, situations (like when Bono & Geldof find themselves visiting the former Pope, Bush & Blair).

the wire stretched in between two towers… stand up in this dizzy world where a lovesick eye can steal the view. I’m gonna fall down if I can’t stand up for your love. Presumably the imagery is of Philippe Petit, the guy who did a tightrope walk in 1974 between the twin towers of the New York World Trade Center (and who is the subject of the recent documentary film, Man on Wire). Just thinking about stepping out onto such a rope is enough to make one balk with vertigo. But I’m gonna fall down if i can’t stand up for your love, or rather if i can’t serve in your love. It is risky love - but if we’re not serving ‘your love‘ what alternative is there but falling…? Could this have anything to do with Peter stepping out of the boat onto to the water…? ≈ Matt 14:24-33

the DNA lotto may have left you smart, but you can stand up to beauty, dictator of the heart it doesn’t matter what makes us who we are (whether our genes or upbringing or circumstances); the obsessions of our culture age (beauty, smarts) are no match for the fruit of the spirit and the Christian’s trinity: I can stand up for hope, faith, love (explicit reference of course to 1 Cor 13:13, Colossians 1:5, 1 Thess 1:3, 5:8). And of course the greatest of these is love.

But then here comes a provocative challenge to the church (and it’s one of the most powerful images of the whole album): But while I’m getting over certainty stop helping God across the road like a little old lady. Ouch. A hugely suggestive image and one that’s lodged firmly in my head (and it keeps reminding me of that youtube classic that did the rounds a couple of years ago, the old lady and the airbag!!). How many of us have presumed to think God owed it to us, looked to us, depended on us? Who do we think we are? Shush now, cease to speak that I may speak (Unknown Caller). This is all reminiscent of Psalm 50 - esp v7-10 - hear, o my people, and I will speak… I am God, your God… I have no need of a bull from your stall… for I have the cattle on a thousand hills). This is a rebuke the church STILL needs to hear, as we invest in our programmes, strategies and schemes - God is bigger than all of that. To suggest that we need to get over our certainty will for some be a red rag to a bull of course - esp those who fear all things postmodern. But then, if it is a matter of thinking we’ve got everything sussed and that our own way of doing God’s business is THE way, then such certainty surely justifies such a rebuke for what is little short of idolatry. God is sovereign - so get out from under your beds, c’mon ye people, and serve… with love…

But there is an absurdity in the fact that it takes a rockstar to rebuke the church (though perhaps not without precedence in that God will use fruit-farmers, revenue-men and even donkeys if he has to). And Bono has the grace in this song to realise that. He’s the first to admit that he has a healthy ego - but my ego’s not really the enemy. He’s a small child embarking across an 8-lane highway on a voyage of discovery (presumably like the proverbial chicken who crossed to find out what was on the other side). He knows that far from giving God a hand across the road, he’s the one who needs all the help he can get. The tongue is delightfully planted in his cheek though - he’s the little Napoleon in high heels… a small man with big ideas‘. Stand up to rockstars like that, if you must. But isn’t the point even if you think they’re absurd, egotistical and presumptuous little men, don’t lose sight of the point: love? Stand up for that. Why? well it’s obvious isn’t it? because God is love! (1 John 4:8-16) C’mon ye people…

I’ll Go Crazy if I don’t go Crazy Tonight

A number of initial reactions have not taken kindly to this song, not least because of the title. It sounds a bit like the sort of improvised lyric that sounded cool at the time, but that doesn’t really say anything. But it is a multi-textured song, musically and lyrically. And like Stand Up, it’s about an almost desperate yearning to love - and without such love, I’ll go crazy. But in order to love like that, could it be that a little craziness will be involved? That’s the need to cry or spit, a sweet tooth’s need for sugar - and this, my favourite - the need for every beauty to go out with an idiot? There is a madness to love, after all - hence the sadly archaic word, lovesick (cf. The Madness of Love by one Hadewijch of Antwerp). It’s even worse when unrequited - for a girl who’s a rainbow who loves the peaceful life. For how can you stand next to the truth and not see it - oh, a change of heart comes slow.

But there is surely/inevitably a spiritual element to this as well? As one reader, Jason Primuth, nicely observed in an email to me this week with his comparison with Jesus speaking to the pair on the Road to Emmaus - Lk 24:25-27. The chorus is resonant of the pilgrimage psalms - presumably no accident, if rumours of the follow up album later this year are to be believed (apparently to be called Songs of Ascent). Just as a human (marriage) relationship is a lifelong journey, so is that of the disciple - a journey all the way to the light. Do you believe me or are you doubting?

Every generation gets a chance to change the world - remember Bono at the G8 summit - “this is our moonshot“. Any confidence we can have is because the sweetest melody is one we haven’t heard. Is that just the-crock-of-gold-at-the-end-of-the-rainbow pipedream? Or something more tangible? Well, if there is a real perfect, love that drives out all fear. We’re back in the realms of that 1 John 4 passage again, (here quoting v18). And if this is precisely what love does, then it is no surprise that the right to appear ridiculous is something I hold dear. Because, let’s face it, that’s exactly how a billionaire rockstar tackling global poverty looks! But so what! Who cares what the passersby think?

Love is a tough call, though. It is a mountain not a hill to climb. It takes time - a change of heart comes slow. Sometimes, the only thing you can do is shout - and go crazy and look ridiculous. And notice the shift in the final chorus: listen for me, I’ll be shouting, shouting to the darkness squeeze out sparks of light. cf. 1 John 5:5-9. But fortunately, yet again, this is no solitary journey - halfway, the song acknowledges Baby baby i know i’m not alone. She’s joined him. And the climb at the end is one where she is no longer doubting but they’re starting out together. And WE’RE going to go crazy if WE don’t go crazy tonight.

U2: No Line on The Horizon

Conversation in the media and around the blogosphere surrounding U2’s 12th studio album, NLOTH, is both ubiquitous and animated, much like the front man of U2 himself, the ever present Bono. Some of the faithful love the album and tout it as their best yet. Others….not so much. Despite the fact that I, like ever so many, have been suffering from a severe case of “Bono Fatigue,” (as my friend Matt likes to call it), I was eager to get my hands on the new record. Indeed, I had been listening to it for weeks before I bought it from my local record store Vertigo Music the day it was released.

Some Christians are hailing the album as U2’s most explicitly Christian since October. Indeed, Christians have been finding everything from the album’s cover to the lyrics thick with Christian content and symbolism.

Music is art and just as good works of art help us to see new worlds or to sometimes see the same world with new eyes, so the work of art itself is open to a plurality of interpretations, depending on the hermeneutic of the viewer-listener-reader.

Let’s start with the album cover, pictured above. It features a black and white Hiroshi Sugimoto photograph of sky meeting sea. Some interpret the cover as a testament to U2’s eschatological vision of that day when God’s kingdom has come to earth in fullness. I like that interpretation and think the cover is certainly open to it. Viewed from the perspective of the Christian story, what I really like about the photograph is the bottom half. The top half is very light and the bottom half much darker. It’s easy to view the image as a bold contrast between light (heaven) and darkness (earth). And yet. And yet one can’t help but be struck by the circle of reflected light amidst the darkness in the bottom half, pushing the darkness outward; a beautiful image I think. The Christian sees in this God’s goodness pushing back the darkness, all that drags us down. That’s grace. Gravity (darkness and sin) pulls us downward, but grace (light and love) push back against gravity and lift us up.

How does Bono himself describe the album cover? Well, not with the language and imagery I just used. He describes it in terms that are woven throughout the lyrics of the album and which, though not at odds in any way with Christian thought, are certainly not explicitly Christian either. He sees the photograph as symbolizing infinity, an image of a future open to infinite possibility. His focus is neither on the light nor the darkness, but on the vanishing point in the infinite distance, the point beyond our vision. The upcoming tour, by the way, will be called Kiss the Future.

The notion of infinity is, as I say, woven throughout the album. From the title track, No Line On the Horizon, where Bono croons

I know a girl with a hole in her heart
She said infinity’s a great place to start
Oh….

to the hymn-like confession Magnificent

I was born
I was born to be with you
In this space and time
After that and ever after
I haven't had a clue

to the equally confessional Breathe, where Bono speaks of the “roar that lies on the other side of silence.” I hear in all these lines an openness to the future, a denial that things must be the way they in fact are, a kind of joy in infinite possibility, and a yearning for what lies beyond. Christian? Explicitly Christian? If one is a Christian one will no doubt resonate with the themes of uncertainty in the face of infinity and that things are not now as they should be and will be in the shalomic future.

While many moments of autobiography can be detected on this album—gotta stand up to rock stars; Napoleon is in high heels; Josephine, be careful of small men with big ideas, many of the songs are written, Bono tells us in the book that accompanies the deluxe editions, from the perspectives of characters he has created. The last two U2 albums—ATYCLB and HTDAB were straightforward autobiography, personal accounts of Bono wrestling with his own demons. This one less so; at least less so in terms of being written from the first-person perspective. But, as Bono himself reminds us, the mask reveals the man. And that’s no doubt true on this album.

Though not written from the first-person perspective there’s still a lot of Bono that shines through the characters he concocts for this album. What manages to shine through is humility, uncertainty in the presence of transcendence, doubt in the presence of unvarnished evil, longing, rebirth, and sheer joy, gratitude and love. If you're a Christian, all of those ideas are bound to resonate, and resonate deeply. Are they Christian? Explicitly Christian? Whatever they are they are certainly not exclusively Christian.

While Bono can be a little too full of himself for his own good, somehow he manages, I think, to convey a laudable sort of humility. This comes through brilliantly on Magnificent.

I was born
I was born to sing for you

I didn’t have a choice
But to lift you up
And sing whatever song you wanted me to
I give you back my voice
From the womb my first cry
It was a joyful noise
Oh, oh…

This is not braggodocio. It’s Bono realizing that he’s been given a gift, a voice, something which, like unusually good looks, is not something one deserves credit for. It’s dumb luck or sheer blessing. And Bono, in full confessional mode, offers back to its Giver what he regards as a gift, and he does so with an obvious sense of gratitude. He even acknowledges that when he wrote the song he had in mind the Magnificat, the song that Mary sings upon her visitation to Elizabeth. Although the song as a whole is, he says, "about two lovers trying to hold on to each other and trying to turn their life into worship. Not of each other, but of being alive, of God...of spirit."

There’s another confession of humility in the full-on gaze of ego in Stand Up Comedy. There Bono sings,

I gotta stand up to ego but my ego’s not really the enemy
It’s like a small child crossing an eight lane highway
On a voyage of discovery

Bono knows his ego needs taming, but I think he’s here revealing a charming childlikeness, the smallness he feels in the face of it all and the glee we all used to take in the dare to “cross an eight-lane highway” just for the thrill of it. Bono has not lost that sense of childlike glee and adventure. The world, bent and broken though it may be, still presents itself to Bono as a vast playground or carnival, an adventure inviting him on its many rides and attractions. And he’s (sometimes) downright giddy about being in the midst of it all.

There are several places on the album that strike notes of yearning and rebirth. First, in Moment of Surrender, a song about a character Bono has manufactured, a war veteran who hasn’t been able to reinsert himself into civilian life or into his own skin or psyche for that matter. As Bono puts it, “he has dragged his wife into drugs and booze, [and] he can’t live with what he’s done to her and so he breaks down beside an ATM machine and begs God to deliver them.” The song is, I believe, the highpoint of the album. In any case, we get these chilling lyrics sung in Bono's brooding voice:

I’ve been in every black hole
At the altar of the dark star
My body’s now a begging bowl
That’s begging to get back
Begging to get back to my heart
To the rhythm of my soul
To the rhythm of my unconsciousness
To the rhythm that yearns
To be released from control

The way Bono envisions it, it’s this same troubled soul in Unknown Caller, who ends up in some motel trying to make a call on his cell phone. Who’s he calling? A drug dealer to score more drugs? Someone for help? We don’t know. But he doesn’t get a signal. Instead, someone (or is it Someone) is reaching out to him with a stunning and completely unexpected (text) message. The message tells him to,

Go, shout it out, rise up
Oh, oh
Escape yourself and gravity
Hear me, cease to speak that I may speak
Shush now….

Restart and re-boot yourself
You’re free to go
Oh, oh
Shout for joy if you get the chance…

I can’t help but be reminded in these lyrics of Jesus in the Gospels telling those he’s healed or forgiven, “Go; you’re free. You’re healed.” One can only imagine or perhaps not imagine at all, if you yourself take yourself to have been forgiven or healed, then you know perfectly well that feeling of unbridled joy that comes with forgiveness and healing. And there are times either in private or public you "shout it out!"

And then, these lyrics from Breathe,

Every day I die again, and again I’m reborn

The ideas of yearning and rebirth permeate the album and, I think, Bono’s way of being in the world. It’s just like Bob Dylan said “That he not busy being born is busy dying.” Anyone who is not open to being born again (and again and again and again) is already dying and is in danger of turning to stone. U2 have always been open to the new, to the unexpected, to the surprising and transcendent, open to being reborn, again and again and again. That’s what make them perpetually fresh, still attractive to fans young enough to be their teen children.

My favorite feature of the album, btw, and no doubt an element owing to the genius of Brian Eno, comes at the beginning of Fez-Being Born. If you’ve heard the chorus to the first single off the album, Get on Your Boots, you’ll recognize these lyrics

Let me in the sound
Let me in the sound
Let me in the sound, sound
Let me in the sound, sound
Meet me in the sound

At the beginning of Fez-Being Born, just behind the music, a barely audible Bono can be heard to sing, begging and pleading-like,

let me in the sound let me in the sound
let me in the sound, sound
let me in the sound, sound
let me in the sound.

That is brilliant! This is what Bono has been born to do. It’s the place he meets us, his fans, the place he is no doubt most himself, and the place he finds grace,

I found grace inside of sound; I found grace it’s all that I found.

Those beautiful lyrics are from the song, Breathe.

Is this U2's most explicitly Christian album? I'm not sure I even understand the question. Some of the lyrics will no doubt send chills up the spines of those of us who fit our own stories into The (Christian) Story. And Bono may no doubt have penned them from within The Story. But the lyrics and the album as a whole have broader appeal. You don't have to be a Christian to resonate with the realities about which Bono sings. I guess I get a little annoyed when Christians say things like "this is U2's most explicitly Christian album." While I'm not sure what that actually means, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth; it's like saying if you're not a Christian well, obviously, you won't really understand the album.

As to the question whether this is U2’s best album, I'm agnostic about that, too. It may be a best since album. Their best since Achtung Baby or their best since The Unforgettable Fire. Is it better than Joshua Tree? I think Joshua Tree is in a class by itself. And I think we have to wait to see how NLOTH ages before we can say where it should rank in the U2 canon.

NLOTH is a GREAT album; I LOVE it and can't stop listening to it. And I’m pretty doggone certain an awful lot of people are going to meet me in the sound when they kiss the future in Chicago on September 12. How about you? Meet me in the sound?