'I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear...'
Even as we lurch from symbolism to substance now that Barack Obama is President-elect, I hope that he appreciates the symbolic and substantive rewards of being sworn in on January 20 as "Barack Hussein Obama."
During the campaign, neo-conservatives such as Daniel Pipes and others of Obama's detractors thought it smart to highlight his paternal Muslim roots and associations. But now that he's won, you'd have to be as naive as a neo-con to miss the nobility and world-historical gains this country would achieve if, having overthrown a bad Hussein, it installed a good one -- not in Baghdad, but in Washington.
Sure, the mind reels. Hussein is a name of honor bestowed upon metaphorical descendants of the prophet Mohammed. An American president bearing that name even just residually would enact what philosophers call a transvaluation of values -- a severe case of cognitive dissonance for millions of people like Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, and for millions more who are not like them at all.
But German minds reeled 65 years ago, too, at the ascendancy of an American named Eisenhower to command the allied forces and, five years later, to be president. After all, German-Americans had been a despised, persecuted minority here during World War I, less than three decades before Eisenhower's ascent.
The situation now is more polarizing for Muslims, of course. Islamicists, confronted with a Hussein in the White House, will rage that the Great Satan has stolen and polluted a holy name. (But where were they when Saddam Hussein, an admirer more of Stalin than of Mohammed, was butchering millions?)
Unlike the rule of that Hussein and of oil sheiks, mullahs, and the Taliban, the very prospect of our Hussein's inauguration is raising young Muslims' democratic hopes even higher than America has raised their material and sensual ones. (In the present material circumstances, it's telling that just when Obama's election was about to reflect Western democracy's deepest strengths, the iconically Western Gordon Brown was begging the Saudis to aid the International Monetary Fund.)
Notice, too, the symbolic and substantive impact Obama is having on African-American youths' who might once have been drawn to the Nation of Islam, whose leader Louis Farrakhan lives a stone's throw from the Obamas in Chicago's South Side. Farrakhan endorsed Obama with a kind of desperation last summer, only to be rebuffed. That tells us all we need to know, as I explained here then, successfully, to nervous Jewish voters.
Still other ironies in Obama's name are rich beyond measure. Barack is Arabic for the Hebrew Baruch, meaning "blessed" in both tongues -- another of the achingly poignant, almost illicit, intimacies between the two languages and religions. The most famous Jew to bear the name was the 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who crossed Christian and Jewish lines, blurring them in order to transcend them.
Obama's story draws all three lines of Abrahamic religion -- Christian, Muslim, and Jewish - into a convergence more promising than that drawn more than a century ago by the Rev. George Bush, a Presbyterian scholar, brother of our president's fifth-generation lineal antecedent, and the first teacher of Hebrew, Arabic, and other Semitic and ancient languages at New York University in the 1830s.
In 1844, the Rev. Bush wrote The Valley of the Vision, or The Dry Bones Revived: An Attempted Proof of the Restoration and Conversion of the Jews, which interpreted the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel to prophesy Jews' return to Palestine from all over the world in what Bush insisted was the not-distant future.
I doubt that our departing president has read his ancestor's exegesis, but if he also doesn't know the Book of Ezekiel, Barack Obama certainly does. In his speech on race in Philadelphia last winter, Obama recalled that, for his black Congregational Church in Chicago, "Ezekiel's field of dry bones" was one of the "stories - of survival, and freedom, and hope" that "became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears."
Not incidentally, the Rev. Bush, who imagined the Jews' return to Palestine mainly as a prelude to Armageddon, also wrote the first American book on Islam, a Life of Mohammed, declaring the prophet an imposter. That's two additional reasons why America's Christian, Jewish, and Muslim prospects are brighter with Barack Hussein Obama than with any of the George Bushes we've known, not to mention with Karl Christian Rove.
Obama may be no more a messenger of God than Rove or "W" are, yet at moments his campaign did flash intimations of the awful sublimity of the Hebrew God's thundering in history; of the Christian pilgrim's exalted, individual journey; and of the Muslim ummah's bonds of communal faith.
And he does understand -- as did an Abraham who was called Lincoln -- that this republic should keep on weaving into its tough, liberal tapestry the threads of intrepid Abrahamic faith that have figured so strongly in its beginnings and triumphs. That Obama draws this understanding from intimacies with Ezekiel and Indonesia and the South Side makes him providential enough.
I agree with that.
November 9, 2008 9:07 AM | Reply | Permalink
Much ado about nothing here. Unless your intent is to rub the right's noses into the shit they were throwing around during the election. The fact that we elected a man of color as President is all that really matter.
November 9, 2008 9:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
Didn't we once have a strong ally named Hussein,
also called "The Little King"? Maybe Obama should have Queen Noor up on the stage with him when he takes the oath.
The initiatives of the Noor Al Hussein Foundation (NHF) which she chairs have transformed development thinking in Jordan through pioneering programs in the areas of poverty eradication, health, women’s empowerment, microfinance, and arts as a medium for social development and cross-cultural exchange, many of which are internationally acclaimed models for the Middle East and the developing world.
Yep, ya gotta watch those Hussein people.
November 9, 2008 9:17 AM | Reply | Permalink
Brilliant, Jim. I think most Presidents are sworn in with their middle names. That is the default position.
But, usually, who cares? Using this name, at this time, will do more to defeat the terrorists that pretty much anything Bush ever did. (Actually, his policies recruited terrorists).
Kol ha kvod, Jim.
November 9, 2008 10:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
"Using this name, at this time, will do more to defeat the terrorists that pretty much anything Bush ever did."
YES, THE AL-QUAEDA RECRUITERS ARE GOING TO HAVE A MUCH MORE DIFFICULT TIME SIGNING UP NEW MEMBERS!
November 10, 2008 5:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
What does Kol ha kvod mean?
Ixnay on the kvoday.
November 9, 2008 10:50 AM | Reply | Permalink
Literally: All of the honor (to you)!
Idiomatically: All right! / Great! / Good job!
From
November 9, 2008 12:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
dedelsta,
gratias, danke, tankje, dzieki, spasibo.................. a dank aych :-)
November 9, 2008 1:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
But now that he's won, anyone would have to be as naive as a neo-con to miss the nobility and world-historical gains this country would achieve if, having overthrown a bad Hussein, it installed a good one -- not in Baghdad, but in Washington.
You can't really be serious, Jim. Any gains that might come from Obama's mere possession of the name "Hussein" will not be world-historical, but will rather be very ephemeral and very short-lived. Presumably most people in the Middle East and greater Muslim world are more sophisticated than you give them credit for, and have read the newspapers, and have by now learned that Obama is a Christian, whose middle name imparts next to zero information about his attitudes and policy preferences.
"Hussein" is an extremely common name in the Muslim world, and so I'm sure that Muslims are all well-accustomed to the fact that it can be possessed both by really good guys and atrocious assholes. They would be ill-advised to read anything significant into the fact of Obama's middle name, and I doubt they will fall for that bit of trivia.
Yes, Obama should be sworn in under his full name. But let's not imagine we are going to get any mileage out of that act.
November 9, 2008 11:03 AM | Reply | Permalink
Dan K, If you are having that much trouble understanding the power in a name, I suggest that you read Hendrik Hertzberg's comment, which has just been called to my attention:
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2008/11/17/081117taco_talk_hertzberg
November 9, 2008 12:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm sorry, Jim, but your appeal to Hertzbergian authority is ineffective. To the extent that Hertzberg's highly subjectivistic musings on the symbolic significance on Obama's name contain any argument at all, it appears to be an argument for the ultimate impotence of names:
Ten weeks from now, the President of the United States will be a person whose first name is a Swahili word derived from the Arabic (it means “blessing”), whose middle name is that not only of a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad but also of the original target of an ongoing American war, and whose last name rhymes nicely with “Osama.” That’s not a name, it’s a catastrophe, at least in American politics. Or ought to have been.
The lesson appears to be that although Obama's name initially carried some negative historical and phonetic associations for many Americans, most Americans quickly moved beyond those primitive emotional reactions to names - which are after all just strings of sounds and shapes that serve as conventional labels - and turned their attention to the intellectual, temperamental and moral qualities of the man to whom the label was affixed.
I think we can expect the same to be true of global audiences. Obama's name may carry some initial positive associations for the world's Muslims. But those primitive and superficial responses to labels will evaporate fairly quickly, and be replaced by more cognitively sophisticated judgments about Obama's policies, and whether those policies are good or bad for the people who are affected by them.
Within a couple of weeks it won't matter whether our new president is named "Barack Obama", "Baruch O. Bamberger" or "Wee Willie Keeler".
November 9, 2008 1:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
I was thinking about this too.
I figure he HAS to use his middle name, since that is the standard. If he doesn't that would be a real shame.
November 9, 2008 11:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
It is the prerogative of the President to determine how he is sworn in, how he signs official documents and what he called in more "informal" communication.
I find it assinine -- and actually rather trivial and petty, given the nature of the problems this country faces -- that breath would be wasted on whether or not the President-elect's middle name should be used.
November 9, 2008 11:19 AM | Reply | Permalink
Because presidents typically ARE sworn in using thier middle name, the righty tightys will have a field day if it is omitted for this one....so we might as well rub thier noses in it. Actually, it would be pretty typical for Mr. Obama to take a supposed liability and turn it to an asset. I will be very suprised if it doesn't happen.
November 9, 2008 12:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
First, my thanks to MJ. Coming from you, that praise makes me feel as if I'm being sworn in myself!
To some others: Yes, the full name is used in the swearing in, so I changed my post's title to "I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear." OK?
Dan K is too much the philosopher here, and not enough the anthropologist. Names have power. Of course, the power wears off. It's consequential when it's consequential, and inconsequential when it wears off. So? How soon does it wear off, Dan K, and for whom? You seem to have all the answers to that one, but, in my experience, some names have enduring power for some people -- too much so, in some cases, surely. This one has power, and that he'll "betray" the name Hussein, but rather differently than Saddam betrayed it, has consequences, too.
November 9, 2008 1:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't have all the answers Jim, but as long as you and Hertzberg are offering your own intuitive speculations on the importance of Obama's name, I can offer my more skeptical speculations as well.
I just don't want us to be seduced into thinking we are going to get any substantial public diplomacy benefits out of the mere act of electing a person whose middle name is "Hussein". Walking the walk is still where it's at. The problem many Arabs and Muslims have had with the United States is mainly rooted in policies, not style and packaging. And it's in the policy area where Obama will have to deliver if he is going to achieve any sustainable positive changes in our relations with the rest of the world.
I supported Obama because I respect his intelligence and insight, his global perspective, his thoughtful and deliberate manner, his grace and surefootedness under pressure, his judgment in a crisis, his communication skills, his personal disciple and ability to stay focused on long-term goals a long-term strategy. My personal "hopes" for his administration are grounded in those qualities - not his identity, name of personal background.
November 9, 2008 2:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
Jim, even when you were a kid at Yale, I thought you'd be a pretty good President. (Of course, our generation is done!!! Yay. Although I sure hope Greg Craig is in there).
November 9, 2008 5:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
Which Presidents didn't use their middle names.
The ones I'm pretty sure did were the Bushes, Nixon, JFK, FDR, LBJ, Clinton.
Clinton thought the third name so significant he gave it to himself. He put the Jefferson in there, not his mom, to convey something. I always liked that he dd.
Presidents who didn't use the middle name. Truman (his S didnt stand for anything), Coolidge, (because Calvin was his middle name), Harding (because Gamaliel was too weird), Wilson (because Woodrow was his middle name) and Grover Cleveland (again Grover was his middle name. Imagine, he chose a Muppet name over his real name, Steve). Carter, I think didn't. The early ones didn't have middle names. I think the first who did was William Henry Harrison. And then we didn't get another one until Grant, Garfield, and Arthur. Arthur's middle name was Alan, pretentiously pronounced with the stress on the wrong syllable!
I can give all 43 but I'm boring myself and anyone who reads this. Before Tuesday I was getting really depressed about the fact that my patriotism and knowledge of American trivia were wasted on Joe the Plumber's country. We're back, baby!
November 9, 2008 5:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
On middle names, I think the question here is how they were sworn in. My impression is that the actual swearing in has always used the full name -- James Earl Carter, etc. -- but I could be wrong.
When I had the title, "Swear Him in as 'Barack Hussein Obama,'" several people wrote me directly to say that that's the form that will be used unless he specifically requests that it not be. I'm trying to ensure that people will notice if he doesn't use "Hussein" than it will be if he does. I'd like it to be used, not to rub the neo-cons' faces in their errors (as one commenter above suggests doing) but for the more constructive reasons indicated in the piece and in my last comment above this one. We'lll see!
November 9, 2008 6:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, Hussain is a revered name in the Muslim world. Prophet Mohammed’s grandson Hussain was martyred in the current Iraq, at Karbala by the army of Caliph in Syria. His death inspired the Shia movement in the Islamic world.
Obama’s election has inspired many in the Muslim world. In fact, people are awestruck by what the Americans have just accomplished. He’s been hailed as a serious and sincere person who would perhaps bridge the widening gulf between the US and its former allies from the Cold War days. But never underestimate the power of the right wing, no matter where they are.
I have been reading papers from Pakistan and other Middle Eastern countries and the right wing there has already started cautioning people that he is just another face from the imperialist US. Some of them are using the same language that the right wing uses here to preempt the process of reconciliation that many on the both sides so fervently believe; Barack Hussein Obama would jump start. His middle name helps but his policies would really determine how long the help would last.
Barack also means lightening in Arabic!
November 9, 2008 2:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
The question to ask is not whether Obama's middle name (or his whole name) guarantees him success as a national redeemer. I'm not aware of having suggested anything of the sort.
The question to ask is what enduring and possibly unique American strengths his election confirms, not only in some people's fleeting perceptions, but in reality.
In reality, his election confirms something about this country that is not true of many if any other developed western countries and is even less true of countries anywhere else. Dan K hasn't yet figured out what that something is, much less acknowledged it. He prefers to take refuge from it in his skepticism -- and in the certainty that Obama, a Harvard neoliberal, will disappoint progressive hopes.
Obama will almost surely disappoint progessive hopes. The country that has elected him is only indifferently or conflictedly progressive, and, in any case, it is part of a global system that is hardly progressive at all. But no one has said more forcefully than I over the past two decades that this country cannot be redeemed by inflating fantasies of racial or ethnic liberation or destiny. The point about Obama is that he knows this, and that he compaigned as one who knows it. And while some of his supporters think that the millenium has arrived, most of them, too, know better.
But it would be equally fatuous not to acknowledge that his race and name have mattered in ways that matter. Because of the kind of person he is and the kind of campaign he has run, his race and his middle name have "accomplished" something important by further confounding old stereotypes and paradigms in ways that make the American experiment quite a wonder to millions if not billions of other people.
That's a small step for Obama the man, but a larger, if not exactly giant, step for the country and the world. It really doesn't cost much to accept this for what it is, which is not everything but is more than a skeptic's nothingness. Surely Dan K, who did valuable campaign work for Obama on Election Day, understands this.
November 9, 2008 5:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
I, Claudius:
I hope that he appreciates the symbolic and substantive rewards of being sworn in on January 20 as "Barack Hussein Obama." [N]ow that he's won, anyone would have to be as naive as a neo-con to miss the nobility and world-historical gains this country would achieve if, having overthrown a bad Hussein, it installed a good one... Sure, the mind reels. Hussein is a title of honor applied to metaphorical descendants of the prophet Mohammed. An American president bearing that name even just residually would enact what philosophers call a transvaluation of values...
I, Casuist:
The question to ask is not whether Obama's middle name (or his whole name) guarantees him success as a national redeemer. I'm not aware of having suggested anything of the sort.
oh I don't know.
"substantive rewards", "nobility," "world-historical gains" and a "transvaluation of values" -- all credited to a president-elect providentially bearing "a title of honor" -- sure sound like declarative fine print in a "guarantee" of succcess, hence the point of your post: I, Barack Hussein Obama.
unless you've since unpointed (i.e, backtracked, reversed course, moonwalked), aware or not.
November 9, 2008 8:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
Jim, I don’t think we disagree about as many things as you seem to think we do. My comments in this thread were about the global impact – or lack of it - of Obama’s middle name. That’s it. I said nothing about the global impact of Obama’s race. Not only do I recognize that there has been a positive impact due to Obama’s race, but I think it can be long-lasting and important. In fact, I argued several times during the campaign for taking that factor into account.
In the case of race, we are talking not just about how Obama looks superficially, or about an accidental label, but about his own deep commitments and sense of identity. Obama built a career working in the black community in Chicago, and has strongly identified himself with that community and its aspirations. He married a black woman. Both he and his wife have demonstrated a pronounced interest in several African issues, including development, political corruption and health. One of my favorite Obama speeches is the one he gave in August, 2006 at the University of Nairobi. It concluded with these lines:
As I said at the outset, I did not know my father well - he returned to Kenya from America when I was still young. Since that time I have known him through stories - those my mother would tell and those I heard from my relatives here in Kenya on my last trip to this country.
I know from these stories that my father was not a perfect man - that he made his share of mistakes and disappointed his share of people in his lifetime.
As our parents' children, we have the opportunity to learn from these mistakes and disappointments. We have the opportunity to muster the courage to fulfill the promise of our forefathers and lead our great nations towards a better future.
In today's Kenya - a Kenya already more open and less repressive than in my father's day - it is that courage that will bring the reform so many of you so desperately want and deserve. I wish all of you luck in finding this courage in the days and months to come, and I want you to know that as your ally, your friend, and your brother, I will be there to help in any way I can. Thank you.
So there is little question that Obama, in addition to the fact that he has African ancestry on his father’s side and looks African, actually sees himself as a black man and a son of Africa.
I also understand that the election of Obama has had an impact on the way the rest of the world sees us. It has convinced others that maybe Americans are not quite so virulently racist as they once believed, since 52% of us voted for a man of color. It has helped promote the idea that maybe there is still something to the idea that America is a place where people from many lands, and their children and grandchildren, can achieve and succeed on the basis of their intrinsic merits, wits and hard work – the contents of their characters. That meritocratic alternative to societies based on class and caste is what many people here and around the world understand the “American Dream” to be.
But Obama is not a Muslim. The fact that his middle name is “Hussein” seems little more than an accident of his father’s religion, a religion Obama does not share. Although I’m certain Obama has a lot of respect for Muslims, including Muslim-Americans, I don’t recall ever hearing him make any sort of point about his partly Muslim ancestry, or conveying that that ancestry is significant part of his sense of identity. Obama is a Christian, and everyone now knows it. Nobody is going to view Obama as half-Muslim, or a quarter-Muslim or an eighth-Muslim.
Yes, the fact that we elected Barack Obama does show, I suppose, that we can elect people whose middle name is “Hussein”. That’s progress, I suppose. But I think few would be so bold as to suggest that if Obama had been an actual Muslim, then he would have had a chance getting elected in America. He would then have been down in the class of political untouchables along with atheists, pagans and satanists. So let’s not overdo it.
You seem to be suggesting I’m on some sort of negativistic campaign to bum everyone out and prepare for massive disappointment. But I have done nothing of the sort. I’m very energized, and still have many, many hopes for the Obama administration. I hope to see some very big, positive changes in the area of US foreign policy, global environmental issues, global energy security, nuclear non-proliferation, rolling back authoritarian encroachments at home, ending economic stagnation and complacency about the future, etc.
November 9, 2008 8:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
Picky, picky, picky,,,, but his full name is Barack Hussein Omama, jr.
November 9, 2008 6:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
so let me get this right, now:
during the campaign, if you brought up Obama's middle name, you were called an anti-Muslim racist. now that Obama has safely won, you want to celebrate that same name that you said didn't mean anything before?
do you hear yourself?
November 9, 2008 7:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes. Gretz, we kept our mouth shut about lots of things during the campaign, and we said things designed to get Americans to see Obama as just another guy, but now he won and we can say what we think.
Hypocrites, indeed, but determined to win. We learned our lesson well.
We won, and we have a disciplined focused Democratic President for the first time since LBJ. Only he won;t get tripped up in Vietnam.
Hell, if I thought Obama was a Muslim, I'd have said that I saw him at Episcopal Church because I wouldn't have cared what he was except that he was the smarter, more decent, more patriotic, more competent of the two candidates.
I hear myself. I like.
November 9, 2008 8:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
Wow MJ, you really ought to get a grip on yourself. Are you drunk. This embarrassing confession of brazen, mercenary dishonesty will be stored away, remembered and used against you in the future to disqualify anything you say as the calculated prevarications of a hack. You might as well say, "Never listen to anything I say henceforth."
If you are going to play the game of lying for political gain, you really ought to master the game thoroughly, and learn to lie about the fact that you are lying.
November 9, 2008 9:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
TpmCafe contributor lives up to "Get Your War On" parody. What is it they say?--"You can't make this stuff up" ;-)
November 10, 2008 12:10 AM | Reply | Permalink
A quibble... perhaps you mean that Islamists will froth and rage at the perceived misuse of the name Hussein. Islamists are people who want to enact an Islamic government and society, however that is construed. Islamicists are people who study Islam. I'm picturing one of my sweet, old professors raging at America for electing a false Hussein, and I'm just not seeing it. =D
November 9, 2008 11:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well, I don't understand your quibble, because you use the words "Isamists," "Islamic," and "Islamicist" all to refer to the same thing.
As I understand it, "Islamicist" refers not simply to people who study Islam, but to those Muslims who have turned mainstream tropes like jihad and ummah into something terroristic and perverse. The ending "cist" signals that they've torn a religion from its moorings and morphed it into an ideology of the kind we've come to loathe in the West.
I don't know if "Islamists" means the same thing as "Islamicists"; I had thought that it referred more to people who devote themselves to scholarship and to expounding tenets of the faith.
My suggestion in the post is that Islamicists as I've defined them here are the ones who would rage at an "infidel's" using the name of Hussein; tthey will denounce him as a demonic imposter. But others of the faithful might be uncomfortable with it, too.
November 10, 2008 1:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
Nitpicking: Spinoza was 17th century, not medieval. Possibly you're confusing him with Maimonides?
November 10, 2008 12:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
Any short-lived "Hussein" bump may already be over. See Marc Lynch's latest post.
As I said, Obama will be judged in the Middle East on the decisions he makes and policies he follows, not on his middle name.
November 11, 2008 7:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
Al Jazeera on the future under President Obama: "Obama is a Christian, but given his background as the son of a man born into the Muslim faith (as well as the resonance of his traditionally Muslim middle name) I expect that much of the Muslim world will view Obama optimistically. He will have an opportunity to re-make the negative US image in many Muslim countries if he chooses to reach out to them."
November 11, 2008 10:49 AM | Reply | Permalink