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The Good Classicist

“I’m not going to talk about what you think I’m going to talk about,” Simon Schama says at the beginning of his talk on Barack Obama and history. “I’m going to talk about George Bush and stamp collecting.” From the outset, Schama is incredibly animated, vigorous, and funny. Charmingly, he addresses the audience as “class.” (Occasionally, he throws out little quiz questions. When was the first gold rush in America? 1829, in Georgia.) He dives right into the Nobel Peace Prize: was Obama’s receiving it a “betrayal of tradition”? Well, the prize often goes to great orators, but that, Schama says, may be “because oratory is mind-blowing when translated into Norwegian.” Obama knew instantly that the prize would be politically difficult for him, Schama says. His first words were most likely “Holy crap,” or “Oops.”

Obama has, Schama thinks, a “compulsive self-consciousness of the historical moment,” and seems to be fond of history, rhetoric, and intellectual inquiry. Like Thucydides and Herodotus, Schama says, he treats history as a performative pursuit; in that sense, he’s a “good classicist,” as Jefferson and Lincoln were.

Schama examines the American suspicion of good speakers. Even Hillary Clinton, during the 2008 Presidential campaign, accused Obama of what Schama paraphrased as “romantic bloviation.” The style-over-substance argument didn’t seem to take hold in the primaries or in the general election; the public seemed to realize, Schama says, that the “affably inarticulate”—he refers to Obama’s predecessor—was not desirable in a President. He follows this with a discussion of anti-intellectualism in America, which is demonstrated in two strains: frontier folksiness (Andrew Jackson and, again, the “instinctive pseudo-folkloric wisdom” of George W. Bush) and “bellowed certitudes” (Rush Limbaugh), both of which imply that anyone who stops to think and consider his thoughts is incapable of doing anything. This kind of anti-intellectual, homespun speech is ahistorical, Schama claims; Obama, on the contrary, represents himself as “historian-in-chief” (in his speech in Cairo, he began by saying, “As a student of history…”).

Obama is often given to providing “pocket history lectures” in his own speeches; this, Schama says, serves to make him seem more American, more in touch with its history, and also to “draw the odium from political practice.” His Inaugural Address was something different, however; rather than another history lesson, Obama launched into a “cavalcade of disasters,” a far cry from “morning in America.” By saying “let us put aside childish things,” he got past the “higher goofiness” of W and Reagan. The speech was a reflection of Obama’s “tragic self-awareness,” and a repudiation of what Schama calls “smiley-face history.” Thucydides pops up again; his history of the Peloponnesian Wars had this same quality of “speaking painful truth to power.” But can Obama engage in this un-American-seeming challenge and be successful? In discussions of the financial crisis and foreign policy in the China and Afghanistan, Schama sketches Obama’s dilemma. He seems to think that Obama’s focus on history, and memory, will always inform him, but that his decisions going forward will be anything but obvious.