‘Hear Me, Earthlings!’

THE joke about Pat Buchanan’s 1992 Republican National Convention speech was that “it was better in the original German.” It’s tempting to assume that Barack Obama’s Berlin speech was better in the original Esperanto. Speaking near the Brandenburg Gate, Obama proclaimed that he was visiting Berlin not as a politician, but as a “proud citizen of the United States” and-this is the telling part-as a “fellow citizen of the world.” (That’s sampatriano de la mondo in Esperanto, for those interested.) Ronald Reagan used the same phrase, but there are no “citizens of the world.” Citizenship requires a state, and unless the United Nations has started issuing passports for all earthlings (can you imagine the lines at the office?), the world has no citizens.

It’s tempting to dismiss Obama’s Berlin speech as a gassy concatenation of sophomoric platitudes. The trouble is that this vision of world history-and the world’s future-wasn’t read by a postcolonialstudies major at Ithaca College, from a text illuminated by a lava lamp, with rhetorical flourishes punctuated by bong hits. It was delivered to a throng of some 200,000 adoring, glassy-eyed people by the presumptive presidential nominee of the Democratic party. The Obama campaign billed the speech as a natural continuation of Berlin speeches by JFK and Reagan, two similarly gifted orators who at the time of their own speeches had the added advantage of actually being president, with reason to speak in Berlin more substantial than that they happened to be passing through. Meanwhile, a sycophantic global press corps hyped Obama’s speech, before and after, as something akin to an inaugural address from the first President of Planet Earth.

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Jonah Goldberg

Jonah Goldberg is a National Review contributing editor.

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THE joke about Pat Buchanan’s 1992 Republican National Convention speech was that “it was better in the original German.” It’s tempting to assume that Barack Obama’s Berlin speech was better in the original Esperanto. Speaking near the Brandenburg Gate, Obama proclaimed that he was visiting Berlin not as a politician, but as a “proud citizen of the United States” and-this is the telling part-as a “fellow citizen of the world.” (That’s sampatriano de la mondo in Esperanto, for those interested.) Ronald Reagan used the same phrase, but there are no “citizens of the world.” Citizenship requires a state, and unless the United Nations has started issuing passports for all earthlings (can you imagine the lines at the office?), the world has no citizens.

It’s tempting to dismiss Obama’s Berlin speech as a gassy concatenation of sophomoric platitudes. The trouble is that this vision of world history-and the world’s future-wasn’t read by a postcolonialstudies major at Ithaca College, from a text illuminated by a lava lamp, with rhetorical flourishes punctuated by bong hits. It was delivered to a throng of some 200,000 adoring, glassy-eyed people by the presumptive presidential nominee of the Democratic party. The Obama campaign billed the speech as a natural continuation of Berlin speeches by JFK and Reagan, two similarly gifted orators who at the time of their own speeches had the added advantage of actually being president, with reason to speak in Berlin more substantial than that they happened to be passing through. Meanwhile, a sycophantic global press corps hyped Obama’s speech, before and after, as something akin to an inaugural address from the first President of Planet Earth.