http://blogs.wsj.com/peggynoonan/2015/01/12/lafayette-we-are-not-here/5:04 pm ET
Jan 12, 2015
Lafayette, We Are Not Here
It was not a missed public relations opportunity. PR is the showbiz of life, and that is not what this is.
Here are the reasons the president of the United States, or at very least the vice president, should have gone yesterday to the Paris march and walked shoulder to shoulder with the leaders of the world:
To show through his presence that the American people fully understand the import of what happened in the Charlie Hebdo murders, which is that Islamist extremists took the lives of free men and women who represented American and Western political freedoms, including freedom of speech;
To show through his presence that America and the West, and whatever nations choose to proclaim adherence to their democratic values, will stand together in rejecting and resisting extremist Islamist intolerance and violence;
To demonstrate the shared understanding that the massacre may amount to a tipping point, whereby those who protect and put forward Western political values will insist upon them in their sphere and ask their Muslim fellow citizens to walk side by side with them in shared public commitment;
To formally acknowledge the deep sympathy we feel that France, our oldest ally, suffered in the Charlie Hebdo murders a psychic shock akin to what America felt and suffered on 9/11/01. The day after our tragedy, the great French newspaper Le Monde ran an unforgettable cover with an editorial of affection and love titled Nous sommes tous Américains: “We are all Americans.” That was an echo of what our American doughboys, who went to France in 1917 to save it, famously said as they landed: “Lafayette, we are here.” Gen. Lafayette had been our first foreign friend and fought alongside Washington when we needed friends, in 1776. Is it sentimental to note this? Great nations run in part on sentiment.
For these reasons and more, Mr. President, Paris was worth a march
It matters when, through absence and through bland statements, the leaders of America say: “Lafayette, we are not here.” For all the ups and downs of the Franco-American relationship, the French are our friends. You march with your friends. It is civilizational: Sheer numbers and the importance of those marching show the world what unity, strength and shared commitment look like. Even Putin sent a top official.
The absence of the American president shows, too, what America would never in the past have conceded or acknowledged, and it was there in the photos of the order of the march. There in the center of the world leaders was Angela Merkel, leader of the West. I wrote a piece suggesting she had become that last spring. I was disturbed and saddened—actually I was mortified as I watched the entire march on TV in New York—to see that fact played out on every screen in the world.
Mr Obama is wholly out of sync with U.S. thinking and sentiment.
Well, we sent the U.S. ambassador to France, Jane Hartley, down the street from the embassy to the march, say the administration’s defenders. An Obama bundler, Hartley is widely acquainted with New York’s journalists, who looked for her in the pictures of the crowd. I scanned dozens of pictures and could not find her. The French know a snub when they see one, and the French know how to snub back. I’m sure the organizers put her somewhere among the millions and perhaps through the obscurity of the position showed what they thought of the governmental status and standing of the person America “sent.” Memo to this, past, and future White Houses: just because you send fundraisers to represent our country in high diplomatic posts does not mean those countries will pretend they were sent Chip Bohlen. The French, of all peoples, won’t.
Were security concerns the reason for the president’s absence? Life is a security concern, you must do what’s right. Would massive U.S. security have inconvenienced others? Then make the security around the president less massive, less an imposition. There is no law that says it must be as Caesarian, and alienating, as it is. The president was too busy? He had an empty schedule. So did the vice president. The march was, at bottom, a preening and only symbolic show? When has this White House ever shown an aversion to preening and symbolic shows?
This was not caring enough.
Politico yesterday noted the president’s reaction from day one of the Charlie Hebdo story has been “muted.” He sat in an armchair in his office and pronounced the shootings “cowardly.” He also said something that struck me at the time, that the murders violated “a universal believe in the freedom of expression.” But there is no universal belief of free expression. Where it exists it has to be defended, in unity and with guts. That is the point.
Before I put up this post I searched the phrase “Lafayette, we are not here” to see if anyone had said it yet. It is already appearing on blogs and comment threads. Good. And it would be good to send our friends in France, again through social media, the sentence, “Lafayette we are here, still, and with you, even if our leaders were not. The American people.”
