Jesus, can that be right? Tom Smith

April 18, 2009

On Tuesday, at Georgetown University here in Washington, Mr Obama spoke about the economy. I was told that the White House, hypersensitive to conveying the wrong visual message, insisted that the university’s device, which includes the initials IHS, the traditional, particularly Jesuit, abbreviation for Jesus Christ, be obliterated from the backdrop. But the President invoked the Sermon on the Mount all the same.

He reminded his audience of how the well-meaning attempt to spread home-ownership in America had been perverted into forms of debt so ill- or unsecured that they had provoked the world financial crisis. He repeated Jesus’s parable of the two houses. One was built on “a pile of sand”, and so fell when the rain came. The other was built upon a rock. “We must build our house upon a rock,” said the President.

So says Charles Moore in UK’s Telegraph. If this is true, and I don’t suppose we can take this reportage at face value, then, honestly, what does Georgetown think it is doing? It covers up a Christian symbol so as not to offend, who? Our young President? Those to whom the very sight of a Christian symbol might make smoke shoot from their ears? I was raised on stories of Jesuits among others being gruesomely tortured to death before they would deny Christ. What gives? “If you won’t cover up the name of Jesus, we’ll . . . we’ll . . . not have the President give his speech in your hall! Oh no! Puleeeasssee! Anything but that!” And then, just to put the icing on the cake, our young President invokes the language of the Gospel, putting himself, of course, in the role of Jesus, telling us not to build our economy on sand, but rather on rock. That’s rich. If an economy founded on money borrowed, to use the technical term, out the kazoo, to be financed with bonds the adventurous Chinese of all people are saying make them nervous, and this to finance inter alia anti- global warming schemes that can only succeed if we convince the Indians and Chinese to sacrifice themselves on the altar of our unproven meteorological theories (not to mention other problems) and many other half-baked at best ideas, is not build on sand, what is? And then there are the electric mini-cars, the high speed rails, the government health care, and who knows what else. Trillions of dollars worth to be paid for how only He Who Must Not Be Named or Referred to By His Initials knows. Geez, you’d think our young President would have the decency to leave the IHS up there just by way of a footnote. He was taking the Guy’s lines after all.

I SEE CNS has the story, with photos of the IHS covered up. So it appears to be true. I mean, honestly, this is just embarrassing. CNS notes Obama mentioned the Sermon on the Mount, but not the author thereof by name. For future reference, allow me to explain how White Houses work. They are filled with weasley political flacks who are essentially bullies. If you say to them something like, we aren’t going to cover up the Jesus initials, and if you aren’t comfortable with that, I’m sure you can find another place to have your speech, then what will happen is they will huff and puff, run around in circles, make lots of calls on their cell phones and then probably ultimately, cave in. They’re sort of like, oh, I don’t know, Peter, when he was going through his brief little bitch phase. That’s in the gospels too. I mean, Georgetown, for the love of God, get a clue.

To be fair, if you read the story linked to above, you can see Georgetown’s position that the initials were covered up at the WH’s requests in order to create a simpler and more uniform visual backdrop.