Man lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from his existential concerns. Most of this is held unconsciously, which means that our imaginations may recognize elements of it, when presented in art or literature, without consciously understanding what it is that we recognize. — Northrop Frye, The Great Code
In Augustine’s Confessions—the original of the species of literary prayers—he devotes a whole chapter to memory. It is as fine a psychological and spiritual study of that faculty as you could find anywhere today. Like a stone in the palm he turns it over and over, tracing out the striata, smoothing its roughness, feeling its weight and shape. He ponders the strangeness that he can remember remembering just as he can remember forgetting, and that somehow forgetting must also be in his memory. “Who can fathom such a thing,” he marvels, “or make any sense of it?”
The book was written a decade after his baptism into the Catholic Church on April 25, 387 CE. The chapter is iike a traffic roundabout that directs the story of the events that drew him—both feverish for God and anguished at surrendering up his old ways—around toward the climatic moment in the garden of a friend’s house when his defenses gave way before a tidal surge of longing for belonging. All of that before he spun off in another direction to discuss the Trinity.
Like a viral agent Augustine gets in through the weak places in our skin of defenses. As much as I rise with him to that summit of emotion at conversion, it’s the passages on memory that I’m most vulnerable to these days since my memory itself seems increasingly vulnerable. Of all the potholes in the road to life’s end the ones that I swerve to avoid the most have to do with losing my memory. Even more than going blind, that seems the worst of the fates, because as Augustine says, “my memory is me.” So I build habits and routines that can bridge my absentmindedness and defuse my anxiety.
Augustine’s analogies reveal him seeking out the deep crevices where memory hides in the mind or striding down the aisles in a capacious warehouse, or pausing at one of many doors in a long corridor to the past. He searches confusedly until “the dim thing sought arrives at last, fresh from depths.” In an envy-producing flourish he boasts that some things are brought up easily, properly sequenced and recalled at will, “which happens whenever I recite a literary passage by heart.” We should all be so lucky.
Alas, my current experience has me hacking my way through a landscape kudzued into a formless forest with few distinguishing marks. More positively, I could see myself swimming from island to island in the sea of memory, regarding them as the tips of sea mounts that go down into the darkest depths but give us stability in the meantime.
Recently, I’ve realized that for months I’ve been re-experiencing some of the pivotal artists and musicians who have helped to construct my inner world. Without design, but surely with some intent, I’ve collected concert videos of Paul Simon, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Paul McCartney’s “Good Evening New York!” and Billy Joel’s “Live at Shea” concert, as well as reading biographies of Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Carly Simon, CSN, John Lennon, and Mick Jagger. These are of a piece with going back to books I’ve picked up over the years about Edward Hopper, Paul Klee, Georges Roualt, Marc Chagall, and Kandinsky—artists whose works are the windows of my soul.
As I write, it is 32 years to the day that John Lennon was shot outside the Dakota in New York City. As hard as it is to imagine, he would have been 72 this year. He died at 40 in 1980 and will be, as Dylan sang, ‘forever young.’ Like many of us, ‘midway through this life he awoke in a dark wood.’ I wanted to see him grow older, and to understand how he found his way out, and what his wit and wonder might have created had he lived.
Which brings me back to memories and the loss thereof and the regaining of them through our tricks to stay afloat, as well as the silent entrance of memories half-formed but more strongly sensed only when our striving ceases and our fences drop.
All those years ago, John said it well:
There are places I remember
All my life, though some have changed
Some forever not for better
Some have gone and some remain
All these places have their moments
With lovers and friends I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life I've loved them all
— In My Life
We are both the shapers and the shaped when it comes to our identities. We are drawn to those in the arts who sing our stuttering words, who sculpt our unformed desires and paint our fears in light. As Northrop Frye says in the epigram, our imaginations recognize what we may not consciously see. When we need it it will appear. Like the Zen saying goes, “When the pupil is ready, the teacher will arrive.”
Sometimes memory is a slow train.
“Gratitude as a discipline involves a conscious choice. I can choose to be grateful even when my emotions and feelings are still steeped in hurt and resentment.” — Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son
It is fortunate that at least once a year we are reminded of thankfulness and gratitude—lest we forget. To the market forces Thanksgiving is the occasion for the holiest day of the year—Black Friday—when all the bare-knuckled commercialism that has been throbbing resentfully since Halloween can finally burst into the open. From Black Friday until Christmas it is open season on consumers, a vortex of induced guilt that results in final quarter earnings and the measure of economic success.
But Thanksgiving as a concept is harder to identify. For many, “thanksgiving” is part of religious services, a pouring out of praise to God in return for all the blessings received. Thanksgiving, Thankfulness, Gratitude—all live in the same neighborhood, but Gratitude doesn’t get out as much as the other two. Call it reticence or shyness on their part, or even general neglect or misunderstanding on the part of the public, but Gratitude and its sibling Gratefulness do not make it into the public’s eye on many occasions.
Gratitude doesn’t appear on Aristotle’s list of virtues nor does it show up in St. Paul’s fruits of the Spirit. You won’t hear it mentioned much, if at all, in politics, except during victory or concession speeches and almost never in the entertainment industry except for Oscar night.
I’ve wondered why we seem to find it difficult to utter the words, “I’m grateful for. . . “ or “I have gratitude for . . . “ Perhaps it’s just awkward to speak the words or we find ourselves slightly embarrassed to be uttering them because one never knows where emotions such as these will go.
But it’s more likely, I think, that gratitude is seen as weakness or even a craven kissing-up to those who wield power over us. Who wants to be seen as being in debt to another, especially if that person is someone for whom we also feel resentment? Having to call on someone else for help is embarrassing; it taps into our fears of becoming redundant and it might allow others to see our incompetence.
There are days when I walk out of the classroom absolutely convinced that every student there sees me for what I am—an imposter. What gives me the right, I rage to myself, to imagine that my pitiful scraps of shared knowledge will be of use to anyone? Where do I get off thinking that my explanations and descriptions are clear, that my logic convinces and my credibility isn’t fragmented by a well-lobbed question? The dark magic of pride, hypocrisy, and self-doubt combine to become a catalytic converter for resentment. What begins as an opportunity for reflection sours into excuses: If I had better students . . . . If I had more time . . . . If they’d pay more attention and actually study the readings. . . .
It’s all a dodge, a pitiful attempt to salvage some self-respect on the barest of pretenses. Other professors make it look so easy. Their discussions flow like cream, their questions are simple and yet profound, their students cannot help but be enlightened. In Kurt Vonnegut’s vivid phrase, ‘they glow like bass drums with lights inside.” Do I forget those who have helped me over the years? No! In moments like these I remember them with shame and embarrassment and shame finds it difficult to be grateful.
Henri Nouwen (1932-1996) was a Catholic priest and author of 40 books. In his commentary, The Return of the Prodigal Son, a meditation on the parable of Jesus and the painting of the same name by Rembrandt, Nouwen says, “Resentment and gratitude cannot coexist, since resentment blocks the perception and experience of life as a gift. My resentment tells me that I don’t receive what I deserve. It always manifests itself in envy.”
There is in ungratefulness a rough shouldering aside of others, a terseness of speech and a looming sense of denial. In his multi-layered biography, John Lennon: The Life, Philip Norman notes Lennon’s frequent callousness toward those who had served him without complaint, in some cases for decades. Employees were dropped without warning, the prodigious artistry of the Beatles’ producer, George Martin, was dismissed by John as “production shit,” and lifelong friendships jeopardized by his impatience and insecurity. Yet those who knew him best and loved him most could cite many more instances of his kindness and thoughtfulness than of the cutting remarks and cruel comments. As his self-confidence waxed and waned his gratitude did so also. At times his vulnerability was achingly apparent such as in the lyrics to Help!:
But every now and then I feel so insecure/I know that I just need you like I’ve never done before.
In the last years of his life, before he was murdered outside the Dakota on December 8, 1980, he reached out to people he had hurt over the years and thanked them for what they had done for him. Spending so much time with his infant son, Sean, taught him patience and brought out in him a paternal instinct that he was not at all sure existed. As he took less and gave more his need to impose his will on others diminished and his generous nature became more evident.
So perhaps that provides a clue to gratitude, that it is there to be drawn upon when we relax our grip and learn to open up to others. Nouwen says that gratitude is a spontaneous response to our awareness of gifts received, but also that gratitude can be lived as a discipline. “The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy.”
I’d like to think of gratitude as both a virtue to be practiced and a gift to be received. In receiving there is re-cognition, a rethinking of who we are and how much we have been given. In the practicing of gratitude there is constancy and commitment. How much we could transform our world through such simple acts!
“The inevitability of cynicism often looks like the twentieth-century legacy, but one goal of philosophy is to enlarge our ideas of what is possible.” — Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists
Now that our long national nightmare is over we can take up a new opportunity for idealism. In the rather confined circles that I spend my working days and nights in, there was relief rather than ecstasy at President Obama’s re-election. In other parts of the country—and, no doubt, in our fair city—they were dancing in the streets, provided they weren’t splashing through water up to their knees or slogging through sand and mud in the aftermath of Sandy.
Immediately after a battle is as good a time as any to ask oneself, was it worth it? And while I watched the fight from the middle distance, I was fascinated enough by the posturing and the propaganda from both ends of the political spectrum to ask myself some questions: Does it make a difference (the “it” being the right to vote)? Is there still a place for hope in these post-apocalyptic days? What, if anything, does a progressive Christian faith have to offer a society that is fed up with fundamentalists of all stripes?
[Full disclosure: I do not vote, since my citizenship is Canadian and my card is green, but having lived in this country most of my life I travel on parallel paths.]
It does make a difference, for a number of reasons, whether the citizens vote or not. The usual reason is that every vote counts, a truism which cannot be denied in states like Florida for example. But surely casting a vote, as commonplace as the action itself might be, has some kind of moral validation to it? If we act on our best judgment we make that which we might only tentatively hold dear all the more real.
As Susan Neiman points out in her enthralling argument for a reasoned idealism (Moral Clarity, 2008), “. . . . the American revolution was nothing short of miraculous. ‘We hold these truth to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’ was, metaphysically speaking, an astounding move. . . . In 1776 a band of colonials had the audacity to declare the idea self-evident—and thereby began to make it come true.”
Even aside from the obvious reasons, the act of voting, like the efficacy of prayer, has less to do with tracing the cause to the effect as it does with changing our attitudes toward “we the people.” Maybe the American people aren’t quite as passive and imbecilic as they are made out to be if they can resist the millions of dollars pumped into the media-political pipeline by Citizens United, Sheldon Adelson, and the Koch brothers.
These people certainly have the right to spend their money as they wish—after all, the Supreme Court likened that spending to a form of free speech—but it’s still somewhat reassuring to see that this time around such blatant manipulating of a Constitutional right came up way short of the goals. And that would still be the case had the Democrats done the same.
Is there hope for those on the left of the political spectrum? If this election served as a wakeup call to the Democratic Party and those affiliated with it, then an unintended consequence of good has glimmered into light. Against the odds, the President has been re-elected, despite a dragging economy, a dragged-out war, and some liberal measures that might not have flown four years ago. Despite four years of ideological gun-slinging progress has been made in human rights, restoring the infrastructure, and setting new directions.
This election blew the gaskets of some on the right to a degree I’ve not seen before. Donald Trump, Ted Nugent, Victoria Jackson and others were apoplectic over the election results. This would almost be funny if it were not for their malignant disavowal of democratic principles. Apparently—if Donald Trump had his way—there would be lynch mobs marching with pitchforks up Pennsylvania Avenue as we speak. Isn’t it time the media fired Donald Trump?
Nevertheless, free elections were held, no one was machine-gunned in the waiting lines, millions of people of good will and conviction—Democrats and Republicans alike—made their wishes known and moved the country fractionally ahead by the sheer virtue of acting on their convictions. This is no small thing in today’s world and we should be grateful for it. Immanuel Kant said, “If we depreciate the value of human virtues we do harm, because if we deny good intentions to the man who lives aright, where is the difference between him and the evil-doer?”
So how can idealism be taken seriously again? Susan Neiman, a philosopher who is also an expert on Kant, looks to him: “Kant says you do it by talking about heroes: those who risk their lives rather than resign themselves to injustice.”
The form of religion expressed in a twisted and malevolent way by those on the right is seen for what it is by its fruits. By contrast, as a knee-jerk reaction, those on the left who reject religion do so by allowing their understanding of it to be defined by the distorters of it. There is no reason why religion cannot have a voice in the political realm if those who speak for it point us away from the naked grab for power and if they hold out for something better in the world. This is transcendence and Neiman says that the urge for transcendence expresses two drives. “One is to criticize the present in the name of the future, to keep longing alive for ideas the world has yet to see. The other is to prove our freedom, and dignity, by having a hand in bringing those ideals about through some form of human creativity.”
The criticism that we fall short of our ideals is no thunderbolt of truth—our sins are ever before us. But neither is it an excuse not to try. As Kant reminds us in his Lectures on Ethics: “The remedy against such dejection and inertia is to be found in our being able to hope that our weakness and infirmity will be supplemented by the help of God if we but do the utmost that the consciousness of our capacity tells us we are able to do.”
It would be a change for the better if those who invoked God did so from the humility of hope rather than the hubris of hypocrisy.
“Culture is man’s medium; there is not one aspect of human life that is not touched and altered by culture.” — Edward T. Hall, Beyond Culture
According to Ed Hall, American anthropologist and writer, culture is not innate but learned, all of it. Everything in a culture is bound together and culture sets the boundaries that define one tribe or group from another. The odd thing about this is not that we have to learn our culture, but that having learned it we are no longer aware of it. Knowing our context so well we take everything for granted and only pay attention when we stub our toes in the dark because someone moved the furniture. In other words, we only see what we are when we come up against someone who is not like us.
This can be a profoundly disturbing experience, one that sets us back on our heels and causes tempers to flare. Since we learn best through comparison and contrast we should not be surprised when the contrasts between what we think we know about the world, and the way others experience and shape the world, get up in our face. That becomes an ordinance of humility, a teachable moment, an occasion to learn from our mistakes without rubbing out the one who points out our mistakes.
Amartya Sen, Harvard economist and Nobel Prize winner, explores the presumption that we live in an overarching system which categorizes all of us in exactly the same way. This way can be either religious or cultural, but inevitably it sets us against each other. “A solitarist approach,” writes Sen in Identity and Violence, “can be a good way of misunderstanding nearly everyone in the world.” Sen’s reflection on this leads him to the conclusion that when we are assigned one dominant classification —whether it be religion, or community. or culture, or nation, or civilization — which ignores so much that is essential to our personal identity, the many diverse roles that we play and the interlocking communities we move through — violence is almost always the result. Holding hands and singing Kumbaya no longer works in promoting peace, and the wish to see ourselves as really all the same under our skin ignores the recognition that we are, says Sen, “diversely different (italics the author’s).”
Crises can lead to opportunities for us to learn more about our pluralistic human identities and to use those very differences to wake up and hone our sensitivities. Sen and Hall do not exaggerate when they suggest that our very survival as a species may rely on us understanding those diverse differences, not in seeking to conform us all to one identity.
This understanding is hard work, very hard work. In fact, some virulent strains in our own culture inoculate us to these exposures. Religion and politics, the two things most avoided in close relationships, seem to thrive on the us-them dichotomy. Since we tend to grow our own identities in proportion to acceptance by our groups, the easiest way, apparently, to quickly build solidarity in the group is to turn it against other groups. That’s a shortcut we cannot afford these days. This is such a natural law of group formation, in my experience, that we may well expect it sooner rather than later in the life cycle of the groups we belong to or desire to join.
Many years ago, in the wake of the Second World War, Gabriel Marcel, the French Catholic existentialist philosopher and playwright, grappled with parallel issues of individuality and freedom. Writing in Man Against Mass Society, Marcel asked what freedom meant in a society which routinely places us in situations that erode our ethics. We have a choice, of course, but we may not always have the means to live out our convictions. There are others who rely on us and for whom we make compromises just to survive to fight another day. In a materialist culture, says Marcel, everything is reduced to commodities and objects, even human beings.
While he could not have foreseen the reach and scope of the global economy of today, he seemed acutely aware of how entangled our convictions and duties are. If you have a problem with the economic conditions that make affordable clothes, food, and electronics, how far will you go to buy only those goods produced in fair labor conditions?
We don’t know the future, Marcel says, but it is that very ignorance that keeps us hopeful. By way of revolt against the mass society, Marcel argues that “all philosophies of immanence have had their day (italics his).” And we are called to fight against the idolatries of race and class that they foster. Such a fight, he intimates, isn’t just reserved for those with power, assuming of course, that they haven’t already succumbed to the degradations that go with power over others. He puts it in a sentence: “A man cannot be free or remain free, except in the degree to which he remains linked with that which transcends him, whatever the particular form of that link may be. . . .”
Artists have the possibility of creative action against this materialism more readily than most of us, says Marcel. But he’s quick to note that being an artist brings temptations to startle, to innovate at all costs, to sell oneself to the highest bidder or to retreat into the world of the aesthete. All of us are called to be creators of our own freedom. And the way to that freedom lies through remaining open to others. Materialistic societies like ours, says Marcel, sin against this freedom by excluding as forcefully as possible this openness to others. For Marcel the individual could not claim to be free in a culture which callously excludes some and commoditizes almost everything.
It’s not easy to reach for the transcendent in a culture that rewards selfishness nor should we presume that our mere opposition to such a culture means that we are open and unselfish. But on the eve of a bitterly fought election perhaps we can remind ourselves that no matter the outcome we may choose the side of the transcendent by learning to listen and to understand those unlike ourselves.
“Life is long if you know how to use it.” — Seneca
When someone in the public eye passes away it causes us to refurbish old memories. Such was the case when Senator George McGovern died at 90 this week, and Jacques Barzun, perhaps our last public intellectual, died at the age of 104 in San Antonio, Texas. Both men were, in their own ways, the last of a kind, the public figure who lives out his or her convictions with grace and irony right up to the end.
McGovern is often remembered as the man who lost to Richard Nixon by a landslide in the 1972 presidential election. Nixon, our most paranoid of presidents, was fearful that George Wallace would take away votes and sought to find anything he could to smear Wallace. The assassination attempt that left Wallace paralyzed took him out of the race and all but assured Nixon the victory. While he sympathized with Wallace in public Nixon privately exulted that the way was now clear. As for McGovern, Nixon’s men explored the possibility of trying to link his campaign with funding from Castro’s government. That particular move proved unnecessary: the country resoundingly rejected McGovern and his liberal politics. Nixon went on triumphantly to a second term in which he disgraced himself and the country by attempting to subvert the Constitution. He avoided impeachment only by resigning on Friday, August 9, 1974.
Nixon’s resignation speech, a rambling, self-indulgent paean to his mother and his lack of money, was picked up by radio by a group of us that day on a windy, rain-swept headland overlooking the sea in the south of Wales. At the time I remember feeling relief that the whole sordid episode was finally over and that we wouldn’t have Richard Nixon to kick around anymore.
In moments like that you wonder what alternate history might have been written had McGovern miraculously won. The Democratic Party was never so aligned again with politics that was unabashedly for the rights of women, blacks, the poor, the lame, the halt, and the blind. After defeat McGovern went on to devote himself to the war against hunger in the world. Richard Nixon resurrected himself in time as an elder statesman and at his death was feted by the living presidents of the time. McGovern’s political beliefs seem almost impossibly naive by today’s “whatever” standards. Forty years of Democratic centrism has meant that the party has all but abandoned its constituency of the marginalized.
History unreels behind us, not so much a transcript of orderly actions, but rather a confession of conflicting desires. We gather it up occasionally, expecting a confirmation of our cherished memories. We are often rudely shocked by the distance between our present selves and our reverenced past. The passing of George McGovern, himself a scholar of American history, reminds us that there is more to life than Real Housewives and that we learn best from that which we have understood.
Jacques Barzun, in the words of the New York Times’ obituary for him, was a “distinguished historian, essayist, cultural gadfly and educator who helped establish the modern discipline of cultural history.” A man who resisted authoritarianism and the dominance of systems, he lived and breathed a liberal humanism that treasured reflection and gratitude for great learning.
Barzun’s bemused and ironic sensibilities could be read as support for the status quo. In his last major work, From Dawn to Decadence, he notes that “most of what government sets out to do for the public good is resisted as soon as proposed,” and that “The upshot is a floating hostility to things as they are. . . . The hope is that getting rid of what is will by itself generate the new life.” The answer, he suggests, is neither in baptizing the past nor in embracing the new. Rather, “Our distinctive attitude toward history, our habit of arguing from it, turns events into ideas charged with power.”
Both George McGovern and Jacques Barzun lived with the assurance that ideas matter—profoundly—and that what today seems so new and unprecedented may have already appeared in our past, either as an Angel of Light or of Darkness. What we do with our interpretations will create our futures.
“If monarchs have little sympathy with mankind, mankind have even less with monarchs. They are merely to us a sort of state-puppets or royal waxwork, which we may gaze at with superstitious wonder, but have no wish to become . . . .” — William Hazlitt, On Personal Identity.
Why would anyone wish to become president? On the face of it, the highest office that we were told anyone could aspire to and some could attain, is a thankless job. Daily the president is assailed on all sides, sometimes by his own kind, but relentlessly by the disloyal opposition. When he does something that approximates the right thing to do, someone—Charles Krauthammer, most likely—will thunder from the Washington Post and George Will will mutter and mewl. Everything he says and does is subject to the kind of scrutiny usually reserved for “persons of interest” by the FBI or Kim Kardashian.
Of course, anyone in that position should expect that they’ll be held “accountable”—our favorite euphemism for who is to blame—but the accountability factor often becomes a political football and a blanket term for general dissatisfaction. We don’t often hear that someone is held to be responsible, perhaps because that implies actions governed by ethics rather than just a faux economic term.
William Hazlitt, writing in the early 19th century, had in mind kings and princes when he disavowed any interest in changing places with them, but his words could apply almost as well with the office of the President. In a way we ask the impossible of our presidents. We expect them to be extraordinary communicators who can talk to anybody—Saudi princes or Joe the Plumber, pizza makers or heads of state. We expect them to have the intel at their fingertips to make a definitive statement on horrific acts that are still unfolding. And we believe that everything that happens between their inauguration and their reelection—or defeat—is a direct result of some action they’ve taken or left out.
They must be one of us, yet without our annoying and petty grievances. They should be smart enough to solve world economic problems but they shouldn’t be tarred as one of the ’Harvard elite.’ We ask them to maintain America’s dominance by any means necessary but we don’t want to pay for it. We want them to tell the truth but we don’t want to hear it.
There are a number of reasons why a person might want to be president. First, they want the perks and the power. It’s not the money: the President makes $400,000 per year plus expenses. The CEO of Goldman Sachs made $16.5 million in 2011; John Hammergren of McKesson made $131.19 million in a recent year. But they get the use of a plane, Air Force One, a helicopter, Marine One, a nice place in the country—Camp David—and a tony address in downtown Washington. They’re referred to as “the most powerful person in the world,” and people wave as they drive by in motorcades.
Another reason is that they might be driven to accomplish what few people do—make it to the top in a profession. If you’re a lawyer I suppose the Supreme Court would be your last and best job offer. Some academics aspire to be presidents of universities, actors to win Oscars, and athletes to compete and win in the Olympics, the Superbowl or the World Cup. And politicians want the White House. Lyndon Johnson ran for the Vice Presidency, not because he wanted it, but because his mentor, Sam Rayburn, couldn’t bear the thought of Richard Nixon getting it. In time and tragically, Johnson got his turn and his term, a position he’d been climbing toward since his early days as a Texas congressman. Bill Clinton found his inspiration in a meeting with President Kennedy as a teenager. Kennedy himself was groomed for the presidency by his father, so the legend goes.
And no doubt there are those who believe they might do some good, might shape the events of history toward justice or freedom or prosperity. We believe them enough to elect them but we doubt them before they are done. “Why will Mr. Cobbett persist in getting into Parliament?”, asked Hazlitt about a perennial candidate. “He would find himself no longer the same man.” There’s the rub: if you’re man (or woman) enough for the job are you willing to pay the price?
The price is literally in the millions. Some estimates put the total cost of the 2012 election at over $5 billion, an obscene amount for the return on investment. At least three times a week I get an urgent email from Democratic headquarters: for a mere $3 I can help turn the tide and rout the Republican berserkers. The money will go, I am assured, to paying for ads to refute the latest lies the Romney camp is spouting. Money for truth. . . .
To run, to put yourself and your family through the merciless gauntlet of American public opinion, you’ve got to have a massive ego, strong enough to withstand the constant criticism, supple enough to dodge the blows and yet deep enough to listen to counsel. You have to realize that you ran to make a solid difference in the world, but now it’s not about you, but the myriad powers that be. And if you have anything different to say about it you’d better be sure the mic isn’t hot and it’s off the record. Because you didn’t get there on your own. There are many who put you there for reasons of their own, reasons that will demand a return on their investment.
But at the end of the day, climbing the stairs to bed like any other person, can you look back on your efforts that day and feel like you rolled the rock up the mountain with purpose and intention? Can you be glad for small victories and brush off the defeats? If you’ve got the ego strength and the humility to realize that the hinge of history may not turn on your command, but you might have pushed the door open just a bit wider for Goodness—then may you sleep well.
They are like unto children sitting in the marketplace, and calling one to another and saying, ‘We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned to you, and ye have not wept.’ — Luke 7:32, 21st Century King James Bible
When I have a bad day the world does not swerve, is not shaken to its foundations nor rattled to its timbers. This is as it should be. Yet, when Barack Obama has a bad day Democrats gasp and clutch at their hearts, Republicans sneer, and Mr. Mitt comes off a winner.
The wonder of it all! In the hours that followed the first presidential debate of the season, liberal commentators cried out to their deities, examined the entrails of small animals sacrificed to cast light on the mysteries, and pronounced the President unfit for reelection. With the insight only those blind with fury can have, they looked deep into Barack Obama’s psyche and recoiled at what they saw. Ennui, arrogance, an insouciant desire to hang it all up and knock out a few rounds on the links—it was all there. They shuddered. The President does not want to win! He has thrown the election! My high school debate team could have done better! Alarum!
David Graham of The Atlantic took people like The Beast’s Michael Tomasky, Harper’s Kevin Baker, and unliberal Byron York of The Washington Examiner to task in a perceptive piece which included the great line, “I’m old enough to remember when Obama was running away with the election. It was early last week.”
Perhaps in a horse-race where the lead changes from moment to moment those backing a particular steed can be forgiven if their hearts freeze in terror when it stumbles. But let’s be real: no legs were broken. This horse need not be put down just yet.
An hour after the debate I read most of the transcript and I thought the candidates had dealt with some substantive issues. I missed the head-shakes, the downcast eyes, and the pursed lips of Obama, but I also missed the bright gleam in Romney’s eyes as he shape-shifted yet again.
It’s an interesting experience, reading a debate: it focuses attention on the words and their meanings, not on the gestures, expressions, signals, sounds, and the myriad motions that burn impressions into one’s memory. Researchers in cognitive and perceptual studies tell us that we remember little of what was said but much of what was seen, a fact not lost on political handlers, pole dancers, sales people and senators.
In a mediasphere formed around images, sound bites, and opinions it might not matter all that much what the candidates think or even less, what they believe in. They are blurred in our eyes, distinguishable only by the captions they are tagged with by the media. Like modernist paintings, they take on the shape suggested by the titles conveniently mounted on the wall next to them. “The new Mitt!” “Obama sags!” “Romney takes command!”
George Gerbner, a communications scholar who studied media effects for decades, believed that the media don’t tell us what to think—they tell us what to think about. They set the agenda; we carry it out and pride ourselves on knowing what’s current. That may not be entirely true anymore. Public figures are primed, prepped, and produced. Like a new line of frozen dinners they come with ingredients listed on the side, a banner with the magic words, “New and improved!,” and attractive packaging. We don’t know what we’ve got until we open it up—and by then we can’t take it back for a refund. This is more than agenda-setting. News organizations used to counter the spin of the public relations people; now they work for them.
For all the scrutiny that candidates for the presidency go through in the long and excruciating path to election, we may not know much about their souls. We see what we’re allowed to see, hear what’s been scripted, and realize that we’re seeing shadows on the walls of Plato’s cave. None of this is deliberately malevolent or deceitful. It’s simply how business works in a contemporary news cycle.
The best illusions are those in which the audience trusts the illusionist. Oddly enough, it’s the burden, the weight, the power of the idea of trust between the people and their leaders that can, occasionally, elude the barriers set in place. If there’s any integrity at all in the leader the trust of the people will elicit a genuine response, one that will be evident in the moment. The unspoken hope that keeps this experiment going is the belief in those moments of truth.
