Obama and the Tragedy of Hope

On his blog at the New York Review of Books website, Garry Wills, who in the past has brilliantly analyzed Obama's rise to prominence, writes a despairing essay about Obama's first year. I posted a response to Wills beneath his essay; both the essay and my comment can be found at this link:

NYRblog - After Massachusetts: His Hopes Did Him In - The New York Review of Books

The gist of my observation, particularly regarding Gov. Schwarzenegger and his struggles in Sacramento, was influenced by a fascinating (if almost comically repetitive) book by former Republican state Assemblyman William Bagley titled California's Golden Years: When California Worked and Why.

Bagley's argument can be summarized in one sentence: If you want a government that works, don't elect ideologues; they don't know how to govern.

An interview with Bagley, which nicely conveys his straightforward exuberance, can be heard here:



Unlike Obama's predecessor, and to the continuing frustration of the liberal ideologues among those who elected him, our current president didn't arrive in Washington and immediately dictate to Congress what to do and how to do it. Instead, he arrived and said: Legislate. He asked his former colleagues to collaborate in the act of governance. He said, Write a bill, debate the bill, pass the bill, and bring it to me. He asked them, in short, to be public servants and to act like adults.

But with Republicans, seemingly without exception, simply refusing to govern—they do not, after all, as they'll tell you themselves, presently believe in government—and with Democrats clumsily struggling with the cacophony of voices that has historically been the Party's moral strength, Congress has been unable to govern.

Democrats now want Obama to rule like Bush. They want him to become what Obama has worked to reverse: the American President as King, as despot, ruling with no tolerance for deviation, ideologically pure, deaf to opposition, above—indifferent to—the law.

This excellent article from The New Republic nicely articulates both the logic and the contradictions of Obama's approach:

http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/comity-errors

So the question presents itself—for both California and the nation: If our legislators decline the invitations of the Executive Branch to govern, abdicating their constitutional and moral duty as members of the Legislative Branch, if they continue to substitute obstructionism and ideological intransigence for collaborative governance, will the Republic survive?

NASCAR and the NBA

Last night a neighbor at the bar was explaining to me that the NBA is made up of "thieves" and "riff-raff," that it's poorly run, that he's not saying this because of the players' tattoos, and that if I want to watch a sport that is both exhilarating and "professionally run," I should watch NASCAR.

(During our conversation, an outstanding game was going on between the Golden State Warriors and the Denver Nuggets. Because of injuries, the Warriors were playing with only eight players in uniform. The game ended in overtime: Nuggets 123, Warriors 118.)

It's unnecessary to note the self-evident fact that the NBA embodies (literally) urban black culture and NASCAR embodies suburban and rural white culture.What struck me after our conversation was the way that athletes in both sports use their bodies to communicate what their respective cultures value.

Anyone older than ten can't help but be struck by the fact that NBA players these days are incredibly tattooed. It appears in some cases that the players have tried to cover every visible patch of skin with a tattoo.

In other words, the players have come to see their own bodies as a way to communicate their cultural values. Many of the tattoos are self-congratulatory (Lebron James: Chosen 1); some honor a mother, a friend, wives or children; others honor $, political heroes, home neighborhoods, Jesus. The tattoos are diverse, varied, extravagant. Yet they all make the same gesture: Upon my body I have narrated my life. Read me.

NASCAR drivers also use their bodies to communicate, but they absolutely never communicate something about their individual lives. Instead, they cover their bodies with corporate logos. Again, this is an expression of what their culture values. Suburban and rural white America value The Corporation. Business. Work. Humility. And the Machine.

Not only do NASCAR drivers decorate their bodies with advertising, they climb inside machines that are similarly covered with advertising—often advertisements for the machine itself.

In addition to the conflicting (perhaps contradictory) emphases of what the athletes of these two sports have inscribed upon their bodies, the sports themselves reflect different values. With basketball, we see that black America values the aggressive, elegant, nearly naked masculinity of its young men. NASCAR, on the other hand, reflects white America's admiration for the invisible bravery of the man inside the machine.

Structurally, the two sports are similarly repetitive. And, like all sports, they are metaphors for the nature of human life.

In the case of basketball, more or less naked men run relentlessly back and forth, back and forth, attempting not merely to score but to humiliate their opposition in the process of scoring. (Hence basketball's obsession with the slam dunk: dunks project erotic aggression, as if by slamming the ball through the opponent's hoop the player effectively fucks the opponent.) The game is refereed (unjustly, futilely) by authorities who cannot be questioned, cannot be touched. The improvisational, graceful, supremely athletic eroticism of basketball gives an otherwise tediously repetitive sport its global appeal.

In the case of NASCAR, a sport whose appeal is limited, more or less, to the U.S., a collection of roaring machines, covered in corporate advertising, relentlessly circle a track, repeating over and over the same cycle. The various positions of the machines shifts minutely from time to time. The endless cycling is occasionally interrupted so that a crew of anonymous workers can swiftly, efficiently attend to the (godlike) machine. The machine then resumes its monotonous, brutal, life-threatening circling.

NASCAR is the assembly line, the corporate career, the sexlessness and anonymity of modern suburban and rural life, transformed into sport. Its principal pleasure is not the eroticism of the body—the running, leaping, and rough dancing of the NBA—but, ironically, The Wreck, when with great delight we witness the death of God, the Machine, as it flips and spins and comes apart, killing, or perhaps saving, the little man strapped inside.

Aesthetics and Politics

I'm drawn, in the world of art, to brokenness, insufficiency, bewilderment, feminine elegance, powerlessness, failure, lovingness, uncertainty, deference, eagerness, recklessness, the chaotic, the new, the insouciant, the heterogeneous, the libertine, the inclusive, the forgotten, the disenfranchised, the disheveled, the exuberant, the experimental, the animalistic, the tentative, the naughty, the droll.

I am repelled by completeness, confidence, steadfastness, triumphalism, certainty, ambition, aggression, order, symmetry, selfishness, the absolute, the bellicose, the nationalistic, the traditional, the individual, the caustic, the outraged, the ascetic, the exclusive, the pantheon, the clean, the powerful, the well-suited, the joyless, the earnest, the cruel.

The same sensibility that shapes my aesthetic life—my attitude toward beauty—shapes my political and religious lives. Consequently, I fail to understand the appeal of modern Protestantism (for example) and the contemporary Republican Party.

Given my upbringing, this difficulty might be a form of self-loathing.

But I find self-loathing interesting—more interesting than self-love.

Haiti

About a week and a half ago I was sitting at my desk at home and felt the brief jolt of a 4.2 earthquake. I learned later that the quake originated about 40 miles from Half Moon Bay, just east of Milpitas.

After it passed, I said out loud, to myself, as if to return to reality, "That was an earthquake." I felt dizzy, even nauseous—not from the shaking, but from what I experienced, at an existential level, as an impossibility. The earth had moved. I could feel my organism's bewilderment. My body didn't care what I knew intellectually; it merely knew that the impossible had happened.

So of course we can't imagine Haiti.

The facts don't help: at least 200,000 dead—the equivalent of 6,000,000 dead Americans, had the catastrophe happened here and matched Haiti's scale. 1,500,000 homeless—the equivalent of 45,000,000 Americans losing their homes in a single catastrophic event. In effect, we've witnessed the end of a nation: its capital wiped out, the State, already fragile, in total collapse, the population decimated (a disproportionate number of the dead will be children), the infrastructure largely destroyed.

Seeing the images from Haiti, I remembered my reaction to the little tremor days before: Earthquakes cannot be.

And yet they are. If we're lucky, we resume. Or, perhaps more accurately, begin again.