WriteWithFire

THE TALK

December 28, 2008

"You are unmutual, No. 6" One of the "No. Twos" in THE PRISONER

I'm guessing that this has been going on all over America since November 4th. The Talk. The Talk is something like an intervention, although, too late to redeem the sinner in question. The Talk, which I thought would fade away by Thanksgiving, still insinuates itself into conversation between friends or colleagues. As it did between myself and a friend just before Christmas Day.

The Talk always begins, "But don't you wish him well? Don't you want him to succeed?"

"Him," of course, is President-elect Obama, as in from the podium of the President-elect.

In this case, I was hearing The Talk for the second time. Why? Who knows? Perhaps friends and co-workers simply cannot believe that I resisted the impulse to make history. Or rather, the institutional, corporate, and media campaign to stampede me into the corral of history.

The frequencey of The Talk does seem to decrease with the number of invitations to social events. No inquisitions when they've stopped talking to you.

Although the new president is well on his way to exceeding Pres. Clinton's talent for empty nuance; nuance and subtley have rarely distinguished the political campaigns of the past two years. Except in the media coverage.

As long ago as the summer of 2007, I was telling friends and co-workers that tentative impressions from the Times, the Free Press, the Washington Post etc. implied that they were all beating an increasingly excited tattoo for Senator Obama. But most people I knew still believed that Senator Clinton was the media and institutional favorite. I may not have been routing for the Illinois senator, but I knew a favored underdog when the media so quietly signaled one. If the senator began to think he was annointed, it wasn't without encouragement.

Senator Clinton had patrician Republican pedigree, but Senator Obama was a member of the aristocracy of cool. No suprise that one of his cultural heroes is jazzman Miles Davis, and a member of Lawrence Otis Graham's "our crowd," upper middle class blacks. Obama rarely slipped into victim mode. But for Clinton it was always her default position. Not cool. A bit too much moisture around the eyes. Betraying a middle class earnestness and anxiety that Hollywood and New York disdains.

In this final Talk, however, a new word was uttered. "Racism." It wasn't an accusation -- at least I don't think it was --merely a mention of an historic reality that I might just be numb to. That 62 million Americans voted for the new president struck me as clear and historic refutation of that history. And that refutation should have implied that I was free to vote for the Arizona senator, which I admitted I did. Free, that is, to vote my conscience and my experience on a number of issues that the president-elect was either cagey or uncharacteristically clear on. (You bet I remember the God and Guns remark.)

As I say, nuance and subtley were not what was wanted this past November. There's the complicated fact, for example, that the majority of Blacks, Jews, and Hispanics in this country vote in opposition to my own civic and economic values (and, sometimes, cultural and moral beliefs). Acknowledging that shouldn't be an opportunity to consign me to the moral depths occupied by Klansmen and members of White Citizens Councils. And yet...

As it happens, the majority of Blacks and Hispanics did vote for propositions in California and Florida which I support -- reaffirming society's and the Church's belief that marriage should not be re-defined, but remain between a man and a woman. Or at least that there should be a discussion first. In the wake of that democratic victory, there was an occasion to wonder whether one particular group wasn't engaging in racism and bigotry. The "N" and "S" word were shouted with abandon during protests outside black and hispanic churches. Mormons and Catholics were also demonized revealing more cracks in the solidarity of the diverse. The "proposition H8" protesters originated from a group that, admittedly, is small, a subculture of barely 3 percent. And often provincial and incurious about what goes on outside it.

As it happens, I am also pro-Israel. An unpopular position among some acquaintances and co-workers. It was an impolitic opinion in law school and the UAW in New York. Even some Jewish faculty and students seemed intimidated.

Most people don't know, but my friends do, that I was blacklisted in the book industry by the UAW and an editorial director in large part for suggesting a vigorous internship program for minorities at one publishing company. That is, for the insensitivity of pointing out a gap between rhetoric and actions. A social gaffe compounded by the fact that the majority of editors and editorial staff were women and feminists.

That will never be a pleasant memory, but my conversion to Catholicism -- a glacial anc conflicted process by the way -- has brought a certain degree of peace with it. Even as it is a conversion that will make life more uncomfortable, not less.

The Talk could be seen as insulting, condescending. But in the end, perhaps, you can't come home again. Too many years away. Too many experiences. People know someone from a decade or two ago. There are prodigal sons. Then there are prodigal strangers.

But, friends and co-workers may be onto something. Perhaps President-elect Obama -- whose radical pedigree and status in the aristocracy of cool is irrefutable -- is a radical the way most Episcopalians are Christians. It's what you say at parties and write in best-selling books and unread journals. It's a dollar in the Salvation Army bucket at Christmas or a check to the ACLU or HRC or NEA just before tax season. Then, once in power, the status remains quo, no matter how pernicious it is. It's not that the new president will do anything, it's that he'll do nothing to upset the house of special interest lords in America. After all, that's what they've paid him for.

As for the rest of us. We'll move along as instructed. There's nothing to see here.

Sam Macomb

THE PATHOLOGY OF COOL

December 16, 2008

"All that is necessay for evil to suceed is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke

On Dennis Miller's show last night, a Chicago Tribune columnist noted that ignorance of the character of Gov. Blagojevich would be impossible for any Illinois or Federal pol. He acknowledged that he liked the president elect from Illinois, but that the only way he stayed clean all those years was by looking the other way.

[The Tribune writer noted that in 2002, state senator Barack Obama and Rahm Emmanuel closely advised and guided Blagojevich's successful run for governor of Illinois.]

It takes a studied and agile cool to step over the steaming corruption of Springfield's and Chicago's civic culture as Senator Obama demonstrated like the Astaire of politics he is becoming.

Few would be enlightened by the observation that the fanatic contempt -- a Progressive contempt -- for middle-classism that the president-elect imbibed at church and law for nearly two decades is for the middle class fastidiousness. Cut and raked lawns, painted houses, washed cars, Sunday mass, regular attendance at the polls every two years. Anxiety about the health and future of their children, about money, about the quality of the local schools, about even a hint of crime. An earnestness separated from cool by a social chasm.

Which is why preachers and activists and community organizers rarely attack the upper and upper middle classes. They depend upon and emulate their economic security; their certain solidarity with unending civil rightism and cultural evolution; their contempt for restraints of any kind; and their social ease that knockoffs from the Claymore Shop cannot costume.

Now, as in the sixties, radicals in casual dress -- or when required by cameras, Brooks Brothers suits -- accessorized by firey rhetoric, climb the social rock face with a supple cool that has more in common with Kingswood and Cranbrook than the Little Red School House in the Village.

[To ambitious progressives, the working class and working poor are beneath contempt, that is, fit only for ridicule. As they are somewhere almost nightly on MY NAME IS EARL, THE SIMPSONS, THE BLUE COLLAR COMEDY HOUR, THE DAVE CHAPPELLE SHOW (in reruns).]

As a state legislature and then Senator from Illinois, President-elect Obama understood that "to do something big" (as Michelle Obama announced "we" would do at a gathering of senatorial spouses) you have to step around the collateral damage of someone elses abuse of power. Great things require great sacrifices -- by others.

Burke's words were apparently a favorite of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, who quoted them often. All that is required for evil to prevail is for a good man to do nothing. Until they can do everthing -- the Obama codicil. Institutional failure in New Orleans did not become a progressive issue until Hurrican Katrina could be used to make it a Federal case. A famously corrupt and ineptly run city finally found its fall guy -- and it only cost the loss of half the city and one thousand lives.

If Christmas brings the meanness out of you, here's a new way to make a progressive co-worker or friend feel bad. As them if "competence" is the word that they would use to describe Detroit, Pontiac, Baltimore, the Bronx, the southside of Chicago, Roxbury, Compton, CA, Oakland, CA, South Central LA, Philadelphia... In the enlightened universe of "world changers," this would be a cruel and unfair and rude confrontation with facts.

In New York and Detroit where I have spent nearly three quarters of my life, looking the other way was the only way to keep a straight face when yet another politician promised to "change the world." Correlating the urban misery index with the latest in slapstick idealism was bigotry on its face. Here in Detroit, the city is broke, the children untaught and unsafe, the city council has their judas goat in yet another dismissed school superintendant, while the preachers sing and dance around SUV's supplanting altars and crosses.

A reporter asked President Elect Obama if, after spending hundreds of billions of mass printed dollars on bailouts, stimulus packages, and infrastructure, he could promise that unemployment would decrease in two years. Obama couldn't promise that and so didn't answer the question. Those gravity-defying dance moves again. President Astaire...

There is no accountability for cool, especially when cool "loses it" as it did in the California streets after the election. Blacks and hispanics discovered that racial epithets aren't merely euphemisms on the Los Angeles Times op-ed page (which now encompasses everything from the funny pages to above the fold headlines.

The other day, at a bookstore, a cashier asked a lesbian couple (they were buying, as they announced to anyone who could hear, gay "erotica") if they would like to contribute a children's book to a local charity. "No. Absolutely not," one of the women said. "Why do they need to learn to read." She smiled. Cool is, of course, a subsidiary of American Narcissicism. A leisure service of the babyboomers. The woman looked around in hopes of getting a response. (Not cool. Not because she wanted to be noticed, but because she showed that she wanted to be noticed.) The marketing slogan for the new Sean Penn movied about Harvey Milk, a gay activist shot down in cold blood by a deranged ex cop, is NEVER BLEND IN. That is now the kulturekampf cry of any and every social justice crusade in the West.

If the whole world isn't watching, no one is. Conscience requires a sense of the private. But progressives live by the assumption that their thoughts, sex acts, prejudices, opinions, diet, and politics are of interest to all. Privacy is only a concern when the government acts or tries to protect citizens from crime or terrorism.

Your desire not to be compelled, Clockwork Orange-like, to view their private lives deserves no consideration. And that is usually when cool is lost. No one paid attention to the couple and the disappointment was noticeable. Reminding me again of a night at the Lone Star in Manhattan when Abby Hoffman came in and no one took note. His suicide months later may well have been, in part, the desperate act of a former celebrity. In a roomful of media narcissicists, Mr. Hoffman blended in.

Sam Macomb

A PLAGUE OF COOL

December 13, 2008

"When the sashaying of gentlemen brings you grievance now and then/what's needed are some memories of planing lakes/those planing lakes will surely calm you down." - John Cale, "Hanky Panky Nohow"

"Let's go change the world." President-elect Barack Obama to his new deputy chief of staff/personnel director/human resources manager/diversity officer, Jim Messina

"Government is cool again," Jim Messina, deputy chief of staff/personnel director/human resources manager/and diversity officer for the Obama White House

Looking back on the fall campaign it is astonishing that anyone believed Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin had a lottery's chance in Oaxaca against a man who looked as if he had just stepped out of a William Claxton photograph. All that was missing was a shark skin suit, thin tie, black shoes, a trumpet, and a cigarette (well, the cigarettes were there, we just didn't see them).

Government is cool again. So says Mr. Messina. But it's cool again because the president is cool again. President Reagan's publicity-still elegance was many things, but not cool. Sen. McCain was a member of the lost generation that was too old for bad rock concert sashaying; too young for the reflexive contempt of the babyboomers. Clinton, with his cheap sunglasses and saxophone was cool in a black knock off sort of way, but President Obama is black. Obama is Kennedy-cool without the Kennedy messiness. (The messiness is there, it is merely Chicago messiness.) Hip hop cool without the clownish Savoy Row sweat suits (shades of Savoy Row el jeffe fatigues). Poitier cool without the big screen chip on his shoulder.

Cool, like pornography, we recognize like a baby who knows the face that is his mothers and the face that isn't. We have been hardwired by good jazz and bad movies; hip tv detectives and tv cops on the take to know cool when we see it.

We can't or won't explain it. The President-elect is cool. That's what matters. Lee Siegel in the WSJ came close to the pathology of cool when he compared Obama with his muse, President Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln's eloquence was always on. President Obama is also on tap. Every situation requires a slick verbal gloss or response. Cool is the emotional numbness beneath the portrayal of a political stranger or Man with a Funny Name who comes to town to clean things up or bring change we can believe in.

As the new cabinet demonstrates and as the 750 million dollar war chest measures in the only metric we know, President Obama is neither a stranger nor an outsider to those who have promoted his elevation.

Yes, he is cool. Cool like spagetti-western Clint and Robert Altman's Philip Marlowe. Cool and cool and cool again until... Until the gun is drawn and the narrative of too cool to care erupts in bloodshed. Often of a friend.

Cool like Miles Davis who maintained his cool by mainlining. Cool like Mingus until he smashed the fingers of a musician by slamming down a piano lid.

In a media mediated world, cool creates tension of high expectations. In the real world, the protagonist holds it, holds it, holds it, then loses it.

Cool moves through the crowd unmoved by what moves the crowd. Free of anxiety and engagement. Only the cool can say something as arrogant and unknowing as "let's change the world."

There is the philosophical difference between the incoming Obama administration and the outgoing Bush presidency. "Freedom is God's gift to humanity," President Bush has said on more than one occassion. Freedom is liberation, it is also burden. It's hard. It makes you sweat when you think. It can be heavy as a conscience.

Change is change. And if the change doesn't work, you walk away unmoved, cool-like, leaving the mess behind. Inner city schools. Corrupt state houses. Haiti. Somalia.

A friend tells me that he was persuaded to vote for Obama because of recent columns by Peggy Noonan. Ms. Noonan certainly did her part for Obama, along with the Times and the Washington Post and Newsweek and People and Teen People. Peggy's heart belongs to Ronnie, her first love. President Reagan could speak with passion. He could take risks. He was engaged. He read Noonan's scripts. But he walked away from the slaughter of 242 Marines and set a precedent that liberated the Clinton administration and all those multilateral ngos from taking the only action terrorists understand.

Ms. Noonan wants Reagan back. Or rather, she wants to go back to Reagan. But we live with the president we have. Not the president we wish we had. And in the moment. Like most speechwriters, Noonan conflates her talent for English with political power and political insight. "Bush has ruined everything." And yet, things have been going wrong for a long time now. Before Bush. Before 9/11. The parties involved would fill more than a Georgetown party. Not to mention a large training camp in Pakistan or Afghanistan or Iran or Syria.

The good that President Bush did, as Paula Dobriansky has detailed in her State Department exit interviews, was mostly unseen. Like President Obama's cigarettes and late-night meetings with the governor of Illinois. "I'm not cool and I never will be" admits Woody Allen's alter ego in PLAY IT AGAIN SAM. An admission President Bush shares. He has referred to himself as "just a simple president," even as he could be over confident in his actions. But humility -- Christian humility? -- was never far below the bravado. Anyone who drank and partied as he did was somatically aware of his uncoolness.

No matter how bad things get, no matter what state fails next (my bet's been on Mexico this past year), or when the next jihadist slaughter takes place, the new president will know just what to say, even when his eloquence is appallingly inappropriate.

He won't lose his cool. Until he does. And then we might begin to miss a president who knew when to shut the hell up.

So "government is cool again." Only someone who could be summoned by "let's go change the world" and not laugh or cringe could say that. I'm betting that every law school graduate had a professor like mine. Prof. O'Flaherty's eyes would lose focus as he reveried about the 60s and 70s when Federal war on poverty and injustice programs were filled to the brim with tax dollars. The professor had apparently been appointed to run one. No questions asked. No accountability required. Easy money. Good times. Stickin' it to the middle classes.

Events -- we are reduced to that hope -- will bring rationality to Pres. Obama's grand old visions of a Great Society II. Even as Americans shiver in darkened houses and grow resentful and passive after being overwhelmed by digital tactics and virtual strategies designed to bypass city hall and elected representatives. The dull competence required to pick up the garbage and hire good teachers and honest cops -- all that is uncool -- will continue. Ordinary Americans, unlike the New Patriots of 1/20/09, will continue to work hard, raise their children, fly the flag on July 4th.

But it is going to get harder. Because it is going to get meaner. The institutional culture of academia and the big cities will now slouch toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Jim Messina will be responsible for hiring thousands of young eager federal employees to retrieve hundreds of failed mid-century programs mothballed in government warehouses.

Teach the illiterate to read. Feed the sugar-fed hungry. Create good mothers out of narcissistic teenagers. Make the buses run on time. Scrap the buses, build "light rail." Make the Jews lie down with Hamas. Don't speak until spoken to. Don't move until told to move. "House the houseless. Feed the foodless" as Robert Redford parodies in THE CANDIDATE. Make it so, says Captain Obama. The suppressive powers of cool will lead where denial always leads -- to civic and cultural madness.

Cool will become a parody of cool. Billions will be spent. Billions wasted. Programs will devolve into graft. Union overseers will preserve the entitlements of complacency. Scandals, corruption, indictments, perp walks. All armored in the green tarnish of big-city- machine brass.

During the campaign I held myself back. No point in talking about unions or New York or Chicago or all the other urban machines well-oiled for obstruction I watched hard-nosed Reaganites retreat into sentimentality. "Don't you hope he will succeed?" I have been asked since November 4th. Succeed at what? What is it he wants to do? Like the Clintons, he wants to be president mostly. He now governs as he campaigned. Governance will become a endless campaign, an unending series of movements as he rouses his followers to form groups (book clubs? sleeper cells?) to keep themselves "fired up." Not for him the dull job of governance, the tiresome detail, the negative reports from the field.

Government is cool again. Let's change the world. Not long before election day, an Israeli woman was asked what she thought about the Democratic candidate. As she gave a tour of her home, damaged by a missile attack that injured her husband and two children, she said "he seems like a good man, but he talks like a child."

Cool and Change are child words. Demanding without understanding. "We want the world and we want it now," screamed Jim Morrison of the Doors. We now have that man child presiding over a land of declining promise.

Sam Macomb

NO THANKS

December 4, 2008

"We're no better than anyone else. Nobody is. Everyone is the same inside. You need the desire and right circumstances, but it's nothing to do with talent, or with training or education." John Lennon, THE BEATLES by Hunter Davies

I came across this quote while browsing in a bookstore. On Thanksgiving morning I sped through as many Lennon interviews as I could google to find it again. An effort almost divinely calculated to scatter the low clouds of envy during this bare, ruined season. Lennon's rants, put downs, contradictions, meanness, betrayal, and egotism as displayed in interviews from Playboy to Rolling Stone to England's small culture and sex-personal-ad rags of the 60s and 70s produced an image of a man to be pitied.

But sitting at this iBook in a cold flat on Thanksgiving, the sour and cumulative impression was mostly of a man ungrateful for his talent and energy and friends. The cascade of false modesity, tinny philosophizing, insecurity, and denial of gifts explained in part why Lennon had, by 1970, his best work in racks marked "Beatles". Whatever artistic judgements he once had, his last album had the slick, sticky shine of late 70s and early 80s lip gloss smeared over too much of the music product of the time. George Martin and Chris Thomas were no longer there to restrain indulgence and repetition or flesh out songs with professional and inspired musicality.

I also came across a Christianity Today article from a few years ago that told the story of Lennon's brief infatuation with Christianity -- unfortunately channeled through one Oral Roberts to whom my mother sent more than one money order equivalent of a bag of groceries. Lennon had the money to indulge himself -- unlike my desperately unhappy mother -- and possibly missed the opportunity for true religion if he had bothered to read some of England's own best apologists. Lewis, Chesterton, Newman. While Lennon corresponded with Mr. Roberts, Yoko flew to Peru and paid a "witch" 60 thousand dollars of Beatle money to bestow on the self-appointed "artist" great "powers."

Lennon's life had smashed up into farce.

I hope he was happy just before he was looned into a place sure to be more generous and forgiving than his wife.

If he had stayed the course, applied the energy of ambition to the desire for grace, it might have been different.

Many may disagree, but only God inspires gratitude. You shouldn't have to be a pioneer or colonizer; visa holder or immigrant to appreciate the inevitability and uniqueness of Thanksgiving in an America founded by the devout. Canada followed suit, but today is too demoralized, too uncomfortable in its blessings to be grateful. Around the world, five million Americans -- students, business persons, missionaries, soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines -- celebrate Thanksgiving. An exhausted Britain left behind the Oxford University Press and, paradoxically, the least snobbish language in history. Perhaps Thanksgiving will be our global legacy when America has moved on.

Sam Macomb