1. The Affair
Disclaimer, Local Politics: While I believe that local politics more closely resembles the democratic myths we hold about ourselves as Americans and therefore implore my civic-minded friends to pay close attention to their local political issues, I also believe that the administration--the man or woman-- that holds control of the White House sets the message and priorities for our nation. As much as any other time in our history, federal priorities affect local democracy in the form of funding, taxing, and spending. All politics are, indeed, local.
Up until tonight, I held myself out as steadfastly undecided in the presidential race. Anybody that knows me can attest that my vacillation has been sustained, not by apathy or dearth of information. Rather, my struggle has been informed by a complete immersion in the primary sources of information about the presidential race. Even as I retreated into a “summer hiatus” in which I denied myself a voice in political debate, I continued to consume information and data, to study history and theory, to listen to the voices of the candidates and their supporters.
I subscribe completely to the theory that power resides in the president’s “bully pulpit.” The narrative for our understanding of local issues is constructed at the national level. Our local politics are where federal agendas find action and reflect our larger ideologies and myths. This election is about those ideologies and myths. It is about our soul. It is about our shared history and our fragmented future rooted in the common belief that we are one nation of three hundred twelve million individuals. We are a schizophrenic people, oscillating between fear and hope, state and soul, federal and local, liberalism and conservatism. Flipping and flailing between ideology and pragmatism: we are all poets and economists.
In this frame, whom we choose as our president means far more than policies and budgets. When the history is written about these times, it won’t be about you or me, it will be written about a people led by a man. It will be about an America that approached doom and survived. It will be about sacrifice.
On January 20, 2009, I sat by myself, hushed and misty-eyed, in a restaurant bar and watched the forty fourth president take the oath of office. On January 20 , 2009, I accepted that the half-black son of a Kenyan academic had defeated the staid pragmatic ideology of the “greatest generation.” On January 20, 2009, I fell in love with a man who stood for an idea about what America could be.
My poet ascended.
I have carried on a tryst for which I am not embarrassed. I have carried on a quiet affair for which I am, in fact, proud. As quickly and earnestly as I have just disclosed it, it has evolved toward completion. To save the spirited memory of passion that tickled my every synapse on January 20, 2009, I must turn away from the relationship and toward the memory of it.
Up until tonight, I held myself out as steadfastly undecided in the presidential race. The truth is, I was having an affair with Barack Obama. My heart had decided long ago. I was bedazzled by a narrative of what might have been. I was showing out—masquerading—for the future historians and sacrificed my individuality for the history books that they will write.
My affair with Barack Obama has evolved toward completion, not because it was a forbidden passion, but because it has been a red hot flame that illuminated the mirror up to which I am forced to view myself. Barack Obama, with my quiet acquiescence, has fulfilled the prophecy that the future historians will need him to have filled. He has been an inspiring leader, a larger-than-life man, a brilliant and professorial comrade in thought. He has dazzled me with his vigor and swelled my breath with pride as an American. He has been the baptizer, come to heal our national wounds about race. He has been the truth and the light for a great many whose voices were heretofore quiet. Barack Obama is George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Barack Obama is America, not just a simile, but a proud and iconic totem for which we can all be proud. As a candidate, he looked and sounded like America, in my mind, should. As president, he looks and sounds like America, in fact, is. My affair with Barack Obama has evolved toward completion, not because it has been a forbidden passion, but because it has been an unmitigated fulfillment.
And now, we have reached the point, in the post coital glow of our national myth-making, to reinvigorate the institutions of America’s promise so that the myth that historians will need to define this era can be perpetuated. In order for the smoldering affair with Barack Obama to have been worth the investment of time and heart, America must survive and the promise of his vision must be spread to the people who have eked along on nothing but hope for the past four years. It is time for the eking to end and the unrestrained quest for selves and success to erupt. Words and hope must become actions and results.
During this tryst, I sat quietly. I have quietly rejected arguments that were devised to undermine the legitimacy of our man, of our time:
Obama is a Muslim.
Obama is a Communist
Obama wants to destroy America
Obama wants to cede American sovereignty to the United Nations
Obama is a liar with no regard for the truth.
Having endured my affair and come out on the other side a changed man, I will no longer passively tarry in the residue of these abominations.
If being Muslim were somehow a detriment to the spirit of humanity, or to the ability of an American to lead this nation, I would call it. Rather, being Muslim means believing in a truth beyond a single man; it means accepting that humanity is subservient to a higher power. Some of us may call it the Law or Nature. Others of us may call it Jesus or Muhammed. All of us should celebrate faith in a power beyond our own skin. If Barack Obama were Muslim, I would celebrate it. I do not believe that he is Muslim. I do not believe that people who describe him accusatorially so—dwelling on the actions of those who confuse hatred with faith—have the spirit they claim to.
Without diving into the history of America’s relationship with Communism, I can say with certainty that Barack Obama is not a Communist; perhaps he is a Marxist. We long ago rejected and defeated the totalitarian state that was embodied by our twentieth-century enemy, the Soviet Union. We long ago embraced progressivism, populism, liberalism and the celebration of the American worker that are at the heart of classical Marxist historiography. Obama stands as firmly against totalitarianism, Nazism, Leninism, Maoism, and anarchy as any of America’s greatest patriots. He also channels the ideals of equality and democracy and fairness in ways that have not been clearly articulated in half a century.
Obama has no designs on the destruction of America. He is no Manchurian candidate. He is not an operative placed by insidious outsiders in a position of power only to hand over our sovereignty. He is come to build and strengthen. Hands and arms outstretched, he wants only to embrace and—in that totemic hug—free us to enjoy the liberties that our forebears hinted at and protected in our founding documents.
Obama is a pragmatist. He may have broken promises, but he has not misrepresented his intentions. We have known that he favors peace over war. We have known that he favors transparency over opacity. We have known that he favors equality of outcomes over fairness. We have known that he favors broad government over free-enterprise. We have known that he favors words over actions. We have known that he will make decisions that he thinks are right—in spite of his ideology—at critical moments. We know that each day he is forced to sacrifice a little bit more of his legacy—of the future myth of who he was—for the mundane workings of the world’s most powerful nation.
And it is precisely because I know this icon intimately—because I am part of what makes it up—that I wish to protect it. Because I cherish the time I have spent with Barack Obama, I can no longer sit quietly.
During our quiet tryst, I was caught in the middle of a loud and gruesome debate characterized by absurd rhetoric, propagandist sloganeering, hateful diatribes, and personal attacks from friends, family and countrymen. For what seemed like ambivalence, I was hated. In moments that allowed for the transparency of my oscillating allegiances, I was misunderstood. My poet and economist, and their tangencies with the outside superstructures that weigh upon the soul which they comprise were at constant odds; they were in perpetual crosshairs. My poet and economist have been in constant battle.
If our children are to remember Barack Obama, America’s smartest president, as the man who embodied the grand experiment in his mind:
If our children are to remember Barack Obama as the man whose vision of diplomacy won him the Nobel Peace prize and not as the man who unleashed anarchy over the Middle East:
If our children are to remember him as the prophesied first African American president, the son of a Kenyan, and not as the man who drew new social demarcations among Americans:
If our children are to remember him as the man who cared about the health of our people so much that he engineered the passage of a law that guarantees healthcare as a right, and not as the man who crushed the world’s greatest doctors and medical community:
If our children are to remember him as the man who ended the war in Iraq and not the man who abandoned a fledgling democracy:
If our children are to remember him as the man who saved America and its industries from certain economic collapse, and not as the man who saddled them with six trillion dollars of national debt:
If our children are to remember a man who stood up from the Oval Office and said that there is no difference between a gay man and me, and not as the man whose words and actions betrayed each other and a whole genus of Americans:
If our children are to remember a man whose very election changed the way Americans can think about themselves in the context of history and the cosmos, and not the man whose failed policies—whose grand experiment upon the American world—pushed us from superpower to obscurity:
If Barack Obama is to be remembered as a mythic hero and not as a footnote of failure:
We must choose, for a moment between our poets and our economists.
If we are to retain our Barack Obama, we must make more difficult decisions. If he is to preserve his place in history—and ours—if he is to prevent the nibbling away at the legacy of our time by the ordinariness of pragmatism, we must turn control over to an administrator whose skills are wrought in the mundane workings of politics and economics. Moving “forward” on the current trajectory means obliterating the snapshot of who we wish to be: who we will wish to have been.
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