The Web has been recently awash with literary analyses of the inaugural, of all things. Some of this is due to the excitement surrounding the fact that Obama had an inaugural poet. Well, I’m glad to have poetry present on the national stage, but I’ll be honest that I thought the poem was a yawner and tone deaf to the moment. Too much writing for other intellectuals at Yale instead of the man and woman in the street. Maybe I wanted something more incantatory and straightforward. Walt Whitman.
There’s also a good bit of literary kerfuffle over the state of Obama’s prose in the inaugural address. Charles Krauthammer derides “the mediocrity of his inaugural address. The language lacked lyricism. The content had neither arc nor theme: no narrative trajectory like Lincoln’s second inaugural; no central idea, as was (to take a lesser example) universal freedom in Bush’s second inaugural.” Ok, I might take this more seriously if Krauthammer didn’t try to assert the oratorical superiority of our last president, but he’s not alone in finding the speech tame.
On the other hand, Stanley Fish–sorry, I’m on a bit of a Stanley Fish kick these days–gives a thorough going literary analysis of the speech, spying in Obama’s use of parataxis a biblical rhetoric fitting for the occasion:
But if we regard the text as an object rather than as a performance in time, it becomes possible (and rewarding) to do what the pundits are doing: linger over each alliteration, parse each emphasis, tease out each implication….
Of course, no prose is all one or the other, but the prose of Obama’s inauguration is surely more paratactic than hypotactic, and in this it resembles the prose of the Bible with its long lists and serial “ands.” The style is incantatory rather than progressive; the cadences ask for assent to each proposition (“That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood’) rather than to a developing argument. The power is in discrete moments rather than in a thesis proved by the marshaling of evidence.
Paratactic prose lends itself to leisurely and loving study, and that is what Obama’s speech is already receiving. Penguin Books is getting out a “keepsake” edition of the speech, which will be presented along with writings by Abraham Lincoln and Ralph Waldo Emerson. (You can move back and forth among them, annotating similarities and differences.)
So the prose is Lincolnesque….or not. It’s enough to make one believe in the kind of reader response criticism that Stanley Fish largely abandoned, wherein the reader makes up the text as he goes along. Still, I guess if I had to choose a reader to trust, Stanley gets my vote. (Disclaimer: Fish was my prof at Duke in grad school, and Krauthammer has irritated me for years, so what do I know).
All I know is that it is good to know we have a President whose language calls for attention that reaches beyond ridicule.
A 2006 Skokie Public Library poster features the president-elect reading Team Of Rivals: the Political Genius Of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Skokie Public Libraryr
At this year’s National Book Awards, held just weeks after the presidential election, there was a palpable excitement about the prospect of Barack Obama’s presidency. Actor and playwright Eric Begosian, the evening’s emcee, articulated what was on the minds of many:
“It’s great news for Democrats,” he said. “It’s great news for African-Americans. But I think it is also great news for everyone here tonight because our new president is, in the broadest sense of the word, a reader.”
“It’s not so much that reading has been absent in the White House in recent years — First Lady and one-time librarian Laura Bush is a voracious reader, and in a recent column in the Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove revealed that President Bush finished 40 books last year and 95 books in 2006.
“But Harold Augenbraum, the executive director of the National Book Foundation, says the book world sees something different in Obama because he’s the author of two best-sellers: “You actually have both a writer and a reader in the White House who is articulate and eloquent in his own right.”
I remain bemused about the definition of the reader. What is a reader? The OED gives us the following common sensical definition: ” A person who reads written matter; a person who is able to read.” On the other hand, worth noting that this is only the second definition. The first and most ancient definition is more mysterious: “An expounder or interpreter of dreams,
The best I could come up with for "expounder and interpreter of dreams"
occult signs, etc.”
I’m not sure if this gets at why we’re willing to grant Obama the status of being Reader-in-Chief while we remain mostly surprised that Bush reads at all, and somehow can’t really believe it. Perhaps we only give Bush credit for being a decipherer or decoder, whereas Obama is an interpreter of dreams. It’s surely the case that when we say “She’s a reader,” we are at least indicating not so much the fact that a person reads or even necessarily that they read a lot (though there’s probably some quantity that’s involved). It’s a qualitative disposition, a way of approaching texts and the role of texts in a life that we’re looking for.
I’m not sure if I go with the story’s designation of Obama as the new Oprah, but I am intrigued about our societal need for celebrity endorsement for our activities. Somehow Oprah’s endorement, or Obama’s, gives us a sense of belonging to a tribe, of being a part of something larger, rather than remaining isolated with the text. I suspect that somehow this longing to belong has always been attendent to being a part of the tribe of readers, but now we process it primarily through celebrity, perhaps. (Though, it is the case that in the past authors often were celebrities of a sort–Dickens, Twain. Even T.S. Eliot spoke to an arena of 20,000 people. This goes on at least until the sixties and the cults of celebrity that followed the Beats, and figures like James Baldwin and the youthful Norman Mailer. Now, however readers are celbrities, or rather, we need celebrities to be readers to give us an excuse for reading.)
The problem is that the cartoon accurately portrays a ridiculous real-life caricature that exists as literal fact in the minds of some people, and it portrays it in terms that are absolutely true to that caricature. An analogous instance would have been a cartoon without commentary appearing in a liberal Northern newspaper in the 1920s — a time when Southern violence against blacks was unabated — that showed a black man raping a white woman while eating a watermelon. The effect of accurately reproducing such a ridiculous image that dwelled unridiculously in the minds of some people would have been merely to broaden its vicious reach. The adherents of that image would have gone unsatirized and untouched.
In satire, absurdity achieves its rationality through moral perspective — or it remains simply incoherent or malign absurdity. The New Yorker represented the right-wing caricature of the Obamas while making the fatal error of not also caricaturing the right wing. It is as though Daumier had drawn figures besotted by stupidity and disfigured by genetic deficiencies — what might have been a corrupt 19th-century politician’s image of his victims — rather than the corrupt politicians themselves, whom he of course portrayed as swollen to ridiculous physical proportions by mendacity and greed.
But if that very same New Yorker cover had been drawn in a balloon over the head of a deranged citizen — or a ruthless political operative — it would have appeared as plausible only in the mind of that person. The image would have come across as absurd and unjust — a version of reality exaggerated to the point of madness.
By presenting a mad or contemptible partisan sentiment as a mainstream one, by accurately reproducing it and by neglecting to position the target of a slur — the Obamas — in relation to the producers of the slur, The New Yorker seems to have unwittingly reiterated the misconception it meant to lampoon.
Well, Siegel is more literate than I am since I can barely conjure anything at all to mind associated with the name Daumier. Good thing we have Wikipedia. And Google. The internet as a collective memory machine. In any case, Siegel’s point seems not so very far from my own when I said:
We could, of course, satirize the reader of the The New Yorker because the reader is at the scene of reading and so, in viewing the image, would view something grotesquely true about themselves. Instead, the New Yorker cover tries to laugh at someone else without referencing that someone else anywhere in the image. Thus the image seems to be “about” Obama even when we pause and have to say “No, it really can’t be.”
Come to think of it Siegel begins his piece by noting how wonderful it is that the world is obsessed with things normally reserved for literary scholars, kind of like my own notation that I’m thrilled that the world is abuzz with cultural theory. Or not. Is this a case of great minds–in this case my own and Siegel’s–thinking alike? Or is it possible that Lee Siegel is a secrete devotee and admirer of Read Write Now. And could it be a case of internet plagiarism. And does such a thing exist. INQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW!
[Side note: Thanks to Monda over at “Theres just no telling” and to Jon Vaitl at “I have an Idea “for their comments yesterday. Monda, I actually just resubscribed to The New Yorker so I guess I haven’t given up on them yet, though I am tempted. Jon, I don’t actually think irony is always smug. As a literary device irony can depend upon the speaker knowing something that either his hearers or his subject do not, but it can also depend upon readers understanding a doubleness within a discourse that is not self-evident to the speaker. For instance, Satan’s effort to tempt Jesusare ironic because he is tempting Jesus to doubt his status, and also attempting through that doubt to displace Jesus as the central focus of the world’s story. The reader perceives the irony of this situation, however, in noting that Jesus demonstrates his heroism not by overt demonstrations of power, but through the simplicity of resistance. Satan’s temptation becomes the occasion for Jesus demonstrating his strength through weakness, a central feature of the the gospel narratives. Satan does not seem to perceive this, even when the reader does, or can. Similar kinds of doubleness exist throughout Christian stories: Joseph’s being sold into slavery as an act of evil by his brothers and an act of goodness by God; the story of the crucifixion as an act of evil by human beings and an act of love by God. Redemption, in this sense, is always ironic. I’ve wondered whether irony is present in unique ways in the Western World because of the centrality of the Jewish and Christian narratives. Rheinold Niebuhr’s notion of th irony of history might suggest so, but I’m not enough of an expert on how irony functions in non-Western cultures to say with any security.
I’m not much convinced that The New Yorker cover works as satire (more on that below), but I think the guys over at JibJab have another hit with this take on the political campaign.
More later on why I think this works and the New Yorker cover fails, but first I have to say I’m so glad that the world is abuzz with cultural theory! Ok, not so much. But the New Yorker’s ill-fated attempt at satire has the chattering classes hard at work trying to parse questions of genre, reader response, aesthetic taste and various other kinds of folderol. If it was satire, would people get it? If people didn’t get it, could it really be considered satire. Does the message of the image depend upon it’s intended audience as David Remnick
Satire or New Yorker inbreeding? You Decide
seems to suggest it does when he asserts that it’s intended, after all for “Readers-of-the-New-Yorker,” that snooty bunch. But is the meaning of the visual text here determined by the intention of the artists and the reading capabilities of an intended-and-oh-so-sophisticated-audience? In this day an age? When ANY text has no chance of being targeted exclusively at an intended audience because it will immediately be spewed endlessly into the blogosphere. What is an intended audience in such a world?
I’m impressed by the degree to which the discourse has revolved around criticisms of readings and possible readings. Maureen Dowd–I liked her much more when she was being smug and condescending about Hillary Clinton–smirks that obama is prissy and humourless and should just realize that COME ON, everyone in New York knows its just a joke. This seems just like the kind of answer a New Yorker would give, believing as they do, and apparently Maureen does, that the world is their oyster.
On “Saturday Night Live,” a sketch in which Michelle Obama tossed the flag in the fireplace and Barack Obama took off the pinstripes to reveal a flowing white robe would be seen as outrageous — and funny. Print cartoonists, unfortunately, find themselves working in an oxygen-free environment that is increasingly akin to the atmosphere of academia, or PBS. Cable television makes print seem like something ancient and sacred, a rule-bound sanctum fraught with the ever-present risk of sacrilege. Print is becoming a strange land where the solitary reader might easily go astray.
“People say, well, I get it, but I’m afraid that so-and-so is not going to get it,” said a mildly exasperated Remnick.
Which is to say that even as we pride ourselves on our media sophistication, as debunkers and decoders of the visual, we fret about the power of the printed image to circulate beyond the comforting control of television’s continuous interpretation and contextualization. In the age of YouTube — where for the most part we can still laugh at each other and ourselves — we are increasingly becoming print-humor iconoclasts, terrified that someone might be worshiping images in the wrong way.
I can really only go part way with him on this. Do we really think print is sacred. Just the other day in my reflections on Hard Times I was suggesting that we are so super saturated with “print”–broadly considered–that print has lost it’s aura. I think the same applies to the image.
It may, of course, be that a good number of lefties have been holding Obama sacred, and The New Yorker cover doesn’t work for the same reason that jokes about Jesus mother don’t play in the Vatican.
But really, I don’t think the real issue is that all the Obamabots are humorless. I thought the JibJab video was hysterical–and not just because it’s skewers are equal opportunity. It’s because the satire reveals and revels in something that is kind of really true about Obama, who is the subject of the piece. By contrast, the real subject of the satire on the New Yorker cover is nowhere to be seen–and, to be honest, nowhere in consciousness. We could, of course, satirize the reader of the The New Yorker because the reader is at the scene of reading and so, in viewing the image, would view something grotesquely true about themselves. Instead, the New Yorker cover tries to laugh at someone else without referencing that someone else anywhere in the image. Thus the image seems to be “about” Obama even when we pause and have to say “No, it really can’t be.”
This is not a lack of irony on the part of readers, as Remnick and others have lamented. Rather, the image is not ironic at all, playing off a doubleness contained within the image or within the readers’ experience of themselves viewing the image. Instead, it is a kind of postmodern archness which is anything but ironic. Indeed, I think it’s kind of smug.
On the other hand, the JibJab video really does reveal something that’s kind of true about Obama, as much as I love him. If stretched and distorted and made into a grotesque–which is what satire does, witness Swift–then you really feel the truth of the criticism that Obama is just a little too good to be true, and that too good to be trueness depends heavily on a lack of specificity that lets us project our fairy tales on to him. He will inevitable disappoint (witness Dowd’s grouchiness). In this sense, the video becomes not only about something that seems vaguely real about the Obama candidacy, it becomes about us as the viewers of the video (and more specifically as viewers of Obama). We see the truth about ourselves and our fantasies in ways that make us uncomfortable but also make us want to laugh.
None of this necessarily makes me happy, about the New Yorker, I mean. I used to think that The New Yorker was the repository of all that was smart and superior and intelligent in the world. But the guys over at JibJab are way smarter. Score another one for video. Where the smart people are.
But out on the campaign trail, Mr. Obama, of Illinois, was warmer and cozier, sometimes adopting the Bill Clintonesque I-feel-your-pain message used to such great effect by his wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, in swing states.
Now I really hate to do this because everyone and their grandmother thinks that all an English professor does is check grammar. Still, I MUST point out that in this case “his wife” refers all the way back to the proper noun “Mr. Obama” since in fact “Bill Clintonesque” is an adjective modifying the noun “message.” And for you grammar hounds out there, a possessive pronoun cannot refer back to an adjective. No doubt the error was overlooked by an Ivy League undergraduate who is interning as a copy editing assistant and who never had to learn grammar since it is skipped in honors classes. Of course, writers mostly don’t bother with grammar anyway. Too far beneath them. Especially if they write for the New York Times.
However, one is intrigued by the possibility that this is NOT in error. Maybe Barack and Hillary did secretly tie the knot in Utah somewhere, or at least somewhere wherein the fact that you may already be married doesn’t matter very much. This gives a whole new angle on the tensions between Barack and Hillary on the campaign trail. What we all merely took for underhanded politics was really romantic and sexual tension gone awry. Hillary’s anger at Barack’s sexism was no doubt given an extra edge by the fact that he skipped doing the dishes and left the seat up the last time they were together. And what about this intriguing photo of the two love-birds together. Party unity, indeed! As for that evening of reconciliation at the home of Diane Feinstein where she said knowingly that she would “leave the two of them alone together”? No doubt with a wink and a nod. Inquiring minds want to know.
Obama’s erudition and eloquence was on display again yesterday in what, I have to say, was a remarkable speech on all kinds of levels. A small part of the speech touched on American literary history in his reference to William Faulkner:
Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.
The evocation of Faulkner is interesting on various levels. On the one hand, it signals Obama’s efforts to speak through the voice of a symbolic and prototypical Southern White Man, and to signal his broad allegiance to “American culture.” More, most of Faulkner’s oeuvre is devoted precisely to the agonized sense that the racial past is inescapable in the South. Finally, of course, it’s ironic since Faulkner himself never escaped that past and seemed to willingly embrace it regardless of his agonized sense of its destructiveness. Faulkner, after all, said that if it came down to it he would take up a gun to kill blacks in the street if he had to do so.
[Side note: Obama also comes out as a champion of reading to your children. Small point, but glad to see it.]
I’m generally with those who feel that Obama’s speech was one of the most important on race by a political figure in the past twenty years. At the least, it was one of the most courageous by a politician, who as a class are more given to dissembling, avoidance, and double-speak. The easy thing would have been to try and throw his former pastor under the bus–as, for instance Bill Clinton did with someone like Lani Guanier.
Obama’s willingness to risk the idea that Americans can stand subtlety and thought about a desperately complicated issue seemed to me…well…I almost want to say presidential, but in the context of American politics of recent decades that would be faint praise. It was leadership that we might hope for but see too rarely.
You can see and read the speech in its entirety at his web site.
Somehow I missed this back in January, but apparently Anne Rice–she who has traded in the blood, gore, and eroticism of vampire novels for markedly less bloody, gory, and erotic stories of the life of Jesus–endorsed Hillary Clinton for President.
Hard to tell what the effect has been. January and February were hard on Hillary. About as much appeal as Rice’s Christian novels. More lately, though, Clinton’s been behaving like the undead. In more ways than one. Barack’s got to find a stake. But is he too nice a guy to drive it in?
Weirdly, the video was posted with some ubiquity around the web, but has been removed from its original reference on YouTube and can no longer be found on Rice’s website. I thought nothing ever disappeared from the web. A transcript can be found at Greg’s Opinion. Otherwise I can’t find a copy of it anywhere. Hard to say why. Eerie.
Maybe the Clinton campaign renounced the endorsement–which included a strong pro-life and rather strong and convoluted evangelistic pitch from the erstwhile Queen of the Night. Indeed, the campaigns seem to be in a rather depressing competition of late to see who can most effectively and swiftly renounce, denounce, dismiss, and otherwise distance themselves from their unsavory supporters.
McCain renounced Hagee–the fundamentalist pastor who said the Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment on homosexuality in New Orleans. Barack today denounced his pastor and spiritual mentor, who had asked that God damn America for the three strikes laws that have wrought havoc in some black communities; this after Barack had to renounce and denounce–or was it reject–the endorsement of the Nation of Islam in language that Hillary found most pleasing–this despite the fact that Bill had been more than happy to make nice about Farrakhan in the recent past. And Hillary had to renounce and denounce Geraldine Ferraro after her racially tinged gaffe this past week. And she apparently renounced Eliot Spitzer’s endorsement after behaviour that no doubt reminds voters of Bill’s pursuit of younger women. (Or did she? The campaign claims that it never had the Spitzer endorsement on their “official” endorsement page, merely on three other pages of the web site; does this amount to a renunciation or a denunciation but not a rejection? There are consultants that get paid to determine this kind of thing; And why wasn’t Spitzer’s endorsement as the governor of New York–one of those famous big states that are the only ones that really count in Hillary world–on the official page anyway. Did she know something we didn’t? Inquiring minds want to know.).
One wonders, in fact, whether Hillary ought not renounce and denounce Bill, not only because he turned the African American vote 90% for Obama, but also because it’s his support more than any other that is likely to wreak havoc on the campaign if she is nominated, and on the administration if she is elected. That would be refreshing: I renounce and denounce my husband for his self-serving campaign style, his racial insensitivity, and for his general desire to keep running things even though he’s not running.
But as for Anne Rice, I see no reason Clinton would have to be embarrassed by Rice–however embarrassing Rice may actually be. After all, I’m sure Rice will bring in both the Goth vote, as well as those devout Christians who believe that abortion is the most important determining factor in the election.
Two HUGE constituencies for the Democratic Party this fall.
If anyone knows somewhere to still find a copy of the Rice endorsement, I’d love to get hold of it.
This in from the NYTimes evaluating last night’s victories by John McCain and Barack Obama:
On the Republican side, Senator John McCain of Arizona won a commanding victory over Mike Huckabee in the Wisconsin contest and led by a wide margin in Washington State. All but assured of his party’s nomination, Mr. McCain immediately went after Mr. Obama during a rally in Ohio, deriding “eloquent but empty” calls for change.
Umm…I’m wondering. Why does McCain think he can make this line work any better than Hillary has made it work for the past three months? Still, McCain comes at it from a slightly different angle. If, as I suggested a couple of weeks ago, Hillary is trying to protect the legions of naive American innocents from from the seductive Black Lothario, it seems to me that McCain is invoking more directly the masculine resistance to beautiful words that has dominated white male experience in the United States for the past 150 years or so.
The enduring question about John McCain is what, finally, he is willing to do to win. His favorite novel is For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway’s story of an idealistic American, Robert Jordan, who goes to fight for the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War. Jordan is willing to risk his life but never his honor, and his dying meditation, that “the world is a fine place and worth the fighting for,” gave McCain’s second memoir its title.
Indeed, McCain has more than his share of doomed to duty integrity that characterized Hemingway’s public persona. The title of Hemingway’s book, of course, refers to an ultimate destiny in death and the unflinching effort of the real man to face that inevitable destiny with something like grace. A characteristic effort of Heminway’s heroes, even when they mostly fail the chance. There’s a way, of course, in which McCain clearly does live out the Hemingway mythology. The prisoner of war refusing to bend the knee to his enemies, the maverick political independent, the loyalty to Bush on principle regarding the war, even when in his heart of hearts I think McCain finds Bush despicable. Even McCain’s political story this primary seasons unfolds like that of a Hemingway hero, the man willing to do what he believes in without resources. The belief that a man should stand up and do the right thing even in the face of overwhelming odds and the inevitable odds of death. As the Times suggested a couple of days ago, he doesn’t even pander well, which is precisely what makes him attractive to so many. Even I like McCain, and I disagree with him about almost everything. Proof again that policy statements and knowing the ropes may be important things for a Senator, but it’s not so clear that this kind of political minutiae is what will get people to follow you.
[Ironic side bar: The title of Hemingway's novel is drawn from John Donne's Meditation number XVII, republished as the following poem:
'No Man is an Island' MEDITATION XVII, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions
No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
I say "ironic" because Donne's meditation is primarily about the unity of mankind, "No man is an island." We are all part and parcel of one another, involved in all mankind. Sounds positively Obamian. We are the hope we've been waiting for. We are the world. We are the children.
In Hemingway's hands the solitary confrontation with death is a chance for the man to test one's mettle against the worst that nature offers, like the bullfighter in the ring. Finally we do this alone. I can't quite see McCain with Donne. Maybe if he stood up and said, "any man's death diminishes me...except that of Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, and various and other choice enemies who would be better gotten rid of."]
Nevertheless, even if McCain runs on this Hemingwayesque idealism, he’ll give Obama a better run for his money that Clinton is right now. On the other hand, if he tries to tell the American people that they are naive for hoping that the world can be different than thepolitical world the baby boomers created …well…politicians don’t get so far telling people they are stupid. The irony of McCain is that he was, in some respects, the Obama of the last political season. If he goes against the instincts that made him a winner in the past, he’ll just be another old guy that Obama will blow out of the water.
Side bar number two: Obama might well be saying, it’s morning in America. Hillary could learn more than one lesson from Ronald Reagan.
Side bar number three: I’m not so sure Obama isn’t more ruthless and politically savvy than Clinton gives him credit for. He appeared on television in the middle of Clinton’s speech last night, and every station in the country dropped Hillary to hear what he had to say. Why does Clinton think Obama is so unable to handle tough as nails and ruthless Republicans? He’s shown every ability to handle tough as nails and ruthless Democrats like, umm, Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Scandal mongerers alert! Barack Obama’s heretofore unacknowledged sex-change operation threatens to derail his quest for the White House.
(Side Note: I have discovered that including many words like “sex-change,” “porn,” and “diarrhea” really pumps up your blog stats. Count on them from here on out).
“If Clinton loses the nomination, do women lose? Rights? Power? Visibility? Clout? Are they not taken as seriously by the political establishment? A month ago I would have told you yes. Now I believe the answer is no. Why? Because metrosexual, pro-choice, pro-health care, anti-poverty Obama is, in every political sense at least, more of a woman than Clinton.
====
“Clinton’s female supporters who are watching Obama’s movement coalesce, solidify and take over should console themselves there will be a woman Democrat in the White House either way if the Democrats win the general election. The nominee will either be a woman with double-X chromosomes, or one with XY chromosomes who votes more like a woman than most with XX.”
Perhaps Bonnie Erbe has come up with the true and deeply troubled reason that Barack Obama draws tens of thousands of screaming female fans at whistle stop campaigns throughout the country.
He’s a gender-bender.
And just what does this say about the tens of thousands of screaming young and middle aged men who rush the stage. Deeply repressed problems with gender identity no doubt. Something we have always suspected of limp-wristed liberals and moderates anyway, yes?
Seriously, though, the gender weirdness of this campaign continues to demonstrate that Americans have a keenly developed, if not completely sick, sense of the politics of sexuality and gender. Obama is suspicious because he is too much of a woman, and Clinton is unappealing because she is too much of a man.
It is interesting to me, though, that Obama combines and focuses a great deal of discursive energy when it comes to the politics of not only race but gender. Several years ago in a class I was discussing the tradition of Black Christs within African American religion. My students, mostly young female Christians, largely agreed when one said that as she tried to imagine Christ as an AFrican American, she imagined he was more definitively male than the white Christ she had grown up with.
Well, this is the classic stereotype that we’ve lived with since the 20s. (I realize I’ve already posted on this, but I just can’t get over it) Black men are somehow supposed to be outrageously and uncontrollably masculine–all brawny testosterone, no brains, no tenderness. White men are somehow soft and feminine–at least if they are religious or educated. Jesus holding Mary’s little lamb. Obama’s “metrosexuality”–his softness, his charm (think, what kind of men do we describe as charming?)–humanizes the threatening masculinity his blackness might otherwise entail for white audiences. Clinton’s ill-fated effort to paint Obama as a seducer, as well as the effort to link Obama’s appeal to Jesse Jackson was not only dismissive, it was also an effort to link him to an older form and stereotype of threatening black male sexuality.
But now that we know he’s actually a woman. We don’t have to worry about any of that, do we?
Is it any wonder that the rest of the world wonders when we will grow up?
integrity that characterized 
number XVII, republished as the following poem:
