Garrison Keillor and Toni Morrison Tag Team Angelou and Grisham

Garrison Keillor, a personal favorite, has broken for Obama. As I suspected a while back, Obama seems to be doing well with the literary crowd—gathering in Michael Chabon, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and now Garrison Keillor. There may be others, but I can’t find them in the five minutes I can afford looking around on the web. Still, it’s not a total lock. Maya Angelou and John Grisham have put in for Clinton, with Angelou putting forth with about as much sagacious pomposity as Morrison mustered for Obama. According to Angelou, embedded below, we should be attracted to Clinton because “she gives herself authority to be in her own skin… to be who she is.” We further discover that Hillary has the honesty to stand up and say “Yes, I am a woman.” And further that she is her mother and grandmother and an great grandmother and great greats. And all women. And she is even Maya Angelou.

Going to be a crowded Lincoln bedroom. And here we thought we were only going to get a two-fer with Hillary and Bill.

Seriously though, I have some trouble with the notion that women ought to vote for Hillary because she’s a woman, any more than a man ought to vote for Obama because he’s a man or because he’s black, or McCain because he’s a man or because he’s white. This being said, I know it happens, consciously and unconsciously. So I don’t have an absolute problem with Angelou being straightforward about it. What strikes me, however, is that Clinton supporters have been quite frank and straightforward in arguing that people ought to vote for Clinton because she’s a woman. I don’t see quite the same straightforward statement by any prominent black supporters of Obama. And of course it would be absolutely politically impossible for someone to get up and say they were voting for Obama or McCain or Huckabee because they were men. So the rhetorical strategies are still interesting. What’s allowed and what’s not allowed. My general sense, still, is that Obama is the wiser in playing down a unique appeal to a “natural” constituency. Can Clinton speak for and to everyone. She doesn’t really try to make that case, and I imagine it will cost her in a general election.

Back to Keillor. Much more understated as befits a Minnesotan. Though, it must be said that Keillor’s understatement is no less strategic or conventional the Angelou’s and Morrison’s self-inflation.

“I’m happy to support your candidacy, which is so full of promise for our country,” the best-selling author and humorist wrote in a letter declaring his support. “Seven years of a failed presidency is a depressing thing, and the country is pressing for a change and looking for someone with clear vision who is determined to break through the rhetorical logjam and find sensible ways to move our country forward. That’s you, friend.”

“And of course it will be exciting to have a president who can speak with grace and power to the American people,” Keillor wrote.

A war that’s left 10s of thousand dead or maimed, and has saddled our grandchildren with crippling debts has left Keillor depressed. Well, perhaps this is self-inflation of a very understated sort. From what I gather though, many things leave the good Lutheran depressed, and for the melancholy another thirty or forty thousand dead is par for the course in the scheme of things.

Keillor’s compliments to Obama’s rhetoric stand out. Obama couldn’t muster a great deal of grace and power in his response, however.

“I’ve been entertained and inspired by Garrison Keillor’s work through the years,” Obama said in a statement. “As president, I will wake up every day thinking about how I can help make life better in places like Lake Wobegon all across the country.”

Umm. Ok. This is EXACTLY why I thought Obama was running. To help all those good folks with white picket fences in the land that time forgot. It’s an interesting contrast, of course, since Keillor, despite his liberalism, has made his literary career on the examination of a white ethnic community as “typically American” in an era when it’s typicality has faded by the hour. Indeed, there is no measure of how atypical Lake Woebegon really is than the candidacy of Barack Obama.

Have they even seen black people in Lake Woebegon. I have my doubts. As much as I love the show. I can’t remember a single one.

Toni Morrison: “Bill Clinton is whiter than I thought”

The literary politics continued today with Toni Morrison’s endorsement of Barack Obama. Previously Morrison has contributed to our vast fund of political knowledge by declaring that Bill Clinton was our first black President. Morrison’s statement obscured more than it revealed, and Bill and Hillary treading on the line of racial stereotyping and fear mongering in an effort to garner votes in South Carolina may have shaken the confidence she had in Clinton. Out of context, Morrison’s quotation is just silly, but to some degree it was a trivial and unfortunate soundbyte in an otherwise somewhat angry but perceptive essay on the hypocrisy of attacks on Bill Clinton, which she linked to attacks on black American men in general. A slightly fuller context from what is usually cited runs as follows:

“African-American men seemed to understand it right away. Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas. And when virtually all the African-American Clinton appointees began, one by one, to disappear, when the President’s body, his privacy, his unpoliced sexuality became the focus of the persecution, when he was metaphorically seized and bodysearched, who could gainsay these black men who knew whereof they spoke? The message was clear “No matter how smart you are, how hard you work, how much coin you earn for us, we will put you in your place or put you out of the place you have somehow, albeit with our permission, achieved. You will be fired from your job, sent away in disgrace, and–who knows?–maybe sentenced and jailed to boot. In short, unless you do as we say (i.e., assimilate at once), your expletives belong to us.”

“For a large segment of the population who are not African-Americans or members of other minorities, the elusive story left visible tracks: from target sighted to attack, to criminalization, to lynching, and now, in some quarters, to crucifixion. The always and already guilty “perp” is being hunted down not by a prosecutor’s obsessive application of law but by a different kind of pursuer, one who makes new laws out of the shards of those he breaks.

Well, I have to admit by these standards Barack Obama may not really be our first black president after all—he dresses too well, eats too healthy, and stays too thin. I suspect he listens to classical music—which must naturally make him white, Denise Graves notwithstanding. And on the whole Obama’s candidacy has made this kind of racial politics seem terribly dated. On the other hand, well before South Carolina, I was pointing out Hillary’s willingness to call up stereotypes of black sexuality in reference to Obama, so I don’t think Morrison is completely off base here. If it’s gotten this ugly with Clinton—our blackest of white presidents—I’m sure we can expect brutality once the national election is underway.
Said Toni Morrison in her endorsement:

“In addition to keen intelligence, integrity and a rare authenticity, you exhibit something that has nothing to do with age, experience, race or gender and something I don’t see in other candidates. That something is a creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom. It is too bad if we associate it only with gray hair and old age. Or if we call searing vision naivete. Or if we believe cunning is insight. Or if we settle for finessing cures tailored for each ravaged tree in the forest while ignoring the poisonous landscape that feeds and surrounds it.”

Umm. Ok. I have to say that Morrison ruins herself when she tries to be sage and prophetic. Her novels are among the very best I’ve ever read. Her pronouncements on culture are sometimes like Mike Huckabee talking about evolution. I wish novelists would stick to novels and skip the blather about wisdom and the great meaning of life.

Sidebar: Chuck Norris, Author

In other literary-political news, I discovered that Chuck Norris—First Endorser for Mike Huckabee—is actually also a writer of pious Christian westerns, alongside the how-to-break-your-opponents-neck karate manuals, of course. Actually, Chuck has quite the list of publications on Amazon.com, though it remains unclear how much of the writing he actually does. Perhaps he is more responsible for the high concept and leaves less important things like words up to his co-writers. In any case, it appears that Chuck has made quite the second act of a career lending his name to projects largely pursued in earnest by other people. Huckabee is only the latest.

A brief excerpt from Norris’s Civil War novel, The Justice Riders:

“Moreover, Nathaniel York hailed from good roots. His grandfather—also a slave—had gained great respect and admiration as a member of the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1803. For his part, Nathaniel York never thought of himself as enslaved to anybody, despite the fact that his family worked long hours in the tobacco fields and lived in a shack at the back of the Justice property. Bright, articulate, and deeply spiritual, Nathaniel had committed his life to God as a boy and had adopted Jesus’ statement, “The truth will set you free” as his motto. When Ezra asked Big Nate to join him in setting other men free, Nate never hesitated. He’d fought throughout the war, a black man and a white man side by side, with his friend Ezra Justice.”

With writing like this, one wonders how Mike Huckabee could not have included Norris on his list of favorite authors. (Huckabee does list Francis Schaeffer, C.S. Lewis, and The Holy Bible–I include the wikipedia links for those of my readers unfamliar with such arcana as the Bible; one can’t be sure in this day and age. A good deal to say about Huckabee’s list, but not today). Seriously though, I wish novelists would leave sweeping cultural commentary alone.

I also wish actors would leave readers alone.

Assuming Chuck Norris is an actor. I mean.