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Political Reading

by Stuart Mitchner

Where are Norman Mailer and Hunter Thompson when you need them? With the political stakes higher than ever, we could use some steely-eyed warriors, old-fashioned word-slingers, and obscenely baroque metaphorical invective to get us through the night. I still have fond memories of the laugh-out-loud theatre of the absurd that was Thompson’s Rolling Stone coverage of the 1972 presidential campaign, not to mention Mailer’s gritty, stylish novelization of the 1968 conventions. Who else but Mailer could do full rhetorical justice to the complexity of Obama and the forces attempting to bring him down?

The closest I could get to the excitement that Thompson and Mailer might be providing if they were still with us, still in their prime, was to access YouTube and Jon Stewart’s passionate send-up of Glenn Beck (a hilarious, soul-stealing rout). No less devastating was his eloquent indictment of Fox News and the rabid Right during his appearance on Bill O’Reilly’s show, most of which was deleted before it could see any “fair and balanced” air time.

Right now I’m looking at three different images of Obama: sternly pensive on the cover of Sasha Abramsky’s Inside Obama’s Brain (Portfolio $24.95); broadly smiling on The American Journey of Barack Obama (Little Brown $24.99), and somberly mindful on David Remnick’s The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (Knopf $29.95). For uneasy comic relief, I also have Sarah Palin beaming at me (you betcha) from the front of both Going Rogue: An American Life (Harper $28.99) and Going Rouge: An American Nightmare (OR Books $16), not to mention Glenn Beck, who seems to be impersonating a sulky Red Army officer on the cover of Arguing with Idiots (Threshold $29.99), a clever grab bag in the form of a deceptively playful picture book of propaganda for suggestible grown ups with tiny attention spans co-written and edited by Beck with Kevin Balfe and illustrated by Paul E. Nunn, with a small army of writers and contributors. Beck’s naughty-boy pout on the front is paired with the back cover’s mock-weepy photo of him besieged by quotes ranging from Discover Magazine’s “Glenn Beck is an idiot” to Whoopi Goldberg’s “A lying sack of dog mess” to Keith Olbermann’s “Only in his wildest dreams could an actual suicide bomber hope to do as much damage to this country.” The heading reads “Can’t Argue With Glenn’s Critics,” but the snide subtext is Liberace’s “I cry all the way to the bank.”

Even if they were around, Mailer or Thompson would be hard put to do much with Beck. How do you perform a travesty of a travesty? He’s already done it; he’s his own Frankenstein, a self-promoting, self-parodying, full-throated exhibitionist with a devious agenda. The only way to “get” him is to do what Jon Stewart did and step into his skin.

Imagining Obama

Given the ever-flowing tide of printed matter about President Obama, his wife and family, and his administration, New Yorker editor Remnick’s book stands out as the work that most exhaustively and credibly reflects the historic magnitude of Obama’s election and his story. The title echoes

Congressman John Lewis’s statement, “Barack Obama is what comes at the end of that bridge,” meaning the bridge in Selma, Alabama, that Lewis and the 600 voting-rights marchers were crossing on “Bloody Sunday,” March 7, 1965, when they ran into a juggernaut of state troopers.

The close-up of Obama on the cover of The Bridge puts you virtually face to face with the open, unguarded gravity of his expression, which is heightened by the way the title and subtitle contract the space, forcing your attention to his eyes and mouth. The figure Lewis imagines looming on the other side of that bridge in Selma would not be smiling, nor would his expression be cool and cerebral. Look in Obama’s eyes and you can believe that he’s worthy of the symbolic scope and solemnity of the metaphor, that he understands the burden of past as well as future struggles, and that he has no illusions about what he’s up against politically. Of all the images of the man flooding the media, this is surely the most Lincolnesque. Look at it long enough and you can imagine the concept of the bridge extending all the way from April 14, 1865, to Inauguration Day 2009, which is where The Bridge ends, with an account of Reverend Joseph Lowery’s moving benediction:

“The weather was bitter cold. For months Lowery had been suffering from severe back and leg pain. His voice was not as strong as it was in Selma when he helped ignite Obama’s campaign in Brown Chapel, but he had come prepared with a prayer crafted to the historical moment [and based on James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing”]. In closing, he was both sly and full of feeling, refusing self-satisfaction or sentimentality.”

After quoting those lines that made so many millions smile, not least the president himself—”In the joy of a new beginning . . . help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace what is right”— Remnick has to acknowledge the perversion of the “incredible moment” by Obama’s “most hysterical antagonists,” who “could see only anti-white malice in Lowery’s words.” Enter Glenn Beck for his sole appearance in The Bridge, the domestic terrorist in action, twisting Lowery’s call for unity into something negative and divisive: “Even at the inauguration of a black president, ... it seems white America is being called racist.”

Now and in the days ahead, Beck can count on plenty of company as the hate-mongers and naysayers spin their paranoia on the air and in print, telling us how Obama’s Zombies have brainwashed us and how the Kenyan upstart has subverted the Constitution, declared war on America, has a radical agenda, and is going to bankrupt the country. He’s the Manchurian President undermining our elections and insulting our mothers, not to mention betraying Israel and endangering our national sovereignty.

So here we are, forging through the muddy tide bereft of the rhetorical energy of Mailer and Thompson while finding at least the spirit of Gonzo journalism alive in Matt Taibbi’s pieces for Rolling Stone and getting a smile and a lift from the occasional New Yorker cover. and some more fun and games from Stewart and Colbert.

In the epilogue to The Bridge, David Rem-nick wonders whether “the most profound moment of the Obama era would be its first,” prior to quoting Obama’s remark in March 2009 that the “justifiable pride” the country felt in electing the first black president “had lasted about a day.”