Obama

I know that I haven't said anything about the biggest news story around. Perhaps I should learn how to lay out my pages better first. Nah. Anyway my thoughts on Barack Obama are almost instinctual. And with a lot of the people I talk to, I figure that's all we have sense the world of legislation, policies, history are so murky and mysterious to us. So I am going to make public a private music I wrote in January when Obama upset Hillary in Iowa. This, for me, was when the potential for this guy become real to me. It deals with Obama the rhetorician.

Thoughts on Obama, history and words on this morning of January 8th
Listening: Bob Dylan: "Changing of the Guard"


If I were Barack Obama this would be my campaign song. But I think he knows what he’s doing. Aretha Franklin, “Think.” Not bad at all. Lot of soul there. A song like that sounds a bit like Obama looks when he walks to the podium with his long, black (skin and suit) presidential arm. It’s incredible the feeling that has crept into the minds of people, columnists, the media. We workers of words.

After Obama charmed Iowa the media thusly tore down Hillary. Everyone from Scarborough to CNN anchors were calling her everything but ugly. Then I knew that this lifetime politician had no chance at the presidency.

And what is the presidency anyway? It’s the face. All we really require (and what hasn’t been done in 7 years, as far as I can tell) is for the man in the executive chair to make a few key executive decisions, stand on a few solid principles and make us feel calm and secure in times of duress. And I have little doubt that Obama can do these things after a few tough years of learning. Look at Diane Sawyer’s dreamy eyes when she interviews the man. He just shot her full of enough self confidence just by talking about JFK landing on the moon; and that…somehow…relates to his campaign?

Maybe in the logical realm Obama doesn’t make sense. But the idea of Obama is absolutely intoxicating. If a guy like him commands our television screens I could find it easier to see this age of irony (perpetuated by commercialism, internet choices, television, fashion, the old guard parents, suburban expansion, Adult Swim, pot, college, gentrification, poor rich divide etc, etc) slowly erode into dust like a fart in the wind. Life and having “fun” in America has always smelt a bit that way to me, the way people walk and talk like they are scared of something. The way they tear the pettiest things down because they are petty. The way we avoid argument.
No one thinks about that maybe life is about enduring and sacrifice, and Obama is the only guy I’ve seen talk about sacrfice, changing our tune which has been dissonant to me for quite some time.
….

Mostly when I think of Obama I think of him sitting alone (as pictured). Away from his family, the press, the campaign advisers. I think of him sitting alone being lit by the florescent rays emanating from his lap top. He noticed the wind outside cuz he’s sensitive to that kind of stuff. And I think of Obama, writer of 2 books. Obama who reads Phillip Roth to calm down (good God!). That I can really relate to this man seems clear. I can see him finding the perfect words to inspire people. Lumbering and laboring over his next piece of rhetoric, which in his mind feels like reality. The kind of emotions this kind of writing stirs in people is unique in today’s landscape.

And it was all over the place in the sixties.

No one really lived up to the words though. My first favorite journalist described an ethereal thing that I feel now.

...

Strange thoughts on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era--the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run … but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant…

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time --and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened …

You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning…

And that, I think, was the handle -- that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting -- on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.

And upon reading those words I embarked on a career in journalism, not knowing really what it would entail, never all the way forgetting that a man wrote words like that about a real place. It was mysterious, and somehow to me it was all true. I forgot those words for a very long time, but I was still going in the direction where those words had initially shot me. It wasn’t until I saw Barack Obama give his speech at the Iowa caucus that those words came flooding back to me in all clarity. This “we don’t need to fight” was very apparent in the man’s cool demeanor upon subtle attacks on his race and experience at the last debate. He never lost his cool or played dirty politics. It was a peace attack of the first order.

The “long fine flash” of a generation in one moment seemed to me to be in the hands of this candidate. He doesn’t need a plan, I think, if he can hold on to that flash for a little while longer. And maybe he’s not our friend. But right now, we need one so bad, that we are willing to take a chance.
…

It’s nowhere in media or politics the kind of words we are now hearing on TV. And it’s always been in the finest American literature. So it’s been there. It’s just we’ve lost touch with the ineffable. We’ve lost touch with the mysterious. I think of Thompson, Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolffe and Melville writing as if their only muse was enthusiasm. And with that enthusiasm you can break rules and make your own. You step out of your role, that tired old European tradition, as an omniscient narrator and you talk man-to-man to the reader, or listener. You can lead your reader through the streets and big houses of your mind without it sounding like bankrupt bravado. What will the audience think of this brazen talk? As Joanna Newsom (an American poet of her own order) mentions in one of her epics, “they will follow you there.”

See, Obama has plenty of time to make this place reality. That’s what his cabinet will be for. That’s what citizens are for. What he has done here and now is much more mysterious and much harder; and it hasn‘t been done in quite some time. My friends and I may have never seen anything like it. He’s compelled us to follow him there, wherever that is.