…I’ve been thinking about you.
And I admit it bums me out that — after such an intense and real togetherness that we all shared, hope and change, etc — you gave up on President Obama, and sometimes you stink-talk him publicly. I am not discounting your disappointment. Maybe there was a particular issue, dear to your heart, and you feel that the President reneged on a campaign promise. Or maybe you’re frustrated by his cautious pragmatism. Or his pie-in-the-sky ambition. Or his radical liberalism. Or his moderate centrism. Or his capitalism. Or his socialism. Maybe he is too black for you, or not black enough.
Maybe it’s much closer to home, i.e. you or someone you love is currently an unemployment statistic.
I am not discounting any of this. I can name a major issue or two that the President is not addressing the way I think he should; and my daily life is directly affected by the mortgage crisis, lack of access to credit, the cost of health care, and big-business exploitation of the environment.
But look: on what are you basing your conclusion that it’s all the President’s “fault”? On media bytes about how “the President clearly can’t run against the Republicans based on his record, because look at how terrible everything is”? I just ask that you look closely at the complexity and depth of the disaster(s) President Obama inherited. Do some more research on what he’s actually attempted to do (and why he failed), everything he’s succeeded in doing (and how he managed that), and what he plans to continue doing in order to achieve the most General Good possible. I myself, on a basic level, still trust that this President’s definition of the most General Good is both smart and noble — not perfectly so, but as comprehensively as anything we’ve seen in a long time.
Read Ryan Lizza’s profile in the New Yorker of Obama’s thorough, thoughtful, and disciplined decision-making process over the last two years for a sense of both the goodness and the imperfection of that process.
Obama’s first three years as President are the story of his realization of the limits of his office, his frustration with those constraints, and, ultimately, his education in how to successfully operate within them. A close look at the choices Obama made on domestic policy, based on a review of hundreds of pages of internal White House documents, reveals someone who is canny and tough—but who is not the President his most idealistic supporters thought they had elected.
I’m not sure why this assessment should/would make Obama supporters abandon him; and it disappoints me that it does. If Obama had not become supremely “canny and tough,” if he had not looked squarely at real obstacles to his most General Good agenda; if he had remained what many feared he was, i.e. all poetry and no prose, inspiring and appealing but unqualified to govern — it seems to me we’d be in much worse trouble now.
We elected him because he’s no dummy, and because he got into this with a genuine vision for productive politics. He is not a monarch; has 4 to 8 years to accomplish things (with half of that time really being sucked up by campaigning). We should grow up and stop acting like he is operating in a no-limitations political system with all the time and magical influence in the world. We should recognize that when faced many times a day with deciding between get-something-good-done-at-the-cost-of-something-else, vs get-nothing-done-in-order-to-appear-consistent-or-principled-in-a-simplistic-way, you do the best you can; you are making very difficult decisions, you hardly ever feel satisfied with them, and you need the support of your supporters. Keep him accountable, sure; but please, reconsider your easy dismissal and stink-talking.
1 May 2011
With the teaching year coming to a close, I am happy to unwind a bit before plunging into the summer’s work. What better way than to plunge in to the comedic stage that is American politics (courtesy of Donald Trump).
Lest you wonder the relevance of political comedy to this blog… my seminar class recently looked at literary comedy, discussing works by George Saunders, Graham Greene, Donald Barthelme, Danielle Evans, Sergei Dovlatov, George Eliot, Woody Allen, and Philip Roth (Lorrie Moore would have been an obvious addition to this reading list, but we’d already a few stories by her previously). How does humor work in literature? What’s funny and who decides? How does the author control the humor, so that the reader is laughing at the right moments, for the right reasons, absorbing the intended nuances? Where is the author relative to the joke, the character, the reader? Timing, narrative distance, voice. In her interview with The Paris Review, Amy Hempel talked about schooling herself in stand-up comedy as a part of her writers’ education.
Among his many gifts and talents, our fair President is also a humorist in his own right. I suppose this is one of those things where, if you are an admirer of the President, you will find this brilliant and hilarious; if not, well… you can empathize with the visibly-irritated Donald Trump (who is I’m sure perfectly happy to have the camera turned on him). I particularly enjoyed Michelle Obama’s good-sportness (in a subtly laugh-out-loud moment, we see her on video working in her garden with school children — ”Look, a carrot!” she exclaims) and the President’s obvious ear for language as he joked about Tim HOSEnee Pawlenty’s undisclosed middle name.
Incidentally, the President way upstaged Seth Meyers; I love Seth Meyers, but this was quite painful.
For a more serious look at Donald Trump’s impact on the political moment, check out Lawrence O’Donnell’s impassioned plea to NBC to reveal Trump’s intentions for the fall. [via HuffPo]
Filed in film, politics, race/culture, teaching, the reading life, the writing life, TV
Tags: Barack Obama, Lawrence O'Donnell, Seth Meyers
8 February 2010
How do I love thee, my President; let me count the ways…
28 January 2010
I watched/listened to last night’s State of the Union with a flinchy face and tensed muscles. The recent media/pundit turkey-shoot (the President is the turkey, in case you didn’t already know) has been painful to witness.
Junot Diaz thinks it’s about story-telling (lack thereof on the President’s part). I agree; but I also think that maybe we — voters, citizens, members of this democratic polity — need to grow up a little. At some point, we need to start telling the stories, helping to get them out there, instead of waiting to be tucked into bed. After all, the President’s schedule is a little, you know, busier than mine.
From Diaz’s New Yorker piece:
All year I’ve been waiting for Obama to flex his narrative muscles, to tell the story of his presidency, of his Administration, to tell the story of where our country is going and why we should help deliver it there. A coherent, accessible, compelling story—one that is narrow enough to be held in our minds and hearts and that nevertheless is roomy enough for us, the audience, to weave our own predilections, dreams, fears, experiences into its fabric. It should necessarily be a story eight years in duration, a story that no matter what our personal politics are will excite us enough to go out and reëlect the teller just so we can be there for the story’s end. But from where I sit our President has not even told a bad story; he, in my opinion, has told no story at all. I heard him talk healthcare to death but while he was elaborating ideas his opponents were telling stories. Sure they were bad ones, full of distortions and outright lies, but at least they were talking to the American people in the correct idiom: that of narrative. The President gave us a raft of information about why healthcare would be a swell idea; the Republicans gave us death panels. Ideas are wonderful things, but unless they’re couched in a good story they can do nothing.
The man has tried, of course; we’ve gotten patches of narrative around all the important issues—the economy, the war in Afghanistan, the war on terror (a.k.a. the Undiebomber)—but I’ve yet to hear anything that excites that part of my brain which loves, which craves the symmetries the pleasures of well-told tale. Just this past Tuesday we saw the consequences for the President of not having a real story to draw upon. In Massachusetts, the President was faced with an insurgent Republican candidate who was telling a story that should have been familiar to the Commander-in-Chief: the story of an upstart outsider with energy and ideas, who was going to shake things up, etc. The President tried to help Martha Coakely by campaigning, but since his Administration doesn’t seem to do story he couldn’t lend her one. He could only show up as himself, and that clearly was not enough. A man cannot withstand a story, even if the man is remarkable and the story is simple. The story always wins.
28 September 2009
A little detour into global affairs today…
I’ve got Afghanistan on the brain, ever since David Brooks wrote in his NY Times Op-Ed piece last week that “historical evidence suggests that…middling strategies just create a situation in which you have enough forces to assume responsibility for a conflict, but not enough to prevail.” In other words, it’s ”all in or all out” — which, in my mind, puts genuine leadership at odds with voter impatience. If it happens that troop increase and long-term commitment to the Af-Pak War is what’s required, then the Obama presidency, I fear, is at high risk. It’s aggravating — that the “American people” (whoever that may be) want to be safe from terrorism, but will vote out any political leader who asks for patience and sacrifice to that end.
If it happens that the best course is to pull out, then cries of “broken campaign promises” will be the President’s other potential downfall.
I appreciated Frank Rich‘s piece in the NY Times this past Sunday, in which he exhorted the President to do what he needs to do, regardless of what he said 18 months ago on the campaign trail.
Obama finds himself at that same lonely decision point now. Though he came to the presidency declaring Afghanistan a “war of necessity,” circumstances have since changed…. [ ] it’s up to the president to decide what he thinks is right for the country’s security, the politics be damned. That he has temporarily pressed the pause button to think it through while others, including some of his own generals, try to lock him in is not a sign of indecisiveness but of confidence and strength.
I’m not sure why mind-changing is considered a sign of weakness or dishonesty in politics. As if mindless consistency, or any sort of consistency, were an ultimate sign of character. The world changes so quickly these days, faster than Internet media can even keep up. Why wouldn’t contradiction–saying one thing today, another thing tomorrow–be understood as the way we live now? It seems to me that the only constant we have anymore is change.
Filed in politics, the writing life
Tags: Barack Obama, David Brooks, Frank Rich, NY Times
The Twitter Bog
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20 April 2009
NY Times TV critic Virginia Heffernan has written a piece in the Times Sunday Magazine about Twitter — “the Twitter bog,” she calls it — that makes me exhale a little in relief. Reading the article gave me a sense that Twitter might come and go as a must-do adult activity without my ever having participated, and that I might actually be the better for it. Or at least not have missed much. Click here to read the full article.
I’ve been reading about how effective Twitter can be for activist mobilization and other group engagement goals; and I don’t want to wholesale diss something of which I have little direct knowledge. But I think often about what Annie Dillard says: How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. Doesn’t even the word “twitter” imply that it’s an activity meant to be more peripheral than central in a life? Does one really want to twitter one’s life away? (I understand that celebrities now hire personal Twitterers — that, in fact, there are many people out there who Twitter all the day long.)
I was thinking recently — as pundits speculate on the nature of “Obamaism” as it evolves and unfolds here and abroad — that our fair President seems to be staking out a rather ambitious transformative vision for, yes, CHANGE: the core of which seems to be this idea that healthy capitalism need not equal excess. That an economy and a society can be built on creating and consuming things, but not to the point of addiction. I’m not sure if, in the midst of the myriad massive programs and initiatives the Obama administration rolls out daily, we are able to fully appreciate just how radical — how fundamental to everything that shapes how we live — a vision this is.
So Twitter as an activity which is productive but not excessive, and not an addiction. Such a simple notion and yet… the American sense of healthy proportion has really gone awry over the last few decades. We’ve come to take for granted that when it comes to a good business idea, if it’s working, if people will pay for it, then make it BIG, make it OBSESSIVE.
As always, God bless, and God help, Mr. Obama.
Filed in media, money, politics, social networking
Tags: Barack Obama, NY Times, Twitter, Virginia Heffernan
30 March 2009
Crudely speaking, it seems a “good” time to be a writer of color. Cross-cultural and transnational narratives are, dare I say, popular these days. The perspective of the “other” creeps its way into the mainstream cultural psyche little by little. Consider the obvious example of President Obama’s best-selling memoir Dreams From My Father, and the even more obvious point that we elected Mr. Obama to the Presidency with a 52% popular majority. Other literary examples abound (Zadie Smith, Junot Diaz, Jhumpa Lahiri, et alia).
Today, I face the issue of Korean-language anglicization in the manuscript of Long For This World. John the copyeditor, with his Irish-Scottish surname, seems to know more about this than I do, oddly — or maybe not so oddly — enough. He writes:
There are two systems currently in use: the official Korean one introduced in 2000; and the more familiar but less accurate McCune-Reischauer from the 1930s, which is still used by ALA and the Library of Congress.
I consider two primary issues here, which needn’t necessarily be in opposition, but which might well be: 1) ease of reading for the average English-speaker, and 2) fidelity to pronunciation. Protocol of systems, as stated above, matter less to me personally.
Re: 1) — hyphens are not typically used in either of the accepted systems, but I can’t help but wonder if they would help to break up the visual jumble of words like, say, jeonbokjuk (abalone stew) or sinseollo (an elaborate hotpot dish made for royalty). Jeon-bok-juk? Sin-seol-lo? Latin-based-language speakers, your thoughts most welcome.
Re: 2) — a friend recently complained to me about the anglicization of our shared surname, i.e. “Chung,” which, in Korean, is really “Jung” or even “Jhung,” with a soft, aspirated lead consonant. (“Chung” makes us Chinese, which is a whole political-history ball of wax in itself.) Thus daenjang chigae (stinky soy bean stew), as it’s often anglicized, really should be daenjang jjigae. Similarly, panchan (all those little appetizer plates that you get before the main course at a Korean restaurant) would be banchan.
I’m just about ready to break for lunch here, now that I’ve whetted my appetite; but before I do, another case in point regarding the ever-globalizing world: the NY Times online today offers in the header the option of switching from the “US Edition” to the “Global Edition,” which I’ve just done for my home page. The major difference, today, is the headline, “Gunmen Storm School in Pakistan” (and a “Global Spotlight” box in the upper-right corner) vs. “Obama Issues Ultimatum to Carmakers.” These days, I guess it’s mostly a matter of whose bad news you want first.
Filed in book biz, Long For This World, race/culture
Tags: Barack Obama, McCune-Reischauer, NY Times
Question 42)
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10 March 2009
Author Questionnaire, Question # 42) List other books on the same subject now on the market, or in preparation, with which your book will compete, or will appear, e.g. to booksellers, to compete.
Boy. This one might serve as a hearty meal to hungry sociologists — particularly the “or will appear” part. Ethnic studies departments, too.
I list 3 recent novels I know of by Korean American female authors. All acclaimed, none of which I’ve read, since I try not to read too much contemporary fiction while I’m in draft mode on my own fiction. Or if I do, I’ll usually read something dramatically different from my own work.
But here’s the point: for all I know, each one of these 3 novels is dramatically different from my own work. Probably so. And yet… it is likely that they will indeed “appear to compete” (I don’t like this word here, for many reasons, but I’m quoting directly).
I hope this isn’t one of those “remorse” posts. Question 42) may just fall into the too-much-information category, a la the political joke, “There are two things you don’t want to know too much about as far as how they get made: laws and sausages.”
But maybe my mind is jumping too fast, too narrow.
Here’s an even narrower thought: since, in reality, many people (myself included) DO judge books by their covers… might this question be better answered when we have the bookstore visual? As in, I always get those two books confused — you know, the ones that both have photographs of belly-dancers whispering into the ears of marmots on the cover?
We’re making our list for possible back-cover blurbers. I recently read a Publisher’s Weekly blurb on the back cover of a short-story collection by a Japanese American writer that read, “Fans of Amy Tan will love this.” No disrespect at all to Ms. Tan — and in fact all due respect for breaking ground for this generation of writers — but is this necessarily the way this needs to work?
Presumably, shorthand is all we have when getting the word out about a new novel in a sea of novels… but I wonder if we can’t, a la my favorite President these days, elevate our conception of our prospective audience. ”The American people know better than that,” candidate Obama often said. And I so very much have wanted to believe him.
Filed in book biz, Long For This World, media, race/culture
Tags: Amy Tan, Author Questionnaire, Barack Obama, Publisher's Weekly
