Writers and Politicians
Among the Presidents who have occupied the White House since
my birth, President Barack Obama is one of the most literate. Historians who
write about the American presidency after 2017 will be obligated to note that
Obama tried to "write an honest account of a particular province" of
his life in Dreams from My Father: A
Story of Race and Inheritance (1995; New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004),
and that he called for a new kind of politics in The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming The American Dream (New York: Three Rivers
Press, 2006). As they condemn or commend
his policies and speeches, the wisest historians will not ignore that fact that
he invited Elizabeth Alexander to bless his 2009 inauguration with a woman's
vision. Nor will they simply mention in
passing that Richard Blanco gave some credibility to Obama's virtue of
tolerance in the 2013 inaugural poem.
The most scholarly historians will dwell for more than a nanosecond on Tara
T. Green's conclusion in A Fatherless
Child: Autobiographical Perspectives
of African American Men (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009)that
"Obama, then, shows the possibilities of escaping the pressures of social
pitfalls as much as he proves the importance of black communities in the late
twentieth century providing homes for those wandering black sons in need of
understanding, healing and love" (132).
All of the historians will direct attention to Obama's September 14,
2015 conversation with Marilynne
Robinson.
It may be the case that writers and politicians rarely have
meaningful conversations, because such talks might draw undue attention to
national insecurities. Robinson's exchange of ideas with the President pivots
on the topic of fear, the subject of her startling essay "Fear" in
the September 24, 2015 issue of the New
York Review of Books. Robinson
apologizes to no one for her Calvinist-flavored Christianity, for her
conviction that "[w]hen Christians abandon Christian standards of behavior
in the defense of Christianity in the defense of Christianity, when Americans
abandon American standards of conduct in the name of America, they inflict harm
that would not be in the power of any enemy"(30). Yet, Robinson warns us in disarmingly plain
English that " the making of Christianity in effect the official religion,
is the first thing its [Christian "establishment"] supernumeraries
would try for, and the last thing its faithful should condone"(30). Robinson's essay provides an extended
footnote for Ira Katznelson's Fear
Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright,
2013), and her breezy recycling of Katznelson's neoliberal analyses seems to
have swept Obama into a remarkable
instance of the indivisible unity of the literary and the political. Obama knows what kind of supernumeraries
Donald Trump and Ben Carson are as they riff on the epistles of St. Paul and
inundate us with exegeses of the Book of Revelation. He knows also why he needs to deflect
attention from the impeccable satire of Paul Martinez Pompa's "I Have a
Drone" (see The BreakBeat Poets, pages 165-167) and to direct our gaze, with
patriotic help from Robinson, to the sublime beauty of the Russian-manufactured
Kalashnikov. As the elected Defender of
American faith, he must wash us in the blood of the Second Amendment and
satisfy our yearnings for violence and fear as the seven angels "pour out
the vials of the wrath of God upon the earth." Marilynne Robinson and President Obama have
given us a conversation to remember.
Jerry W. Ward,
Jr. October 27, 2015
