Plasma Pool

modified from this piece of January, 2008

***

My recent article in support of electing Mike Huckabee president of the United States prompted a number of questions about my attitudes toward the Democratic candidates, most of whom I would support in a general election before suporting Huckabee. I’m leaning heavily toward Obama for two interrelated reasons: he is inspiring to intellectuals and he is black. He would be not only the first black president, but the first intellectual president since Kennedy or even Wison, and both his color and his intellect would have profound psychological implications for our national consciousness. Those two firsts, black and smart in a way that is likely to energize other intellectuals, are symbolically important on their own, but think about their resonance together: an intellectual president who’s also black? Think about that being on TV every day for four to eight years, what that would do stochastically but undeniably to the sense of possibility for someone like seven-year-old Yellanjello, of poverty-stricken East St. Louis, Illinois. Now think about the parallel effect an Obama presidency would have on us, on you intellectuals, artists, and public servants, etc.; on all segments of society whose standards for success, have at least in theory, very little to do with money. Presidents who are lawyers (and MBAs) inspire lawyers and MBAs—by which I mean that the country more or less believes that the economy improves under their stewardship. Analogously, Obama’s election has the potential to kickstart a gradual but undeniably impactful revolution in American intellectual life, a revolution he would steward, if only symbolically. Not only would a serious thinker be thinking about and making the serious decisions we need intelligent people to be making—not only will have better decisions being made—but the serious thinker will be black.

Our misguided taboos about talking about race in this country perversely prevent us from trumpeting how important Obama can be as a symbol—as though to say his blackness could be a boon to him would be to take away credit from him personally; as though that would be a sort of affirmative action, which, at least in this form, we are all, disadvantaged whites and condescended-to minorities alike, supposed to despise. How often people stop themselves from making comments about intelligence or acumen or skill to or about people of color for fear of being misunderstood and thought some shade of bigot! That implicit prohibition right there, that injunction to shut up about race, is one tangible effect of our country’s last 40 or so years under the sway of groups organized around common victimhood (a tradition with its clearest origins in second-wave and subsequent feminisms): even implying that the victim has benefited in any way from that which marks him as a victim (his race, his religion, his sexual preference, et al.) is tantamount, in our culture, to discrimination at best and racism at worst. Victimhood in these scenarios becomes synonymous with minorityhood. It’s hard, though, to think of the president of the United States as a victim of anyone other than maybe Helen Thomas. Instead of cow-towing to the victim wings of minority movements—or more likely while cow-towing to them—a President Obama could show, simply by going to work each morning, that the persisting centrality of victimhood is repressive and undesirable. He could, just by going to work, do much to set “black culture” on the path toward something like Bill Cosby’s reductive but astute and influential idea of what it should be: a segment of society like many others, where each child feels he has a number of life options that do not involve crime or violence. He could even be president of the United States. That possibility-broadening alone would radically shift the way majorities view minorities, the ways minorities view themselves, with one almost certain trend characterizing that change: a movement away from victimhood and rights rhetoric; a genuine a transcendence of social categories—because now “transcendence” isn’t just a word, it’s a face, a big, smooth black one with elephant ears and a goofy grin staring out the tube at Yellanjello and her racist neighbor Jim Bob alike, daring them to accept received wisdom about race when evidence so strongly denying it is, well, staring them right in the face.

Now multiply that moment—when it clicks in Yellanjello’s and Jim Bob’s heads that maybe, just maybe, they were wrong about everything—out over eight years, during which 100 million new kids will have grown up with a black intellectual president. Maybe Yellanjello by then is in in community college rather than sweeping hair off the floor at her cousin’s friend’s salon for six dollars an hour, and Jim Bob, well, Jim Bob’s still a racist prick, but how can he tell his son with a straight face black people are inferior, that they’re in any way a detriment to “our” country, when the wildly smart and successful chief executive of our country is a black man? Jim Bob may still tell his son that, but the chances his son will believe it are far slimmer than if Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Mike Huckabee, or John McCain had been president over those past eight years. A ubiquitous President Obama—even if all he did was to hold up the presidential curtain up a bit better than it’s currently being held up—would through his mere existence force our prejudices into the national consciousness; he could make racism disappear by making the moral conflicts it poses it impossible to avoid. And, especially if he’s only slightly better at the job than our current employee, he has to potential to make racism poitively un-American. He would also be poised effect a long-due reunion of the liberal intelligensia with what has become of the working class. Disadvantaged Americans and disillusioned American intellectuals us are two groups that have been shunned, albeit in different ways, by our farce of a politics. A President Obama could bring these groups if not necessarily together then into concert, engaging and even enjoining the disillusioned to solve our collective dilemmas of disadvantage.

Yellanjello’s little brain as she’s watching the TV: that’s where this all starts, and Obama’s potential affect on it offers such promise in my eyes that Edwards’s appeal withers for reasons that have very little to do with Edwards. Like every other mental construct, Yellanjello’s sense of possibility is formed analogically. She compares what, how and where she is with what, how and where others are; she intuits similarities and distinctions, she reassess her situation, and she progress with her own models of interaction forged from the experiences of many. Impossibility, at a basic cognitive level, can be described as the inability to make an analogy that sticks to what we want it to stick to, the inability to make an analogy that allows us to move forward. Electing Barack Obama, whose bright caramel skin looks something like the end result of a successful “Let’s all have sex till we’re the same color” campaign, would instantly double our national analogical lexicon. Anybody can be anything, because, damn, our president is everything. The psychological effect of that doubling would be incalculable. In fifty years—if not eight—the United States would be an entirely different country.

“If it’s true,” PBS’s Gwen Ifill asked Obama Monday night, “that people can look at you and say he’s naive, then do you understand what Senator Clinton means when she says that you are raising false hopes?”

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Oh, that I completely reject. I mean this notion of false hopes—I, I reject the entire premise. I think this crystallizes what this campaign is about. I mean there’s so many people who are telling us what we can’t do…. [That] the politics always has to be mean and nasty and personally destructive, that, you know, the poor will always be with us [...] You know, I mean…that’s not being realistic. That’s just being lazy intellectually.

Everybody put on your thinking caps.