Procrastinet

Why I Dig Obama - An Allegory

filed under: Hey, What's The Big Idea

Okay, so imagine you're a freshman in high school. And there's a new required class in poetry, and some kids dig it and some are grumbling about it, but it's basically okay.

And then the popular, charming football coach gets up at a school assembly and says something hilarious and scathing about poetry, and how pointless it is, and how sissified you'd have to be to like it.

It would go something like: "When I played in high school we didn't even wear pads, and I got two concussions and broke my ribs. But it could have been worse. I could have been in poetry class." But, you know, funnier and more scathing.

In any event, it's well said, and everybody laughs.

And just like that, the knife has been put into the poetry class. It is now impossible to take it seriously, at least in public. And every time you hear a new poem, you think about that football coach making fun of it, and you take it less seriously. A couple bookish types try to point out that poetry is actually kind of nice, and they're hooted down.

Okay. So for the purposes of this discussion, that football coach is Ronald Reagan, and the quip in question is "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.'"

Back at Allegory High: the years pass. Sophomore year, there's a new teacher for the poetry class, who's pretty cool and some kids say they once saw him smoking pot, and he tries to deal with everybody thinking poetry is dumb by teaching "the collected works of Eminem," doing translations of poems into plain English, whatever.

And some people dig it. It doesn't challenge the basic premise that poetry is lame. It just points out that some of it is less lame than others, and that anyway it can still be kind of enjoyable in spite of being lame.

Let's not even talk about Junior year. Assistant Coach Jockstrap teaches poetry that year. It's a bad year for poetry.

Then, Senior Year at Allegory High, there's a new poetry teacher. He's young. He's black. He's cool. He's laid back and intense at the same time.

And here's the thing: this motherfather just LOVES poetry. Loves how it uses the language, loves how it demands an active interaction from the reader, loves the way it can express stuff with a specificity that prose can never touch.

And everybody is sitting in his class, and they get all stirred up listening to him - let's call him Mr. O - listening to Mr. O talk about poetry and what it can do.

And Mr. O is so damn cool that all the boys want his approval and all the girls have crushes on him and everybody's talking about poetry class while they're in the lunchroom.

And by jiminy, Allegory High has itself a little poetry renaissance.

So.

If Mr. Leatherhead the football coach stands for Ronald Reagan, then "poetry" stands for the idea that the government can and should actually help people.

The Reagan era caused a shift. Suddenly, believing in the government's ability to help meant you were a rube and a ninny. It took the New Deal/Ask Not paradigm of civic governance and left it bleeding in some busboy's lap.

Bill Clinton is the first President that I cast a vote for, and the first politician that I took personally. But in hindsight, looking at the difference between Clintonian politics and Obamian politics, I see that for all the good he did and even more he tried to do, he didn't shift that paradigm back.

He didn't even try. He made a point of doing exactly what was possible and nothing more. And, in some critical cases, he sold out the principles of a liberal/progressive society entirely (Don't Ask/Don't Tell, welfare "reform," the Defense of Marriage Act, etc.).

"You'll never get these kids to like poetry," say the Clintons (allegorically). "Just give 'em what they want and maybe slip a little poetry in around the edges. If you think you can change their minds, you're a damn fool."

Maybe they were right, at the time.

Barack Obama wants to restore the idea that the purpose of government is not to get out of the way, but to do good. To help. That's the big-C "CHANGE" he wants everybody to believe in. From the Obama website:

Amid the partisanship and bickering of today's public debate, he still believes in the ability to unite people around a politics of purpose - a politics that puts solving the challenges of everyday Americans ahead of partisan calculation and political gain. (emphasis mine)

Mr. O of Allegory High got the kids back into poetry both by what he said and who he was. In Barack Obama, with his incredible reserves of personal charisma, there's a match between the message and the messenger.

Paradigms don't shift easy. Obama's got a big hill to climb, but he's the first guy I've seen who looks like he actually has a chance to climb it.

Ronald Reagan wasn't a demigod, he wasn't the Messiah, he was just the right guy with the right thing to say at the right time. He was the delivery vector for a thought virus, and we're fighting the cognitive infection to this day.

Obama wants to be the cure.

Posted by rjt at June 5, 2008 03:36 PM