06 October 2008 Posted on BlackState 06 October 2008
In a “New York Book Review “essay concerning Senator Barack Obama’s now infamous speech on race, a inevitable link was made between our first black Presidential candidate and our first gay president Abe Lincoln. I say ‘inevitable’ because I knew sooner more-then-later the current senator from Illinois would be linked to the past one, to validate Obama’s speech more then to actually analyze it. The ‘other side’ does it all the time, shouting Ronald Regan’s name every time they want to reiterate the model of their party’s politics and quite a few of Barack’s believers have been evoking the ‘what-he-might-have-accomplished’ reverence of JFK’s name when Obama gets up to speak about change (you think the guy giving another of his stirring speeches in Berlin not so long ago happened by accident?).
But I was thinking, wouldn’t it be nice to let Barack, John McCain and everybody else who has something to say, speak for themselves?
What I come away with, other then the fact that I believe more now then I ever have that both major political parties in this country are more similar then they are different, is that in politics, as in so many places in our society, we need the comfort of past examples to give credence to what is being said and done presently. Aligning and attaching one person with another, by hoisting a present day Presidential hopeful on the shoulders of indisputable honorable men from our history tricks us into believing, from the sound bite and t.v. new scrolls we all hardly even have time to listen or watch, that this person we see before us is like, hell, they ARE the person who’s shoulders they are being hoisted on to.
It’s an easy way to get a nice slippery-slopism going. If we speak one man’s name in the same sentence with another, won’t the ladder man embrace the virtues, smarts and sense of the former? If we put the new guy in the same stadium, make a stirring speech in a high-profile country where that other guy made a stirring speech years ago (and make a big deal of it) hell, shouldn’t we just superimpose the other guy’s face, body-and most importantly reputation-on this new guy simply because the new guy is standing in the old spot or talking about the stuff the old guy talked about?
I don’t want a songwriter, a teacher, a new lover, least of all my possible President (and of these 4, the one I am least concerned about is the possible President, actually) to sound, look, ‘be’ like anybody before. Yes, I know there is a certain philosophy each party needs to adhere to, but if it’s a new guy (or gal) you’re trying to elect, let him or her live or die, succeed or fail, trip-up or inspire by their own petard. Jesus, if you’re professing ‘change’ above all things shouldn’t you being embracing the new? Recycling even from beloved icons does not a warm fuzzy make for me. Yes, we should learn from the past, but like a hotdog does it need to keep repeating on us?
JFK and Ronald Regan. Love them, like them, hate them, don’t give them a second thought, either way they ‘be’ dead as the proverbial doornail. Whatever they did do, that changed our lives (good or bad), that we learned from, that we have failed to heed, that we have created legends around, these dudes are not running for the big office in 2008 (though what a race that would be: JFK verses Regan!) Honestly, I believe we are well into a hell of a hill of beans come 2009; whomever steps in will have a whole host or problems to deal with, some of which are of neither party’s making. And the last thing I am proposing is for our candidates to forget what they learned and who they learned it from. I realize that Times essay was written because of Lincoln’s obvious concerns of race, analogous as they were to the whole Barack’s ex preacher ‘thang’, and I realize when the guy speaks in Berlin or even has the good luck to make that big closing speech at the convention on an MLK anniversary, it’s all planned by the movers and shakers of his party to get as much mileage as possible.
Fuel is made from dinosaur bones; what was old is new again; 50 is the new 30… you’ve heard all the phrases. We revere our past, coddle our icons and as much as we bemoan static, call for change, ache to sniff a breath of fresh air…if we can indeed catch it, or know enough that one was swirling around us. Beleaguered comparisons to the past, for either party’s guy, proves to cynics like me that nothing is new in this topsy-turvy world, just recycled from the garbage heaps of smelly past ideas.
Of course, voters don’t want is to be reminded of all this. The masses want to believe that Obama is own man and not a shill his party threw up to show how ‘liberal’ they really are. The powers assure themselves that John McCain isn’t just a smarter George Bush. Clinton supporters wanted to see Hillary as her own woman and not an extension of her husband, who is really just an extension of her, who is really just and extension of him, who…
Like a shark we need to keep swimming forward or we will all surely die…if we haven’t already.
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