Partial Readings: The World’s a Stage
Partial Readings: The World’s a Stage
Partial Readings: The World’s a Stage
James T. Kloppenberg?s Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition made a thoughtful case for the influence of American philosophical pragmatism on Barack Obama?s political orientation?even as Kloppenberg warned that ?pragmatism may be particularly ill-suited to our own cultural moment.? In Dissent, Feisal G. Mohamed echoed that concern: ?Much as the Left might see Obama?s incremental change as political expediency, Kloppenberg compellingly shows how that approach grows out of long-standing intellectual commitments?One is hard-pressed in deciding whether to be less or more dispirited after this revelation.?
In his review of Reading Obama in Democracy, Alan Brinkley argues that Kloppenberg?s portrait of the president is incomplete. ?Obama draws his ideas as much from the fervent idealism of the abolitionists, the legacy of the civil-rights movement, and the influence of his (now mostly hidden) religious life as he does from the pragmatic tradition….This is part of the enigma of Obama?his movement back and forth between what would seem to be opposing visions.? Still, Obama?s idealistic inspirations have failed to give him the fighting spirit the times require.
?[The] kind of slow, deliberate consensus-building that Obama seems to prefer is not consistent with the character and needs of national politics and is certainly not consistent with the political world he has inherited?as exhibited by the obdurate and virtually unanimous opposition of the Republican caucus to almost everything he proposes….Overcoming the deep rifts within American society is a great and worthy goal, and Obama may one day be the person who can bridge the growing divides. But in the meantime, there is work to be done?shoring up the economy, helping the unemployed, fighting off the right?and that work does not seem likely to be achieved by the pragmatist?s commitment to shared ideas and ?deliberative democracy.?
Brinkley?s interest in the president?s political traits serves a higher cause: the politics he hopes Obama will promote. For others, the president is of interest less for what he might do than for what he is: a star. The latest issue of Lapham?s Quarterly asks what is new, and what ancient, in the contemporary worship of celebrities. Lewis Lapham offers a disheartening jeremiad in his preamble to the issue:
In congressional committee rooms, as on Hollywood banquettes and Wall Street tip sheets, names take precedence over things, the private story over the public act. On air and online, the news from Washington for the most part consists of gossip, suggesting that politics is largely a matter of who said what to whom on the way out of a summit conference or into a men?s room.
Barbara Walters adopted the attitude observed by Max Weber (?complete personal devotion?) when interviewing the newly elected President Jimmy Carter in the fall of 1976. ?Be wise with us, Governor,? she said. ?Be good to us.? Not a request addressed to a fellow citizen, but as with the begging of a golf ball from Tiger Woods or the offering of a pudendum to the members of Mötley Crüe, the propitiation of a god?
Like the camera, the market moves but doesn?t think, drawn as willingly to the production of nuclear warheads as to the growing of oranges or grapes. It doesn?t recognize such a thing as a poor celebrity. Celebrity is money with a human face, the ?pegs? and ?loops? on which to hang the dream of riches that is ?the darling passion? of the American breast. Bipartisan and nondenominational, the hero with a thousand faces unfortunately doesn?t evolve into a human being. Let money become the seat of power and the font of wisdom, and the story ends with an economy gone bankrupt, an army that wins no wars, and a politics composed of brightly colored balloons?
On the national cultural circuits, as among the political camp followers feeding on the spectacle of a presidential election campaign, the mere mention of money in sufficient quantity (a $100 million divorce settlement, a $787 billion federal stimulus) excites the same response as a sighting of George Clooney. Eventually the society chokes itself to death on rancid hype. Which probably is why on passing a newsstand these days I think of funeral parlors and Tutankhamen?s tomb. The celebrities pictured on the covers of the magazines line up as if in a row of ceremonial grave goods, exquisitely prepared for burial within the tomb of a democratic republic that died of eating disco balls.
In the Utopian, Joseph Nye argues that the European Union will remain a potent force in geopolitics, on equal footing with the United States. ?On issues that require power with rather than over others, the Europeans have impressive capacity.? Despite this, Nye remains ambivalent about whether European nations will continue smoothly along the path of integration: ?The key question in assessing Europe?s resources is whether Europe will develop enough political and social-cultural cohesion to act as one on a wide range of international issues, or whether it will remain a limited grouping of countries with strongly different nationalisms and foreign policies.?
Orhan Pamuk offers his own prognosis of the European future. He worries less about the relationship among European nations than about the relationship between native Europeans and immigrants to the continent:
It is clear that the peoples of Europe have a lot less experience than Americans when it comes to living with those whose religion, skin color, or cultural identity are different from their own, and that many of them do not warm to the prospect: this resistance to outsiders makes Europe?s internal problems all the more intractable….One can understand how many Europeans might suffer anxiety and even panic as they seek to preserve Europe?s great cultural traditions, profit from the riches it covets in the non-Western world, and retain the advantages gained over so many centuries of class conflict, colonialism, and internecine war. But if Europe is to protect itself, would it be better for it to turn inward, or should it perhaps remember its fundamental values, which once made it the center of gravity for all the world?s intellectuals?
