Yeah, that’s what people always say, Lee says. The aura and all that.
I’m sitting at the edge of the patio, facing out, fallen into shadow. It’s the moment at a party where the detritus of paper plates and napkins accumulates on every surface, second or third drinks are in hand, and everyone over the age of twenty-five is sitting down and unlikely to rise anytime soon. Ten minutes ago Martin and Robin and I were sitting here in a tight circle, eating shrimp and grits, but she took a call from work and disappeared, and the Brain Trust filtered in, overfed, almost limping with the extra weight, everyone shaking my hand, Paul even slapping me on the shoulder. You again? Where’s your notebook? Is this on the record?
I wouldn’t call it an aura, Lee says. That makes me think of a halo, you know? It wasn’t that he was trying out for sainthood. You didn’t get an MLK vibe. Not a Jesse vibe. That’s the thing: he was already beyond that. People called it post-racial; it wasn’t post-racial. It was post—race as an issue. There’s a crucial difference there. It was, like, say you call up a lawyer because you need to hire a lawyer, and then you walk into his office, and he’s black. Didn’t sound black on the phone, didn’t see a picture, no warning, and then he’s right there, and he gives you this look, you know, he sees you’re off guard, and his look says, you got a problem with that? Not in an aggressive way. In an informative way, an appraising way. Like, is this going to be a problem? That’s what he was like, those first few years. After the speech. Hello, America, I’m going to be your next president. I’m the best man for the job. I happen to be black. You got a problem with that?
I got a problem with the phrase happen to be, Marshall says.
Okay. Okay. That’s your job. His job was to use the language of the moment. And white people, excuse me, Kelly, but white people, dominant-paradigm people, they love to say, he happens to be from Mexico. She happens to be a lesbian. They happen to be part of a polygamous macrobiotic cult. Because it makes it all random and unintentional. I happened to fall down and break my ankle. It all seems so unfair that way. You don’t have to draw any connections, just look at what’s in front of you. We’re all the same. God just happened to hit you with the ugly stick.
You know what I’m tired of? Paul says. I’m tired of interpreting the meaning of Obama. Shouldn’t we be over that by now, now that it’s a done deal? A president should not mean, but be.
The Obama era. The Obama years.
Keep your powder dry and your drones in the air.
Bet he contemplated using a drone on John Boehner once or twice. Or Grover Norquist. Or Scalia.
Clarence Thomas. Silent but deadly. Shit, Thomas is the drone. The stealth bomber of the white right.
Y’all bringing me down, Paul says. You hear that singing? None of these kids were even thought of when that song was on the radio. For them it’s ancient history. It might as well be the Beatles. Or Elvis.
Don’t you know kids don’t listen to the radio anymore? Marshall says. For them it’s all about Glee and American Idol. They like a song, they pick it up. Doesn’t matter if it’s from yesterday or 1930. I like that. It’s an eclectic era. Take what you want, the rest is dross.
It’s because the music they’re putting out today is crap, Lee says. All the Nicki Minaj, Lady Gaga, Beyoncé stuff, with the Auto-Tune and the electric beats, all that fizzy special-effects nonsense.
That’s not fair to Beyoncé, Martin says. She’s the real thing. She’s a throwback.
Says the man who listens to Joni Mitchell. Paul leans over and looks at me. Kelly, has he told you about that? Better make sure you get it down on the record so he can’t deny it later. First time he picked me up in his car, what was he playing? Blue. Thought I was going to shit my pants. Seriously, that was some country stuff. So country it was like, not even twentieth-century, like, medieval. Like there should be recorders and harpsichords on it. And he tried to get off telling me it was Robin’s tape.
It was.
I don’t care if it was Jesus Christ’s tape, I would have tossed it out the window after two bars.
Plenty of people think Joni Mitchell’s cool, Marshall says. Herbie did a whole album of her songs. Ain’t you ever heard Mingus?
Yeah, I heard Mingus.
No, Mingus, her album, you ignoramus. That’s some whacked-out Seventies material on there. Cassandra Wilson’s early stuff comes right out of Mingus.
Problem is, Martin intones, Paul, all due respect, you don’t know your musical history.
But back to Obama—
Seriously?
Yes, Paul, Martin says. Seriously. Let him finish.
Before I was so rudely interrupted by Michael Jackson and the henchmen of pop-culture distraction, Marshall says, let me just say that what Obama is not is a proxy. He doesn’t carry the bag. Not for the white liberal establishment, not for Israel, not for Charlie Rangel or Tavis Smiley.
He carried the bag pretty damn well for Goldman Sachs. Or he let Geithner carry it.
Then he sicced Elizabeth Warren on Geithner’s ass, Paul. It’s that Team of Rivals theory you were telling me about.
Martin scratches his chin.
You ever read those Joseph Campbell books, The Masks of God? he says. Robin hooked me up with those when we were first going out. It’s totally fascinating stuff. Anyway. Somewhere in there, Campbell says that the earliest kind of kings in prehistory, in the very early Egyptian, Sumerian, Mesopotamian states, were sacrificial kings, that is, they were put to death by the people and ceremonially buried in order to appease the gods.
I don’t like where this is going, Lee says.
Okay. Okay. I’m extrapolating a little. But get this. Obama’s just an extremely, extremely smart guy. An intellectual overachiever before he was a political overachiever. And he’s also, just to put it mildly, a hybrid. A mongrel. A cobbled-together person who’s chosen his categories all the way along. You got me? That kind of person is always going to be a natural skeptic.
A master of the mask.
Yeah, but here’s the thing. A skeptic is not a cynic. Not necessarily. So Obama, he understands something about the essential nature of being president that the rest of us don’t. Being president means being at the center of a circle whose radius is infinite. You’re the center of an incalculably complex system. Responsible for everything, in control over almost nothing. Now most presidents are essentially just showboats who are very good at projecting leadership and pretending to have a hand on the helm. They sleep well at night. Dubya was one of those. So was Reagan. So was JFK. And then there are the really deep political minds, the Machiavellians. LBJ. Clinton. But Obama is something else again, because he understands the symbolic role of the president is a tragic role. That puts him in a different category.
Lincoln.