In her Jan. 9th 2010 column entitled, “Captain Obvious Learns the Limits of Cool,” Maureen Dowd writes something I would like to comment on. Once again, and as so often in recent years, we meet the language of the Papa Bear State, a concept I have been snorting at and stamping against for some time now. Et tu, MoDo, et tu! Then fall, Blogging Dino. (Cue heavy thud just short of impact tremor. Impact tremors are reserved for T-Rex.) We are told towards the end of the column, if I understand rightly, that President Obama, in supposedly failing to respond quickly and passionately enough to the Christmas-day near miss over Detroit, has squandered his opportunity “to be the strong father who protects the home from invaders” and who “reassures and instructs” Americans when danger threatens or disaster strikes.
The second formulation may encapsulate a reasonable expectation, but the first is unfortunate. The president is an intelligent and capable man, and I am glad I voted for him. “That hope and change thing” is still working out for me, thank you. But “strong father”? He is no more than a few years my senior, and probably several years the junior of many people reading or contributing to this blog. I didn’t vote for a National Father last November; I voted for the individual I hoped would become the 44th POTUS. What I like about Barack Obama is precisely that he seems intent on rejecting the “papafication” of the presidency, even though he can hardly be said to have diminished the powers of the office in his one year at the helm. In short, he tends to speak to the citizenry as if they were rational adults. That’s a risk, of course, because a disturbing number of Americans become terrified for their skins quicker than you can say “exploding underwear.” But I give Obama credit for taking the risk, and I find his allegedly too-aloof way of dealing with crises preferable to the tendencies of the previous administration.
Employing the language of the Daddy State, in the long run, only encourages the brutes who deny the wisdom of Ben Franklin’s dictum, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety” (Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Benjamin Franklin, London: Henry Colburn, 1818. 270; Franklin places the sentence in quotation marks.) The president may be the most powerful individual on the planet, and he is undeniably invested with a great deal of symbolic value; he bears some responsibility, most of us would probably agree, for keeping the country as safe as it can be while still observing the constitution he swore to uphold. He is not, however—and apparently does not want to be—“Our Father, Who Lives on Pennsylvania Avenue.” Never mind “the limits of cool”: the discursive limits or boundaries that President Obama takes into account are those required to maintain a healthy relationship between a republican citizenry and the individual they have chosen for a time to serve as their highest official.
So please, call the honorable Mr. Obama a clean and articulate communo-fascist Kenyan Muslim terrorist-fist-bumping negro-dialect-free granny-killer if you must, but not “Daddy.” We have enough outlandish descriptions for Barack already, and there is little doubt the pie will be made still higher in coming years. It's Permanent Silly-Season Revolution for this man's opponents, and evidently even some of his well-meaning supporters can't help playing the useful idiot from time to time. I will just go with “President Obama.” Simple. Dignified. Even a dinosaur can roll with that....
I think I've noticed that the people who prefer to say the "Democrat" party, Eye-wrack and such prefer simply to call him Obama, which is a not-so-subtle way of dismissing, belittling and even dehumanizing him. I make it a point to point out that he's President Obama since it annoys them so much that he is.
ReplyDeleteYou forgot to mention that he's a disciple of a radical Christian Black Supremicist preacher as well -- and one who murdered his grandmother and wants to murder yours.
Hey -- he ain't my daddy. I had a drivers license when he was born, so I'm technically old enough to be his.
Beautifully put bloggingdino--exactly my sentiments on this subject.
ReplyDeleteIt is also interesting to note that certain members of the extreme right think President Obama "talks down" to the American people, and they also label him as "arrogant" and "narcissistic."
People who attach those labels to President Obama are actually advertising their own feelings of low self-worth and intellect every time President Obama addresses the nation as a man who believes the American people are capable of understanding and dealing wtih complex ideas and situations.
Those who need sound-bite solutions to difficult issues indeed need a Daddy Figure who will pat them on their heads and say "Everything will be fine, just don't worry your pretty little heads about anything. I'm the Decider, I'll take care of you."
Capt. Fogg,
ReplyDeleteYes, another bad thing about daddy-rhetoric is the way it feeds into the tribalism advocated and demanded by the brainless twits who say "Democrat Party" and so forth. Referring only to the "nook-you-ler" family as the basic unit has long been a favorite ploy of the right. We aren't to think of ourselves as citizens, just as mutually isolated "families" in cutthroat competition with one another for scarce resources, privileges, and protections, etc.
Shaw,
Thanks -- yes, it's worth emphasizing just how risky it is to say anything intelligent and mature at the national level. Anyone who does so runs into a firestorm of rage and imbecility from a significant segment of the population and the politicians who represent them. That's worrisome since, as Thomas Carlyle wrote, "In the long run, every government is the exact symbol of its people." If we are childish enough, we are likely to end up with a government that treats us with the same contempt we show for ourselves.
My sister is a liberal who lives in a very conservative part of Wisconsin...
ReplyDeleteYesterday she got to see democracy at work first hand: Russ Feingold had a town hall meeting.
Its bad enough with Fox News but every question asked of Feingold yesterday came from one of Glenn Beck's shows...
We are fast becoming a country of people who have low self esteem and are overwhelmed by the world around us...
So, we want a 'DADDY' in the White House...we want someone who talks to us. We will follow where they lead us....
Feingold acknowledged (privately to my sister after the town hall meeting) that he has the fight of his life coming up his next re election...
Its Orwell's 1984 right before our eyes...
I couldn't agree more; I have a "Daddy" and he is welcome to offer his observations and advice and I respect his views but it doesn't mean I need his input to make decisions.
ReplyDeleteI want a President to oversee the functioning of a nation, not the minutae of my life - I can take care of that myself.
"I'm the Decider, I'll take care of you."
ReplyDeleteThere's a dichotomy and a contradiction here. We want a Ruler, not a leader and someone determined to force his ideas of of right and wrong on us regardless of popular opinion -- something between paternal and tyrannical who agrees with out hostile ideas.
And then we want "smaller government." How anyone doubts that we share a common ancestor with baboons, I don't understand.
"we are likely to end up with a government that treats us with the same contempt we show for ourselves."
Do you mean wind up with yet another government that treats us with the same contempt we show for ourselves?
Capt. Fogg,
ReplyDeleteWith regard to the last-mentioned point, I think we aren't there yet -- we still have the right to vote and there is at least the appearance that we are in charge. I think "appearances" are important -- without at least a semblance of popular control and some expectation of its being kept up, all is lost.
Dino, I chuckled through MoDo column, agreeing with a lot of what she had to say.
ReplyDeleteBut, yeah, daddyfying Obama just doesn't work, even if one really, really tried.
The man does not give off that vibe, no matter what kind of hopes and/or delusions we put into his image.
Definitely not a father. More like a brother, who's too ponderous for his own good and would benefit from an occasional reality-inducing, er, smack. (Spoken from a perspective of a loving and caring sister, mind you. ;)
Usually, I find MoDo a bit silly, but this time she is drawing upon a commonly used metaphor. In a nutshell, the Dems are often called the “Mommy Party (nurturant parent),” and the Repubs are called the “Daddy Party (strict father).” Politics within the context of the family metaphor is a central thesis in George Lakoff’s Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. The two models of the family give rise to different moral systems, different forms of discourse, and different modes of reasoning … often leading to opposite conclusions. From Lakoff, here is food for thought (perhaps a future post):
ReplyDelete[Conservatives] have learned that politics is about family and morality, about myth and metaphor and emotional identification. They have, over twenty-five years, managed to forge conceptual links in the voters’ minds between morality and public policy. They have done this by carefully working out their values, comprehending their myths, and designing a language to fit those values and myths so that they can evoke them with powerful slogans, repeated over and over again, that reinforce those family-morality-policy links, until the connections have come to seem natural to many Americans, including many in the media.”
The major weakness of liberals, according to Lakoff (and I tend to agree with him): As long as liberals ignore the moral, mythic, and emotional dimension of politics (which means being too intellectual in our approach to policy and issue-by-issue debates), then we will not truly understand the political landscape and will not be able to change it.
Octo,
ReplyDeleteThat's an interesting thesis, but if Lakoff is suggesting that liberals need to adopt precisely the same strategy, I would have to say that for it, "tear-falling pity dwells not in this lizard's eye."
I suppose my initial response is that Dems need to bring passion to intellect and the language of citizenship, not promote and pander (like the right) to people's supposed infantile need for an ultra-moralist, reassuring President Papa Bear.
It's possible that the storylines or myths to which you refer were in some cases fabricated by the right out of whole cloth and that they didn't take something already firmly in the collective unconscious and forge conceptual links to it. Or we could say that they continued a tradition of perpetual fabrication of such myths. But I'm sure you know this--am just thinking out loud. Maybe the answer lies somewhere in between mere identifying-and-linking and clever fabrication. I don't know. Am probably too tired to make much sense.
I'm reminded of the way many advertising campaigns revolve almost entirely around sex, sex, sex. I honestly don't believe most of us over the age of 25 are particularly driven by that need anymore; but since we're told every five minutes that we ought to be obsessed with it, everyone assumes there's something wrong if the urge to merge isn't seeming to them like the only thing that matters. Not only will we pay to know what we think, as the saying goes, evidently we'll fork over good money to find out what we ought to feel, too. Notice that pleasant-looking people aren't called "beautiful" or "handsome" anymore but must always be said to be "hot"? That's a sex term, not an aesthetic term. The latter have become downright quaint.
Well, off to bed, which in my case is merely a soft spot at a safe distance from the nearest watering hole and well off the game trail.... I can assure you that I will not be having lascivious dreams about some airbrushed female allosaurus. I'm too old for that sort of nonsense anymore....