This “weekly” address was in fact Obama’s very first, but enjoining “weekly” creates a faux continuity: Past activities fuse with future ones. And by issuing the podcast as the president-elect, Obama created a new, unprecedented, even extraconstitutional, national office. Still, his screen presence felt familiar, comforting. He played a role that corresponds to ones Americans have long watched on TV — from Robert Young in Father Knows Best to Sam Waterston in Law & Order (or, even more apt, Waterston in his TV ads for TD Ameritrade). The role requires unflappability, which Obama exudes like Verbena cologne, and it is his aim, in this video, to quiet America’s erratic pulse, its arrhythmic financial markets, its frightened workers, its bankrupt home owners.
The president-elect is seated behind a desk on a black leather chair, his head cushioned against its back. He’s in medium shot and part of a cozy composition; nothing seems out of place. He almost appears tucked into the image, which divides into discrete elements. On the left, an American flag hangs the length of the frame, the one and only element taller than he. The background is a medium-brown wood-paneled wall. To the left of Obama, shoulder-high, three dark-blue volumes: Public Papers of the Presidents: John F. Kennedy (1961–1963). The tomes lend a somberness to the image, representing the popular, fallen president, while associating JFK’s New Frontier with Obama’s upcoming variation on the New Deal. On the far right, also shoulder height, another volume, its title blurred, and a basketball, like a Pop art sculpture, signed by Lenny Wilkens of the US Olympic basketball team. A plant’s green leaves drape over the ball.
Though it’s video, it’s basically a still image. Obama wears a dark red tie and a flag pin on his gray lapel. His head moves up and down gently, for emphasis, and occasionally it subtly shifts from side to side. His expression is serious, sober, nearly unchanging, and the new gray at his temples does no harm. The sonorous Obama voice stays steady, on course, with none of the rise and fall heard in his campaign speeches, but he doesn’t shy away from unsettling language, like “the greatest economic challenge of our times.” Still, he’s not running anymore, so he’s transmuted his stump speech into a Fireside Chat, in which the screen is the hearth and his voice the melody in the air. “I know that we can steer ourselves out of this crisis. I am more hopeful than ever that America will rise once again.” He has checked his radiant smile, since these are not happy times, but he reassures the American public that happy days are here to come.
From this initial video message to his preinauguration press conferences to more recent YouTube clips and weekly talks, Obama has transformed the function of the president-elect, just as he transfigured the presidential campaign into an Internet phenomenon. Streaming from the Office of the President-Elect, a nonplace or anyplace, Obama proclaims his virtual presidency. The easy acceptance by the public and the media of this novel authority — after some initial “Where’s the president?” “Nowhere”—attests to the way people live today, in online encounters and communities. They connect as if they were face-to-face.
Barack Obama keeps making history. He has now also affected the English language, specifically the word virtual. Through his prestidigitations, he has helped along a linguistic shift: Virtual is the new actual. And, in that sense, Obama is president, news maker and commentator. He can explain himself, by himself. Since he knows what he’s thinking — and why — before the mediacs do, he scoops them effortlessly. In comparison with his skills, their responses seem increasingly thin, redundant, more obviously ill-informed and excruciatingly superficial. Obama’s capacity to think and answer should force the “cult of personality” pundits to stop shouting and start reading. But it won’t
W is for Wharton
A Mole in the House of the Modern
Edith Wharton’s passion for architecture was foundational, evidenced by her very first book, The Decoration of Houses, a work of notification. Wharton disdained the merely decorative in rooms and buildings, as she disdained it in her fiction. Her writing is severe, deliberate in its attacks and restraints, and lives in every detail and in the structure. Wharton’s novels and stories move from small moments to big ones (she manages to merge the two), from openness of opportunity and hope, to inhibition and tragic limitation, from life’s transitory pleasures and possibilities, to its dull and sharp pains and immobilizations. Traps and entrapment, psychological and societal, life’s dead ends become the anxious terminals for Wharton’s literary search for freedom and pleasure. (In her book, pleasure is freedom’s affect.)
The architect Wharton is always conscious of the larger structure, with her meaning central in each scene. She meticulously furnishes a room, so that all the pieces and lines in it function as emotional or psychological props, conditions or obstacles. Like cages or containers, her interiors keep characters in a place, often an internalized place. They enter rooms, meet, sit, talk, then Wharton lets them find the walls, the limits. She observes them in houses or on the street in chance meetings, and they fix each other — the gaze is her métier — to a moment in time, to a truth (about the other or themselves), to a seat in the social theater. Everything that happens with effect, building her edifice. Wharton selected her words with a scalpel, as if with or without them her patient would live, die; she was precise in her renderings, otherwise the construction might fall, and other such metaphors. Her writing is never labored, though. Yet nothing’s simple, or simply an object, and never just an ornament. The ornament is redolent and may even be causal. (Think of “The Bunner Sisters,” thse poor women whose fate hung on the repair of a timepiece. A twisted tale, but then Wharton is perverse, and sophisticated and surprising in her perverseness.)
Wharton’s stately, measured rhythms let the reader linger over a sentence, then move along languidly. One may be stopped dead by some piece of psychological astuteness, a blunt idea by brutal clarity, or staggered by an almost excessive, because perfect, image. Slowly, Wharton draws beautiful portraits, deceptive pictures. (I sometimes wonder if Wharton ever felt rushed by anything, then I remember Morton Fullerton and her love letters to him, that rush late in her life). Beautiful language serves — like tea, an elegant service — ironic and difficult ends. It lures one into a network of sinister complications and, transformed, beauty leads to dreariness and viciousness. The reader will be torn by the loss of that plenitude, by failure, by hopelessness.
But Wharton is economical about elegance, stringent about lushness, display, every embellishment. Rarely extravagant. Maybe it’s because she understood position and space, knew she didn’t really have much room, no room for profligacy. She couldn’t run from reality, even if she wanted to (and I think she did), so she had no room to waste, certainly no words to waste. The inessential might obscure the clarity she sought. She wouldn’t let herself go, let her writing go. She understood the danger, she understood any form of complicity. Her often privileged protagonists fatally conspire with society against themselves, become common prey to its dictates, helpless to disown or resist what they despise in themselves and in it. Wharton was profoundly aware that, seen by others, she was free to do what she pleased, a privileged woman, perhaps explained early on in The House of Mirth. Lily Bart “was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate” (I, 1, 8).