There are many issues this spring leafing out on that
tree! They have to do with ambition –
something that his peers fully understand and others might have hints of. They have to do with raw talent and capacity
– something beyond most of his peers, supporters and detractors. They have to do with the gauss count of his
moral compass – a very difficult quantity to measure. And they have to do with his worldview –
since this is the most difficult and ambiguous, it is one that I will write
about.
Understanding of such complexities begins at home. A simple
man will find it impossible to understand a complicated one (without help); a
computer is not repaired with a hammer and chisel. A good bit of the difficulty in understanding
Obama arises from this fact.
In part because I grew up in a clash of cultures, in a house
of secrets, in a town of secrets, in a land of secrets I became what might be
called socially hypervigilant. And it is
hypervigilance [1] that I see in Obama as one of the main principles that
serves up his experiences. It becomes so
natural, so ordinary, that one forgets that everyone doesn’t experience in the
same way.
As I understand Obama’s history he grew up as the
outsider. An American black kid in
Indonesia, a black child in a white family and a ‘regular’ black guy in
American society. While much of that
history is not in my experience, I have watched, with my own version of
hypervigilance, blacks in American society; paying vigilant attention at
remarkably high levels is required. As a
metaphor, think of most people only needing and being able to see and respond
to four colors, and most minority people being required to see a million colors
and to make importantly difference responses to those colors and their various
combinations. They also learn quickly
not to try to explain that world to the color blind and color challenged.
In my experience of the American south, blacks must not only
be acutely aware of what is happening around them, they most also seem unaware
and disinterested in exactly the right amounts.
The perceptual acuity and concentration required are enormous. The dominant society has its 4 color
prescription for the acceptable behaviors of minorities which is mindlessly and
ruthlessly enforced.
Obama has to be a master of these skills. He has always been, I would guess from his
first real sentience, a seeker of the way; building a body of skills and habits
within which he was safe, or safer than without them, and with which he quickly
discovered he could control his world.
One price is that not one person in a thousand (or more) can see the
world as he sees it.
This makes him dangerous as the most important man in the
world. No matter what he tells us, it is
not the truth; we can’t possibly see his real truth, and, possibly we “can’t
handle the truth” should we see it through his eyes. But is he more dangerous than the 4 color
seers who defile him or those who would replace him? Almost certainly not. When Obama is not ‘telling the truth,’ it is
often because what he has to say is so difficult to translate into communicable
form; the others are just lying [2].
I believe that there are lots of black folks in the US who
understand this, but they won’t tell – the unaware and disinterested rule,
remember.
Up to this point I have been operating on the assumption
that Obama is an honest man; here is where it gets dicey. Knowing how to read and understand him would
be difficult enough were he completely honest, but if he is dishonest like
(almost) all the rest of the political world, then where are we? Then we have a president who is a master at
seeing the subtle hues of all the colors, understands their nuance and is
willing to lie about their meaning for his own advantage.
People like McCain, Huckabee, Barbour, Bachman, Gingrich,
Palin and Romney tell such transparent lies that all but their sycophantic
followers are embarrassed for them. Just
a little learning and their 4 color world begins to look colorless and empty of
useful solutions. This, of course,
doesn’t mean that they can’t get into positions of power and cause a lot of
trouble by applying simplistic, self-serving notions to complex problems, but
it does mean that we can watch in informed horror as they do it.
Obama is another story.
What seems a lie may be the truth.
What seems distance and disinterest may hide the closest attention. What seems concern and engagement may be pro
forma sidestepping. If I am right,
Rooseveltian resolve is as foreign to Obama’s deepest comprehensions of how to
think and act as the rainforest is to the desert. And yet, I think that Obama might be trying
to be the more honest man. He farms out
his administration’s dishonesty to his staff and cabinet. Roosevelt did the opposite; he could lie
easily and so keep around him some number of people with moral wisdom exceeding
his own. If this is so, then we might
understand the meaning of Obama’s choices for retainers in a new light.
Some people seem to disclose themselves completely in their
public selves. Others have a public
persona that is accepted as fully adequate, though not exhaustive of the
person. Some seem understandable, but
not especially transparent. And yet
others present a public exterior that not only hides, but is intended to hide
the machinations of the person beneath.
There is a fifth category much more complex, people who deflect personal
evaluation and press their designs for action onto the ‘natural’ behaviors of others. The socially hypervigilant person often finds
this a comfortable way to function; and they can, if they are smart enough,
stay in control of the vast amounts of information needed – up to a point.
I have been befuddled and outraged at many of Obama’s
choices of people to serve among his minions, not the least by Emanuel,
Summers, Geithner and Gates. These men
are self-serving functionaries devoid of human feeling compared to a Frances
Perkins or Eleanor Roosevelt, devoid of the capacity to inform a president of
the order of magnitude difference between operating the levers of power and
the humanity that must be vested in a leader of living, breathing men, women
and children. And I continue to be
deeply troubled by adding Daley and Sperling to the mix.
But these are people that can be read like a children’s
book. They have a one dimensional
presented nature; like tools: a hammer for this, a saw for that. They are the people a hypervigilant would
select. Hilary Clinton is the most
complex person in the upper reaches of the administration, though she knows how
to deal with people like Obama and Bill Clinton; she was a safe choice.
There has been a great deal of confusion about Obama among
the people who are his natural supporters; is he a liberal? Is he a good man playing with bad people? Is he a bad man playing with good
people? Is he playing chess with
conservative checker players? Or my question, is he playing chess with
progressive checker players? It just
might be that he is playing chess with everyone – all the time.
Ultimately, I don’t think that we can know. I don’t think that we will ever know for
sure, will not even be able to finally measure the man against the actual
results of his administration. It is
almost impossible for it to have been otherwise. The first black man elected president would
almost have to be a question wrapped in an enigma.
Obama is probably the most dangerous president we have had
since FDR – dangerous in the sense of being president at a time when great
damage can be done to democratic governance – and is, like FDR, among the
presidents most unlikely to seek to do the nation ill; his capacity to protect
the nation is another matter. But the
nation will be changed dramatically and forever by the events that occur during
his presidency. And it is almost a
certainty that Obama, the man, will never be clearly seen with his hand on the
guiding controls of national power. And
no, this is not a good thing, but it may well be in the nature of the man to
watch us all very closely and try to stay a step ahead of our actually
understanding him [3].
[1] I am using the term hypervigilance in a somewhat, though
not completely, different way than it is used in psychological diagnosis as
part of PTSD. I am surmising a social,
systemic form of vigilance that is extreme and integrated into a complete
behavioral system appropriate to circumstances; it is generally explained in
the text of the essay. Here is another
example: where I grew up there were more rattlesnakes and water moccasins than
almost any other place in the country.
Children learned to look very closely when walking or even opening a
door to the outside since there were often rattlers on the cement porches
warming in the morning sun or gathering warmth in the evening – the stories I
could tell! To this day I do not step
over a log or a rock or otherwise put my foot down without checking around
it. I even notice a little twinge
stepping around a blind corner inside buildings. To some extent my minor obsession with visual
pattern recognition might be related to the adaptive ‘hypervigilance’
appropriate to walking around on the central Florida Gulf coast palmetto fields
and mangrove swamps.
[2] 4 color seers, of course, cannot recognize the
difference. Complexity for them is
always a lie and the inherent dishonesty of simplicity is their truth. This is a deep problem for the species as we
find ourselves confronting a complex reality and needing understanding beyond
our present habits of adequacy.
[3] Check my essay Obama Is No
Country Song written right after he was elected.
