The cynic and the two nations: Twenty years since Barack Obama assured us we're the *United* States of America, a new country has been building with fearful momentum. Can anything be done to stop it?
It's something that would be gimmicky in the hands of a lesser writer, but IMHO Pierce reaches a level of gravitas and above-the-crowdness that really distinguishes his writing from the usual...
It's something that would be gimmicky in the hands of a lesser writer, but IMHO Pierce reaches a level of gravitas and above-the-crowdness that really distinguishes his writing from the usual political commentary. He frames his worldview around the idea that democracy is both our birthright and our neverending responsibility, a hard slog of voting and organizing and activism that a greater and greater share of the population is no longer interested in. That and the idea that Obama as a political figure offered "absolution without penance" in a way that felt good but let things fester in a bad way, unaddressed. Looking back on his older essays, he really captured the mood of the current moment as far back as 2012, even 2008. I'll forgive him a little flowery prose when the insight is that good.
I don't find it as charming as you I'm afraid. When I thought he was using it as a depersonalization, it made sense, I could relate to it, but the Cynic's family member investigating a crime...
I don't find it as charming as you I'm afraid. When I thought he was using it as a depersonalization, it made sense, I could relate to it, but the Cynic's family member investigating a crime pretty well killed it.
Ultimately to me it felt like he got distracted talking about the recent campaign shifts of the assassination attempt and Biden dropping out, as if he needed to explain those for historical purposes, for the reader in a hundred years but not today. (Could be the mobile format I never saw his explanation for the * after former president (and his choice of when to use whose name was odd)). Also, and this is perhaps just me, I don't think Jefferson failed to contend with the reasons people accept tyranny, I think he was pretty well aware of it.
I haven't read his others in the series but coming in at the tail end, it feels like an odd attempt to make the throughline in American politics about Obama, perhaps because he has focused on Obama in the past, and his real salient points get lost in the affectations of his writing and his digressions.
I feel like I'd be interested in a discussion of the American people finding absolution in Obama - not my experience but I was young enough to not be a cynic at the time of his election, I was a full Yes We Can change the world hopeful person at the time - but it felt like he's trying to force a continued theme rather than using his skill to focus on the points.
A new essay from Charlie Pierce, the latest in his long-running, elegiac series chronicling the moral and political arc of the last two decades as seen through the person of Barack Obama. Other...
A new essay from Charlie Pierce, the latest in his long-running, elegiac series chronicling the moral and political arc of the last two decades as seen through the person of Barack Obama.
Other essays in the series:
The Cynic and Senator Obama [June 2008] - Obama says that cynics believe they are smarter than everyone else. The cynic thinks he's wrong. The cynic doesn't think he's wiser or more clever or more politically attuned than anyone else. It's just that he fears that, every morning, he'll discover that his country has done something to deface itself further, that something else he thought solid will tremble and quake and fall to ruin, that his fellow citizens will sell more of their birthright for some silver that they can forge into shackles. He has come to believe that the worst thing a citizen of the United States of America can believe is that his country will not do something simply because it's wrong.
The Cynic and President Obama [November 2012] - Perhaps all our best presidents are the ambiguous ones, the ones hardest to figure out, because they force us to take more of the obligations of citizenship on ourselves, and not to look for some Great Man to lead us. [...] Of all the possible presidents in 2012, Barack Obama was the best of them. But that wasn't the point anymore. The country needed more than a president. The country always had needed more than a president.
For Obama, the Clock's Running in His Own Head Now [November 2012] - If he loses, there will be a powerful movement to render him, and these rallies, as footnotes. If he wins, he will be president again, and it will be a dusty, grinding job for as long as the calendar allows him to do it. [...] Ever since he came upon the scene, he has been a candidate who has had to rein himself in, someone who could sing Al Green, but just a line, someone who can dance, in front of an adoring crowd, but just one step, and then gone again. On the press riser, his senior staff was watching him do it, and they all smiled, and the sunset fell across their faces.
The Greatness of Barack Obama Is Our Great Project [November 2012] - The long creative project of America has been to engage all its citizens in that work. That is the history that he wears so well, and that he wields so subtly. That is the truth that he represents. That is the great silent thing that has been there through all the debates, and the ads, and all of that preposterous money. We are working on ourselves. We are incomplete. We are never finished.
The Cynic and the Lame Duck President [January 2015] - There's one thing about the president that took the cynic a long time to understand, and he didn't truly understand it until he heard the president refer to "the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government." Put simply, in so many areas, the president is putting the responsibility of governing—of leadership—on us, which is where it should be. We shouldn't need a president to start a conversation on race. We should start it ourselves, in thousands of town halls and church basements and radio talk shows. But as a self-governing democracy, we are too cowardly to do it honestly, because it rubs up against the comfortable myth of American exceptionalism. We have surrendered the basic, questioning courage it takes to run a self-governing political commonwealth for the anesthetic lassitude of national self-esteem. That is the bluff this president has called.
Good lord his third-person "Cynic" shtick is obnoxious.
It's something that would be gimmicky in the hands of a lesser writer, but IMHO Pierce reaches a level of gravitas and above-the-crowdness that really distinguishes his writing from the usual political commentary. He frames his worldview around the idea that democracy is both our birthright and our neverending responsibility, a hard slog of voting and organizing and activism that a greater and greater share of the population is no longer interested in. That and the idea that Obama as a political figure offered "absolution without penance" in a way that felt good but let things fester in a bad way, unaddressed. Looking back on his older essays, he really captured the mood of the current moment as far back as 2012, even 2008. I'll forgive him a little flowery prose when the insight is that good.
I don't find it as charming as you I'm afraid. When I thought he was using it as a depersonalization, it made sense, I could relate to it, but the Cynic's family member investigating a crime pretty well killed it.
Ultimately to me it felt like he got distracted talking about the recent campaign shifts of the assassination attempt and Biden dropping out, as if he needed to explain those for historical purposes, for the reader in a hundred years but not today. (Could be the mobile format I never saw his explanation for the * after former president (and his choice of when to use whose name was odd)). Also, and this is perhaps just me, I don't think Jefferson failed to contend with the reasons people accept tyranny, I think he was pretty well aware of it.
I haven't read his others in the series but coming in at the tail end, it feels like an odd attempt to make the throughline in American politics about Obama, perhaps because he has focused on Obama in the past, and his real salient points get lost in the affectations of his writing and his digressions.
I feel like I'd be interested in a discussion of the American people finding absolution in Obama - not my experience but I was young enough to not be a cynic at the time of his election, I was a full Yes We Can change the world hopeful person at the time - but it felt like he's trying to force a continued theme rather than using his skill to focus on the points.
A new essay from Charlie Pierce, the latest in his long-running, elegiac series chronicling the moral and political arc of the last two decades as seen through the person of Barack Obama.
Other essays in the series:
The Cynic and Senator Obama [June 2008] - Obama says that cynics believe they are smarter than everyone else. The cynic thinks he's wrong. The cynic doesn't think he's wiser or more clever or more politically attuned than anyone else. It's just that he fears that, every morning, he'll discover that his country has done something to deface itself further, that something else he thought solid will tremble and quake and fall to ruin, that his fellow citizens will sell more of their birthright for some silver that they can forge into shackles. He has come to believe that the worst thing a citizen of the United States of America can believe is that his country will not do something simply because it's wrong.
The Cynic and President Obama [November 2012] - Perhaps all our best presidents are the ambiguous ones, the ones hardest to figure out, because they force us to take more of the obligations of citizenship on ourselves, and not to look for some Great Man to lead us. [...] Of all the possible presidents in 2012, Barack Obama was the best of them. But that wasn't the point anymore. The country needed more than a president. The country always had needed more than a president.
For Obama, the Clock's Running in His Own Head Now [November 2012] - If he loses, there will be a powerful movement to render him, and these rallies, as footnotes. If he wins, he will be president again, and it will be a dusty, grinding job for as long as the calendar allows him to do it. [...] Ever since he came upon the scene, he has been a candidate who has had to rein himself in, someone who could sing Al Green, but just a line, someone who can dance, in front of an adoring crowd, but just one step, and then gone again. On the press riser, his senior staff was watching him do it, and they all smiled, and the sunset fell across their faces.
The Greatness of Barack Obama Is Our Great Project [November 2012] - The long creative project of America has been to engage all its citizens in that work. That is the history that he wears so well, and that he wields so subtly. That is the truth that he represents. That is the great silent thing that has been there through all the debates, and the ads, and all of that preposterous money. We are working on ourselves. We are incomplete. We are never finished.
The Cynic and the Lame Duck President [January 2015] - There's one thing about the president that took the cynic a long time to understand, and he didn't truly understand it until he heard the president refer to "the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government." Put simply, in so many areas, the president is putting the responsibility of governing—of leadership—on us, which is where it should be. We shouldn't need a president to start a conversation on race. We should start it ourselves, in thousands of town halls and church basements and radio talk shows. But as a self-governing democracy, we are too cowardly to do it honestly, because it rubs up against the comfortable myth of American exceptionalism. We have surrendered the basic, questioning courage it takes to run a self-governing political commonwealth for the anesthetic lassitude of national self-esteem. That is the bluff this president has called.