Obama: In the Irony-Free Zone Joan Didion
Early in the primary season a certain number of Americans began to feel an almost inexpressible uneasiness about the direction events were taking. What made this uneasiness so hard to express was that it seemed to belie everything we officially claim—through election cycle after election cycle—that we want.
We were getting what we said we wanted.
For the first time in the memory of most of us a major political party was moving in the direction of nominating a demonstrably superior candidate—a genuinely literate man in a culture that does not prize literacy, an actually cosmopolitan man in an arena that deems tolerance of the world suspect by definition. A civil man. A politically adroit man. Enthusiasm was high. Participation was up.
Yet something troubled.
What troubled had nothing to do with the candidate himself.
It had to do instead with the reaction he evoked.
Close to the heart of the problem was the way in which only the very young were decreed capable of truly appreciating the candidate. Again and again, perfectly sentient adults cited the clinching arguments made on the candidate's behalf by their children. Again and again we were told that this was a generational thing, we couldn't understand. In a flash, we were back in high school, and we couldn't sit with the popular kids, we didn't get it. The Style section of The New York Times, on the Sunday after the election, mentioned the Obama T-shirt that "makes irony look old."
Irony was now out.
Naiveté, translated into "hope," was now in.
Innocence, even when it looked like ignorance, was now prized.
Partisanship could now be appropriately expressed by consumerism.
I couldn't count the number of snapshots I got e-mailed showing people's babies dressed in Obama gear.
I couldn't count the number of times I heard the words "transformational" or "inspirational," or heard the 1960s evoked by people with no apparent memory that what drove the social revolution of the 1960s was not babies in cute T-shirts but the kind of resistance to that decade's war that in the case of our current wars, unmotivated by a draft, we have yet to see. It became increasingly clear that we were gearing up for another close encounter with militant idealism—by which I mean the convenient but dangerous redefinition of political or pragmatic questions as moral questions —"convenient" because such redefinition makes those questions seem easier to answer, "dangerous" because this was a time when the nation was least prepared to afford easy answers.
Some who were troubled by this redefinition referred to those who remained untroubled by a code phrase. This phrase, which referred back to a previous encounter with militant idealism, the one that ended at the Jonestown encampment in Guyana in 1978, was "drinking the Kool-Aid."
No one ever suggested that the candidate himself was drinking the Kool- Aid—if there had been any doubt about this, his initial appointments laid them to rest. In fact it seemed increasingly clear not only that he would welcome some healthy realism but that its absence had become a source of worry. "The exuberance of Tuesday night's victories," TheNew York Times reported on November 6, "was also tempered by unease over the public's high expectations for a party in control of both Congress and the White House amid economic turmoil, two wars overseas and a yawning budget gap." A headline in the same day's Times : "With Victory in Hand, Obama Aides Say Task Now Is to Temper High Expectations."
Yet. The expectations got fueled. The spirit of a cargo cult was loose in the land. I heard it said breathlessly on one channel that the United States, on the basis of having carried off this presidential election, now had "the congratulations of all the nations." "They want to be with us," another commentator said. Imagining in 2008 that all the world's people wanted to be with us did not seem entirely different in kind from imagining in 2003 that we would be greeted with flowers when we invaded Iraq, but in the irony-free zone that the nation had chosen to become, this was not the preferred way of looking at it.