As I Pondered, Weak and Weary

Over at one of my competitor's publications, Junot Díaz (via Andrew Sullivan) wonders why the "Storyteller-in-Chief" has done such a rotten job of Presidential griotry:

All year I’ve been waiting for Obama to flex his narrative muscles, to tell the story of his presidency, of his Administration, to tell the story of where our country is going and why we should help deliver it there. A coherent, accessible, compelling story—one that is narrow enough to be held in our minds and hearts and that nevertheless is roomy enough for us, the audience, to weave our own predilections, dreams, fears, experiences into its fabric. It should necessarily be a story eight years in duration, a story that no matter what our personal politics are will excite us enough to go out and reëlect the teller just so we can be there for the story’s end. But from where I sit our President has not even told a bad story; he, in my opinion, has told no story at all.

I heard him talk healthcare to death but while he was elaborating ideas his opponents were telling stories. Sure they were bad ones, full of distortions and outright lies, but at least they were talking to the American people in the correct idiom: that of narrative. The President gave us a raft of information about why healthcare would be a swell idea; the Republicans gave us death panels. Ideas are wonderful things, but unless they’re couched in a good story they can do nothing.

Junot has in mind something like this I suppose:


And while I am tempted to point out how wise and keen this kind of insight is (largely, I must confess, based on the fact that I wrote something remarkably similar a year an a half ago with the much-cleverer title of "The Griot Gap":

...
But at the end of the day, what we want our Presidents to do it tell us the story of ourselves; to stand in front of the tribal fire, or the tribal “fire side” radio, or the tribal teevee and act out a ritual that tastes just a little bit like what Walt Whitman was getting to in ”Song of Myself”,

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
…

Telling the story of America to Americans -- finding just the right chords, and setting them to the music of the English language -- is an enormously powerful tool.
...)

I feel compelled by the obligations imposed on me by the ancient and sacred rules of blogging to point out the sadly obvious fact that Barack Obama does not tell the story of America -- the real story of the real American as it exists today -- because, as long as his political strategy depends on propping up the delusion that some form of mature, bipartisanship is still possible, he cannot.

He dare not.

Because the real story of the real American as it exists today is the story of a

political/cultural clique of powerful lunatics and their 30 million willing stooges methodically destroying this country.

The real story of America now is the story of madmen whipping themselves into a psychotic rage

over imaginary offenses.


The real story of America now is the story of those madmen intricately plotting the murder

of the America I knew and loved

and then carrying

that murder out.


The real story of America now is the story of those madmen methodically burying the evidence of their crimes


under


one million


cubic yards

of lies.

The real story of America now is the story of those madmen celebrating a fleeting moment of triumph

as their imaginary enemy lay dead beneath their feet...

...before sliding into a state of permanent, shrieking insanity when the evidence of their crime takes up residence inside their skulls, where it just gets louder

and LOUDER and LOUDER.

The real story of the real American is told by a deeply deranged narrator

and begins like this:

"TRUE! nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why WILL you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How then am I mad?..."

The real story of America now is "The Telltale Heart", which is why, as long as the the Bard of Pennsylvania Avenue remains reflexively medial and relentlessly placating, he can never dare to whisper a word of it.