OBAMA
Greil Marcus (GQStyle Spring 2009)



“It’s been a long time comin’, but —” So said Barack Obama in the first moments of his victory speech in Grant Park in Chicago on election night, calling on Sam Cooke along with the other familiars — Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr. — he invisibly but unmistakably gathered to his side. “If you ever hear me sing ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’”, Rod Stewart once said of Cooke’s song, released in late December 1964, just after Cooke was shot to death outside a motel in Watts, in Los Angeles, “you’ll know my career will be over” — because, Stewart seemed to imply, he would not be able to look an audience in the face after failing to live up to the song. But Obama had more confidence — or, because he was perhaps testifying that, not four years old when “A Change Is Gonna Come” first aired on the radio, he had lived out his life under the shadow of the song, had carried it with him like a manifesto, Obama was asserting that he could not only sing the song, in his own way, in his own cadence, but rewrite it. “But I know, a change gone come”, Cooke sang. “Change has come to America”, Obama said. Did he really do that? Did Sam Cooke really do that? For Obama it was not his last song, but his first song.



I wasn’t in Chicago that night. I was in Minneapolis, in Northrop Auditorium at the University of Minnesota, in the audience, as Bob Dylan played for the first time on the campus of his erstwhile alma mater. The second song was “The Times They Are A-Changin’”, from the year before “A Change Is Gonna Come,” a song I’ve never liked. It always seemed as if it were written by the times, which is to say it felt like a manifesto written by a committee, or commissioned by one. But on this night so much history was loaded into the song it was impossible not to be sucked into its gravity. Dylan paced the song with space between the words, the rhythm the steps of someone making his way through an empty mansion with both care and dread. It was as if the song, or the history it carried, was moving in slow motion, carrying — as Obama would say later in the night of a 106-year-old voter named Ann Nixon Cooper, “born just a generation past slavery” — not only the history the song was made to celebrate — “She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people ‘we shall overcome’” — but the history that remained to be made: the history that the song and those present to hear it would witness as it and they had witnessed what had come before. But it was more than that.



As Dylan took all of the triumphalism out of the song, the cheering, the defiance, all of the easy ride the song had promised when it first appeared, he turned it into a kind of dirge. He divided history in two: the time the song had, now, outlasted, and the time that would, now, test it. As a dirge the song became a warning: in the past, the people listening had or had not made the history the song spoke for, but now they would have to make it, or fail the song just as Rod Stewart believed he would fail “A Change Is Gonna Come.” The last song of the night was “Blowin’ in the Wind,” another song I’ve never liked, another song that, this night, for me rang a bell it never had before. “I was born in 1941”, Dylan said just before he began the number. “That was the year they bombed Pearl Harbor. I’ve been living in a world of darkness ever since. But it looks like things are going to change now”. I only caught the last line; when the song ended, everyone crowded into the Northrop lobby, under a giant television screen tuned to CNN. It was ten o’clock, just as the polls closed in California, just as the announcer over our heads announced that Barack Obama had been elected president of the United States. Dylan had not gone a minute past where he knew the show had to end.


Fans just getting out of the Bob Dylan concert
at the University of Minnesota break out a dance party
upon hearing the news that Obama clinched the presidency

What happened then, all over the country, and all over the world—people shouting through their tears — is not unrelated to the way Obama was able to call up “A Change Is Gonna Come” as he spoke that night. It is not unrelated to the sense of authority that has surrounded Obama since. Almost always, when someone is elected president of the United States, whether it is someone you supported or someone you opposed, it takes a long time before the attachment of the word president to that person’s name begins to sound even remotely real, and with Obama that was not true on election night and it has not been true since. That is, I think because of the way he speaks — a manner for which the world eloquence is merely pretty, and hollow. It’s the ability to speak of complex things to large numbers of people in a way that neither compromises the complexity of what the speaker means to say nor insults the intelligence of those who are listening — to speak in a manner that itself attunes those who are listening to their own complexity. I am thinking of Obama’s speech on race, from March 18 of last year, when controversy over statements and sermons by his longtime preacher, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, threatened to derail his campaign — a thirty-seven minute address that gathered listeners as if around a campfire — but I am also thinking of a scene from John Ford’s 1939 film Young Mr. Lincoln as described in Short Letter, Long Farewell, a novel published by Peter Handke in 1972. The narrator, a young Austrian in America, goes to a theater. Lincoln, played by Henry Fonda, has agreed to defend two brothers accused of murder; a drunken mob arrives at the jail to lynch them, and Lincoln faces it down. He talks; he captures the drunks, the narrator says in wonder and awe, not missing the flicker of an eyelash, the turn of a vowel, “by softly reminding them of themselves, of what they were, what they could be, and what they had forgotten. This scene — Lincoln on the wooden steps of the jailhouse, with his hand on the battering ram — embodied every possibility of human behavior. In the end not only the drunks, but also the actors playing the drunks, were listening intently to Lincoln, and when he had finished they dispersed, changed forever. All around me in the theater I felt the audience breathing differently and coming to life again”. That is what eloquence is too weak a word for: speech that is not only about democracy, but that is itself democratic.



In The Human Stain, published in 2000, Philip Roth tells the story one Coleman Silk, a seventy-two year-old man from an African-American family from Philadelphia who has passed as a Jew — that is, as a white man — his entire adult life. Reading the novel now, one can hardly avoid imagining Barack Obama into its pages, not because he ever passed or ever could, but because as an African-America he seems to have invented himself as absolutely as does Coleman Silk. “What do we really know about this man?” John McCain asked throughout the fall campaign, and even without the innuendo — was he a Muslim, a communist, somehow a terrorist? — the question hit home because it was about something real. Obama’s very ease in his own skin, his apparent immunity from slurs and lies — like Jackie Robinson in his ability to trust in his own gifts and never betray his own rage at the slurs and lies that by election day had at Republican rallies become a torrent of hate, with crowds shouting “Traitor!” and “Kill him!” at the mention of his name — spoke for, as Roth wrote of Coleman Silk, “the democratic invitation to throw your origins overboard if to do so contributes to the pursuit of happiness”. Obama seems like his own creation: that is the source of his aura, the sense of self-command that draws people to him, and it is at least partly the sense that he is not quite real, not quite human, that terrifies, or sickens, others. The self-made American embodies America, a nation that was itself made up — “Everyday”, Roth wrote, “you woke up to be what you had made yourself” — but the self-made American is also a kind of Frankenstein.



The banner headline on the front pages of the New York Times the day after the election was queer in its affirmation of what the election had been about: RACIAL BARRIER FALLS IN HEAVY TURNOUT. As a self-invented American, one who could claim the history of the Civil Rights movement, as in his litany of place names from Montgomery to Atlanta, without excluding anyone from that history, Obama did not run as someone who had set himself against a “racial barrier.” A particular individual set himself a goal and achieved it; America was not less racist the day after the election than it was the day before it. But perhaps what was wrong about the headline was that it spoke in terms that were too narrow, too small, too merely functional for what had actually occurred. The country may not have changed, but its history did. It rewrote itself. For as a friend said, “Blowin’ in the Wind”, Bob Dylan’s last word on election night, was not just “Blowin’ in the Wind”. It was also the song Dylan has long said he “took it off”, “a spiritual”, a song that dates to the Civil War, a song Lincoln might have heard, but not likely ever sang, as, one night in Greenwich Village, in a performance of an empathy so great is might better be called transubstantiation, a Jew in 1962 turning himself into a African-American in 1862, Bob Dylan did: “No More Auction Block”.

(2009)