Same Day, July 17, 1996 10:48PM: Buenos Aires, Argentina

February 10, 2012 1 Comment

For those of you who dare, this is the second chapter (the first is here, still).

This is a continuation of July 17, 1996. The scene opens in a café, in Buenos Aires, Argentina.  It’s located in a Bohemian spot, Boca. It’s what we commonly call un barrio.  

One of the characters is reading El Clarín, which is a popular and central newspaper in Argentina.  And, as TWA Flight 800 is real,  Hojjatoleslam Ahmad Musavi is a real character, though highly fictionalized here so as to avoid condemnation.  Others, Gardel, Evita Perón and Maradona —  el Che — are of course real.

The rest — I’m responsible for putting you through this …

El Clarín, on the lower right hand side of its front page, in a small tight square unnoticed by most of its readers even as they licked the tips of thumb and index finger and turned to the paper’s next page, reported that an unidentified Middle Eastern man was found dead in a dingy alley near the Rocha Bend of the Riachuelo in La Boca.

Artists and laborers in red, yellow, blue-green chapa houses, built at the dawning of a nation by Italian immigrants working in nearby meatpacking plants and warehouses in Buenos Aires’ oldest neighborhood, aroused by first light, awakened to a coiled body in fetal position, throat cut from ear to ear, face down and eyes wide open submerged in coagulated gutter water and floating cigarette butts.   Winter flies gathered the spittle.

Víctima de juego sucio, reported El Clarín.

“I hope he’s not here,” said Marcelo Abendroth in a whisper, his long,  delicate hand outstretched over the story of the dead Middle Eastern man in El Clarín laying opened on a flimsy table in the dim Rincón Café in San Telmo.   He looked down at the story and stared at it for some time.  Then he carefully drew his café to the edge of his thin lips so as to avoid being stung by its heat.

He scoped the Rincón.  A gilded portrait of a young Carlos Gardel, fedora at an angle over the tangista’s upturned brow, hung side-by-side with the Madonna sagrada, Evita Perón, over the murky bar.  Abendroth grinned.  A dozen small fat candles in constant vigil beneath the portraits flickered a quiet light onto a mahogany bar and scarred it with a melancholy wax.   The bar was an altar , an homage to an imagined Argentina.  Bottles of wine and whisky and gin and absinthe from France stood without order – whisky next to wine, cognac and warm cokes and vodka.  At the end of the bar next to the television held high on a homemade wooden shelf was a signed poster of a youthful Diego Maradona in his blue and yellow of better days.  The poster was tacked into the plaster wall.

Near Plaza Dorrego, the Rincón was the local café, the nexus for life’s transitions.  On its wounded external brick wall was a spray painted caricature of a youthful Che Guevara, in his boina and scraggly beard, frozen for posterity.  And beneath the image of the Argentine doctor from Rosario, in blood red:  Until Victory Always!

Marcelo Abendroth wore a brown gabardine suit, a dark blue wool turtle neck and Italian loafers without socks.  He had taken off his jacket and draped it behind his seat.  Abendroth had skeletal shoulders and a spindly neck.  He rolled his sleeves half way up his forearm exposing fine wrists.   A Rolex dangled like a woman’s bracelet from his right wrist.

Abendroth looked down at the newspaper, again, and moved his hand to the side and glanced at the story.  He read the headline out loud: “Víctima de juego sucio.”  And raised his conditioned eyebrows to show indignation.  “Very Argentinean, the knife,” he said sternly – as stern as he could be given his demeanor.  “I hope that Abu Dokhan lives up to his name.  And vanishes.  I hope he didn’t have anything to do with this.”

Hojatoleslam Ahmad Musavi had eyes that were outsized portals as black as night.  They fell on a thick weariness that told a story of an anguished life.   Musavi’s face was round and wide.  He ran his hand over his bald head – a sign of his frustration with Abendroth’s questions about the whereabouts of the smoke-bearer, Abu Dokhan.

But Abendroth noted how Musavi brightened when he heard the name of the most wanted Lebanese.  Musavi sat up and eased his hand down his burly face and rubbed his bulbous nose as if he suddenly had an itch.  The table trembled from his weight.   Hairs protruding from his nose were like ivy entangled in a moustache that covered his upper lip.  Abendroth looked away in disgust.

“Hezbollah calls him The smoke-bearer, the Abu Dokhan.  That’s what it means, smoke-bearer.  He vanishes like smoke,” said Hojatoleslam Ahmad Musavi with pride.  “All westerners think we Arabs are related or that we know each other intimately.  Everyone knows who Hajj Radwan, the Abu Dokhan, is – that’s his real name.  Hajj Radwan.   But I.  We,” he said pointing to Abendroth and then himself. “We have nothing to do with him, my friend.  And I have nothing to do with this dead man.”

“In this country all Arabs are implicated, I’m afraid – first the Israeli Embassy is bombed, then AMIA is leveled,” said Abendroth.  “I’ve been told that the dead man had a bird stuffed in his mouth.”

“A bird?  What kind of a bird? It’s not in the paper,” said Musavi.  He spoke as if he was gargling with marbles.  He leaned towards the much smaller Abendroth.  Musavi seemed to be about to swallow him.

“They don’t want to alarm people. We Argentineans are a superstitious lot.  A canary.”

“Ah.  Someone has indeed sent a message.”

Musavi sipped his bitter black coffee, eyes on Marcelo Abendroth,  Director of the Economic Education Trust, a subsidiary of Triad Management, a consulting firm concentrated on information and influence ; it mines special interests for investors in the United States that look to expand their holdings and have some bearing on power.

“I love the coffee in your country.  It reminds me of home,” said Musavi, his thick lips expanding into a smile that made his face even wider.

“The destruction of the Israeli Embassy and AMIA are not subtle messages, Musavi.  Not at all.  What’s next?  There’s always a next.  Something.  Always more, something else,” Abendroth said leaning forward over his espresso.  But he immediately relaxed because he knew from Musavi’s blank gaze that there wasn’t going to be a response.  Abendroth was not one to push.  He smiled coquettishly, which was his way when he was nervous.   He looked down at his hands, palms down, and rubbed the tops of his finger nails with his thumb as if he was removing dust.  He admired their luster.

“Abendroth.  In German it means evening or dusk, does it not? Argentineans are always on the lookout for Germans.  It must make you self-conscious.  Nervous perhaps.  No?  The indictment in people’s eyes when they know – and suspect.  Similar to what we Arabs feel.  So you must understand that Hajj Radwan, the Abu Dokhan, is a coincidence – that’s all.”

“Coincidence.  The Israeli Embassy and the Argentine-Israeli Mutual Association, the AMIA itself after the embassy.  Coincidences, Musavi?  Suddenly this dead man.  What are you hiding?  We’re always hiding something.”

“Money is truth, Mr. Abendroth,” said Musavi in his thick accent.  “The only truth.  Nothing else.  Money.  It creates democracies.  And it can create autocracies and dictatorships and whatever we need it to do.  Money can hold whoever we want in power, for as long as we want.  Money paves roads.  And sometimes, as you say, it can hide things.”

“It depends on the story, Musavi.  It has to be the right story.  Freedom has a price.  It’s a balancing act.  That’s the world we’re in.  Our world.   And you want to play in it so you must tow the line, Musavi.  With care.  Or you might not be let in.  Entrance comes at a price.”

Marcelo drew his espresso and then waved to the sleepy waiter.

“Ajenjo.  Para los dos, por favor,” he ordered.

“Ah bien.  La fée verte.  Muy bien.  Perfecto.”

Marcelo Abendroth leaned towards Musavi as if he didn’t want to be heard.  “At our first meeting in Iguazu, I remember the smoke-bearer.  He was there.  I remember.  He was with you.  In your entourage.  I can see him there plainly.  Like it was yesterday.  I saw him.  I remembered him when I read this story.  This was before the embassy.  Before any of it.  This dirty business.  What are you doing, exactly, Mr. Musavi?  What can you say to me?  If it’s learned that Hajj Radwan was with you – it’s obvious no?  People would think.  Put two and two together.”

“Anyone could have done this killing.  Someone could have been angry at this guy because he said something foul against Boca and fútbol passions ran wild and they cut his throat after too much drink.  Maybe he was a River fan.  Look where we are, Marcelo.  This is not uncommon in your country.  It could have been a woman – because of a woman.  The signs are there – the knife.  The knife is always used when a woman is involved.  It could have been the Iranians.  Who’s to know?  Or maybe it was that psycho al-Gaddafi – he has a bone to pick with your president.  Menem’s an Arab, too, after all, and word is, he crossed Gaddafi.  On the street I hear that your president reneged on a missile deal.  You can’t take ten million dollars from Gaddafi, not give him anything in return and get away with it.  Come on.  Your people should know better.  Perhaps Gaddafi is paying him back – a warning.  Maybe that’s the message.  A message from Gaddafi.  Don’t cross me Menem or next time it will be closer to home.”  Musavi paused and looked down at his black café, put his thick hands around the tiny cup and, as his large round shoulders came up around his head and he looked like a giant sea turtle, said, “And maybe it was the CIA.  You know they’re everywhere and they like it down here.  They like your country, all those Germans smuggled in – who could have imagined that American military power was built with Nazi know-how? And it came through here, your country, Marcelo.  It’s very easy here.  It’s chaotic and delightfully confusing.  Anything is possible in your country. Everything can be done here.  People are wonderfully distracted.  That’s why we all like your country.  Certain countries exist to facilitate the needs of others.  The legacy of the Cold War, I’m afraid.  We have to live with it.  Adjust.  Isn’t that how we’ve evolved?  It’s the probable course of things.  And who’s to know?  Maybe the CIA is fronting for Gaddafi or the Iranians, maybe both.  It’s all possible.  It depends on which way the story will be turned.   Isn’t’ that what you said?  We’re all in this twist now – twisted together in a coil, stories intertwining, running into each other, infecting one another.   We can’t escape it.  History, the present, the future – they’re all intertwined and confused.  No one knows the truth.  No one knows where we’re going.  We have to create new truths.  New rules.  I don’t recall Hajj Radwan there with us.  I’m sorry,  Marcelo, I don’t.  Not at all.  Maybe you’re mistaken. You westerners think we all look alike.  It’s not just.  Not just at all.  We Arabs don’t know each other. We’re not all related.  The eye is fickle, my friend.”

“And the heart is worse.”

“Perhaps.  Perhaps you’re right.  Maybe the Iranians, maybe Gaddafi.  The CIA.  We don’t know anything about this dead man.  And, yes, the embassy and AMIA are messages, indeed.  That’s all.  Messages, Marcelo.  The result of something much larger. Eventually we’ll set a good course, catch the right wind with the right force.   Perhaps Hajj Radwan has been here – perhaps not.  We will never know.  Unsavory characters know how to blend with the rest of us.  They blend and wait – and then strike.  A friend today can kill you tomorrow.  And never be found again.  Maybe getting away with a thing like that is the ultimate freedom.  An aphrodisiac – the most powerful of all.  What’s a life worth, anyway?”

Abendroth lit a cigarette and inhaled with the deep satisfaction of someone who smoked because it eased him.   Musavi leaned back in his chair and extended his arms, his hands holding the edge of the delicate table, and took in the contentment of watching Abendroth’s unease.

A bandoneon cried out Gardel.  El día que me quieras.

The bandoneon player, all in black like the night echoing through the front window behind him, was lost in the woe oozing from his fingers moving instinctually up and down the white keys that shone like the moon. El día que me quieras.

Musavi studied Abendroth.  A full silence fell between them.

“I’m not sure about all this Musavi,” Abendroth said in the semi darkness of the Rincón.  He was hesitant.

“We’re merely trying to learn to live in the world that has been created by you westerners.”

Musavi took a red pack of Dunhills from his pocket and lit a cigarette, too.  He held the cigarette between his thumb and index finger.  Inhaled.  And exhaled slowly and leaned forward and flicked the edge of his cigarette into a tin ashtray between them.

The bartender turned on the old black and white TV at the end of the bar and its radiance fell on the dim Rincón.  The bartender reached for the rabbit ears and adjusted them and a coarse picture came into view as if traveling a great distance through fog.

… A las 20:45 horas, once minutos después de despegar del Aeropuerto Internacional Kennedy, el vuelo 800 de TWA, con destino a París, Francia, se estrelló en el Océano Atlántico frente a la costa de Long Island…

Marcelo Abendroth turned towards the TV, a disturbing blue-gray eye, an unannounced brightness that pushed aside the solemn comfort that can exist among strangers, and took a drag of his cigarette.

Suddenly the TV picture was gone and a scratchy graininess shoved Gardel’s sadness, jostled it, and brought forth another.

The bandoneon player kept on, his melancholy persistent, like mourning.

“Carajo. Puta.  Qué mierda,” the bartender railed.

“Chin,” said Musavi, raising his absinthe.  “Salud.  It’s done.  The future is ours.  Let’s not cry over what’s past.  We’ve done well together – and we’ll do more.  We understand each other.  And we have a place to start.  A starting point.  We’re in deep.  And we’re going deeper.  When there are no answers to a puzzle, my friend, the only solution is to go in deeper, dig further into the maze.  It’s the only way.  There’s no turning back.  There’s only going deeper.”

Marcelo Abendroth turned away from the TV and raised his glass to Musavi’s. “I suppose you’re right,” he said. “To forging ahead.  Going deeper.  Here’s to the labyrinth.  Salud.”

“Al futuro,” said Musavi.  “Nuestro futuro.”

They pulled their heads back and swallowed the warm ajenjo and slapped their short glasses on the table.   The table shook and creaked.  Musavi looked up at the black television screen.

Filed under American Literature, corruption, cultural studies, fiction, Homeland Security, men, Muslim, philosophy, politics, Pop Culture, Religion, the University, TWAS Flight 800

July 17, 1996: New York City, Upper West Side

February 8, 2012 3 Comments

These are the first pages of a story I’ve been working on for quite some time.  The larger working title is THE DOUBLE HELIX.  The first third is called BENDING. The second and third parts are titled TWISTING and COMPRESSION.

Please feel free to comment.  Your comments will definitely help me.  Where do you think it’s going?  What’s happening here?  Who are these people?  This is fiction that grows from history.   The major event, here, which happens on July 17, 1996, is true.

“Providence sometimes foreshadows the future of men in dreams, not so that they may be able to avoid the sufferings fated for them, for they can never get the better of destiny, but in order that they may bear them with the more patience when those sufferings come; for when disasters come all together and unexpectedly, they strike the spirit with so severe and sudden a blow that they overwhelm it; while if they are anticipated, the mind, by dwelling on them beforehand, is able little by little to turn the edge of sorrow.”

Achilles Tatius in The Adventures of Leucippe and Clitophon

 

 

PART ONE: BENDING

July 17, 1996: New York City, Upper West Side

Life’s din diminished some in that small moment when he pulled open his apartment window with such expectation that the last few inches the window flew up knew only his eagerness.

With his palms on the coarse sill, he ducked under the window’s frame and leaned into the horizon – the  Hudson River and the Jersey Palisades across the way and the George Washington bridge just north beaming a dull evening gray.

He waited all day to tilt into the serenity that arrived with the humidity and pressed him to push away his day.  He arched his back and stretched and took it in.

He panned down six stories and set his eyes on an incongruous dance of Poodles and Labradoodles and French Bulldogs and a Great Dane and a German Shepherd and a Chihuahua and a couple of Golden Retrievers held easily by a dog walker in a weathered Yankee cap, a danseur never entangled in the leashes held to one hand, then the other, the exchanges fluid and experienced.

The dogs sniffed the smells coming from a square earth and lifted their legs to trees and squatted when they recognized something.

The Great Dane and the Chihuahua and the Bulldog dumped together as if responding to some great secret.  The rest waited, and the dog walker studied them.

The young Dr. Raúl Sicard was transfixed by the scene.  What others might find inconsequential, something to pass by, intrigued him.  There was meaning in the seemingly mundane.  He was a geneticist and he liked nothing better then to lose himself in thought when he came face-to-face with an adaptation like this.  He strayed off to see if he could imagine the adaptations that drove the dog walker and his canis lupus familiaris to this moment, this place, here and now.

The city dog is so different from the country dog that roams unconstrained across a larger earth and squats without fear, he thought, never lifting his leg.  Almost nothing separates them – yet everything does.

He stretched further out his window and took a deep breath, even though the air was heavy.  Streets lamps came on. The Palisades were lit and reflected off the Hudson River.

Haitian women rushed stately blue strollers with large white wheels around the dog walker scooping up the steamy remains with a hand gloved in a baggie.

Up and down Riverside Drive and across Joan of Arc Park, in the promising glow of summer evening, went these intertwining objects – the dog walkers and the Haitian women and their stately strollers.

This is how the world moved that day, July 17, 1996, before Raúl’s eyes adjusted to the sadness that arrived when the phone rang outside everything familiar to him and stopped him from stretching as far as he could into the picture knocking at him, asking him to leave things behind for a bit.

He held the grainy sill and turned to the ring that tempted the faith he found in his routines.

He felt the weight in the room, a sadness that came out of nowhere – yet it seemed old and familiar, and lodged itself in the pit of his stomach.

Raúl leaned inside and faced the phone.  He held the sill with his right hand, not yet giving it up all the way.  Not yet.

The knots in his spine that would otherwise crack and unwind the fatigue that amassed from hours curled over a microscope deciphering the nucleic acid that contains the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of all known living organisms tightened.

The sadness multiplied.  He had no explanation for it, dumbfounded.  He liked knowing where things came from, how they evolved, what changed them, how they appear.  How things appear even suddenly like the ring of the phone that hung in the air with the sadness.

He traced his steps for signs.  Just a few moments before the first ring he entered his apartment and dropped the keys in the bowl on the table beneath the mirror near the front door and draped his lab coat over the chair meant just for that otherwise it would be useless.  Grabbed a beer and turned on the TV for noise.   And pulled open his window.

At some point that day, the sadness must have begun to set in unnoticed.  Maybe the sadness had been there all along – that was more logical.

The phone rang again.

He could consider the ring’s origin or rather the origin of the intuition he had that came with the ring and told him that something happened and he was involved.  But that was too much, too far to go.

Something traveled the distance and found him and opened a black hole and he didn’t want to be present.  He didn’t want to be sucked in.  Know its spiral history.  That’s what humans do, he thought, run for cover – and wait and adapt slowly, hopefully.  Those that can’t adapt don’t make it, ever.

He felt bound.  In the genetics lab life laid down road signs, roots to instincts that he could quantify.  There was nothing to measure here.  Nothing at all – but an intuition.

The phone pawed at him trying to get to where the heart is.

There was no way to revise the day, see it fully in memory’s half-light.  After working in the lab he and friends sat in a sidewalk café across from Lincoln Center and had a Brooklyn Summer Ale and dreamt of things that may never come to pass.  On a  cloudless bright day, they descended into the dank and murky subway station on 161st and took the number one, Broadway – Seventh Avenue local to 72nd Street and strolled to Lincoln Center where a Guatemalteco on the corner sold dolls with bouncing heads and a Jamaican next to him hawked antique copies of Paris Match and Look and National Geographic in several languages.

A invisible woman with tattoos of crosses and peace signs on either hand and barely able to stand on the corner waited for pedestrians to push by and she’d mumble spare some change as they forgot her, a picture of an extinction, something that no one wants to see intimately, the end of an adaptation.   Soon, she would not be.

It’s all like this – the Guatamalteco, the Jamaican, the invisible end of an adaptation.  It all had to be like this, a design, an order.  Nothing spoke to him of the sadness he felt – but it had been there, he was sure of it.  Had to be.

He tried ignoring the third ring and turned to the hum of the TV.

A voice over a static map of Long Island filled the room with sadness.  That’s when the phone rang a fourth time, its red flash igniting the papers on the desk next to it and the bills waiting for another week.   An inexorable eye looking back at him.

Nothing mattered now.  Except the fifth ring.  Its sound hung in the air, hollow.  The phone and the TV.

…At 8:45P.M., eleven minutes after take-off from Kennedy International Airport, TWA flight 800, bound for Paris, France, crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Long Island.  Witnesses say they saw a bright flash in the sky.  But nothing is certain.  There are no causes known at this time.  The Coast Guard responded immediately, dispatching numerous search and rescue vessels.  The New York City Police Department, the New York State Police Department, and the Suffolk County Police Department have all responded as well.  The National Transportation Safety Board has dispatched a team from New Jersey.  And we’ve been informed that numerous private vessels are also involved in this initial search and recovery effort…

“]

TWA Flight 800 [Animation

 

The phone rang again.

“Papá,” he whispered.  Raúl said it just to hear himself say it, to test its feel and the emptiness that arrives with flashes from a life lived, rattles you and tempts your faith.  “Papá,” he said again.  It filled the room.   “Papá.”  It overwhelmed everything.  The sanctity of his routine, the lab, the dog walkers and their dogs crapping and the Haitian maids and their Cadillac strollers.

He picked up the phone and staggered.

He felt him there, the ghost of his father standing beside him as still as recollections tend to be where light suddenly is as darkness and the darkness is where we are and where we will be.  Where the problems of the heart live just beyond the design, beyond the touch of order.  This sadness was new and full.

Filed under American Literature, cultural studies, fiction, Homeland Security, Media, men, politics, the University, TWAS Flight 800

Barack Obama and the Power of Style: Why the GOP Can’t Find Its Soul

February 5, 2012 3 Comments

Barry Blitt has done it again, a provocative cover for the February 6, 2012 New Yorker.

In this complex image, we find a very relaxed, smiling, from ear-to-ear, President Obama, beer in one hand (could it be a foreign beer, a Heineken?), a football in the other. He’s in a white Oxford shirt, sleeves rolled up to his forearms ( he’s yet to have to pull them all the way up and go to the hard work, perhaps — or maybe he just makes the hard work look easy?), sitting in a comfortable chair — a moment for the president to chill out and watch a GOP football game on a wide screen tv.

The Big Game by Barry Blitt

The players, in a full stadium (presumably the public watching; mediated sports, here, functioning as “a continuing tension — relationship, influence and antagonism — to the dominant culture,” as Aaron Baker tells us in “Sports and the Popular,” in Sports, Media, and the Politics of Identity), are Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich.

A bulldog-faced and bruised Newt is being tackled by a flying Mitt, his face serious and determined. Helmets have flown off, noting the violence of the game — football and politics as high-stakes contact sports; both players are marked up, bruised, as is the GOP. And the football is out of their hands — a fumble, or the ongoing fumbling so much the definition of the GOP during this vicious political cycle pre-November.

Blitt is asserting an essential characteristic of Obama’s popularity that we’ve failed to see or if we’ve seen it, we’ve failed to acknowledge: Style. I’m suggesting that it is this Style that repels many white citizens — and politicians — but which will undoubtedly be an asset in his re-election.

Blitt deconstructs our “shortsightedness,” as I’ve said before, by conflating African-American style, coming into prominence through music, and mediated sports, especially America’s favorite contemporary passion, football, a game consistent with crisis management (we’re always in a crisis, in war with this or that — the Taliban, drugs, poverty), the taking of territory with power and wit, much like armies do, and restricted by time and space, the perfect metaphor for a world that has to deal with limited resources.

Everywhere we turn in football — and politics — there are constraints, limitations and crisis. And we’re always running out of time; there’s never enough. It’s now or never; there’s no long term plan. Attack, attack, attack. Leave no one standing. It’s not surprising that topping the sports news these days are concussions, the short athletic lives of football players and the compromises in later life. This is the American way of life. We can see that now. Fight, fall, endure — not much of a future in this.

But Obama offers us style as an antidote — and those that see their former lives metamorphosing into some unknown are fighting back like mad, rather then seeing the errors in the ways that have gotten us to this point. Republicans never talk about one reality, for instance (and the popular media never pursues this line): we’re living through the wonderful world left us by Bush-Cheney. The GOP has amnesia.

But where does style and the animosity towards it come from?

In the now classic Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete, William C. Rhoden, of the New York Times, in “Style: The Dilemma of Appropriation,” tells us that in the summer of 1963, he remembers watching Ron Santo, the Chicago Cubs‘ third basement, hit a deep fly ball in the gap between right and center.

Willie Mays drifted across the outfield like Charles Coles, the great tapdancer whose footwork was so sweet and smooth that they called him “Honi.” He arrived at his spot under the baseball with no apparent sweat, even though he’d had to run for what seemed like miles to get there (147).

Following the catch, “Santo kicked the ground in disgust.” But, Rhoden says, the “most memorable part of the play took place after Mays made the catch”(147). Mays “nonchalantly picked up the ball out of his glove, tossed it back to the infield, coolly walked back to center field, flicked his sunglasses back up, and waited for the next play. His body language suggested annoyance that the batter hadn’t presented a greater challenge”(147-48).

Our Mays is Obama sitting back with shirt sleeves rolled to his forearms, beer in one hand, a football on the other — nonchalance, de rigueur for Obama. It’s how he strolls to the podium; how he must play basketball. It’s how he sings Al Green. And the plastic, always scripted Mitt Romney has no style at all. And Newt is a playground bully, unlikable, menacing.

Mays came along after Jackie Robinson, who had to watch every aspect of his life; he made room for Mays. After Mays we have Muhammad Ali, Charlie Parker earlier. Miles Davis introduced Americans to “cool” and “hipster” in the late 1950′s (Rhoden, 152).

“In virtually every decade since the 1950s, black athletes have been at the core of some stylistic or structural innovation in sports”(152).

These changes, as television — and the image — begin to dominate, run parallel to political figures — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Julian Bond and Jesse Jackson, Barbara Jordan and Shirley Chisholm, and Carol Mosely Braun.

Barack Obama is now the most famous African-American; in him we see the political rise of the African-American. But we also see the manifestation of style, its rise out of R&B and Rap, out of the style so endemic of the NBA — tats and all. The power of style is that “in some ways [it] underlines the [Black athlete's] inability to define themselves in more substantive ways and find acceptance” (156).

Obama still can’t “define” himself in “substantive ways and find acceptance,” in general. With Obama’s current approval rating, the up-tick in unemployment figures and the ever present , though slow, upswing of the economy, the Republicans have little to address. Even Romney was bold enough to say that the current unemployment figures had nothing to do with Obama; however, Gingrich did say that, in the end, some credit would have to be given Obama. Which is which?

The GOP can’t coalesce around a singular message. This means that it’s going to get nastier; this means that direct attacks on Obama’s personality — his style, which for the African -American is synonymous with “soul” — will increase. The most violent and angry segments of the GOP are overtly racist, though their kids listen to Rap, wear caps with brims sideways and their boys sport baggy jeans half way down their buttocks (without knowing what this means).

The problem — and challenge — that the GOP image makers face is the “fact that black style was quickly commodified by white power, which became addicted to this other new form of black gold”(168). Style is something we require of our leaders because it shows how a candidate connects with the general public; it is powerful because it’s visceral, sensual and sexy. None of the GOP candidates are sexy. Women, minorities, the young all gravitate to “cool,” witness the rise of Apple, the wooden descriptions given Microsoft, lackluster and stiff, like its creator, Bill Gates.

America is a house divided by style. This is to argue that America is self-divided by a confusion concerning a change in the balance of power perpetuated by the rise of the black politician that, for the most part, comes with a history that’s quite different from the history experienced by the dominant (white) class of privilege. And one definitive — and powerful — characteristic of this style, as Rhoden argues, is that it’s a consequence of great suffering.

In an America that is suffering profoundly, only a leader that has suffered, personally and with his people, can lead. It’s a matter of grace, something Hemingway would argue, but which the GOP fails to see.

The GOP nominee will be Mitt Romney, but he’ll fail because he lacks the grace — and dignity — to address deeply felt suffering with style that says, I understand. We can overcome by making it look easy.

Filed under Barry Blitt, Citizenship, cultural studies, Media, NBA, Obama Administration, philosophy, politics, Race and Ethnicity, Socio-Economic insecurity, The New Yorker Tagged with

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