As a labor lawyer, Bernie Mamet was constantly aware of workers’ conditions and exploitation. He put in long hours at his law office at 327 S. LaSalle in downtown Chicago, working continuously to secure his situation, always feeling under pressure. The strong, upwardly mobile aspirations of the parents also meant demands on the children to succeed, Bernie Mamet never let them forget how the disadvantaged had to struggle and rely only on themselves to succeed. Nadel, pp. 14-15.
Finally, there is the question of being an outsider -- but one with honest feelings -- and cynicism and sentimentality. Here is what Nadel says:
The Chicago style mixes a survivor’s cynicism and a streak of sentimentality without obliterating honest feelings. A writer in Chicago is not in the center of a national literary culture but is on its margins “not by absorbing the national tradition but by pretending to know nothing of it.” Mamet, as he repeatedly states, feels like an outsider, the result of being a Jew, a writer, and a Chicago author: “But the question,” he emphasizes, “is not how to get into the country club. The question is ‘what’s going on here?” Nadel, p. 25.
I would suppose it needless to say, at least to those who read these posts with any regularity, or even now and again, that this writer is an outsider, partly stemming from being a Jew, with strong feelings honestly held, who is both cynical towards, but one fears unhappily accurate about, what goes on in this country, and is not untouched by sentimentality. Holmes said about his generation of Civil War veterans that they had had a piece of great good fortune: When they were young, their hearts had been touched by fire. Indeed. Indeed. It is just so for others too, though for different reasons.
* * * * *
All of this, believe it or not, brings me to Barack and Michelle Obama.
I have described above what happened to Jews of the Michigan law class of 1963. This had been par for the course for decades before 1963. As well, for decades Jews couldn’t move into lots of residential areas, book into lots of hotels, join lots of country clubs, gain admission to lots of colleges, or make a career in engineering, in banking, or in big business. Then, after 1963, this country fought horrendous, useless wars, has killed people literally by the millions, has rewarded crooks with billions of dollars, has let the middle class go downhill (as they lose jobs too), rarely punishes, and even more rarely punishes severely, the white collar and political criminals who do these things, although these horrors are unlikely ever to end until people like Lay, Ebbers, Kozlowski, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, etc., etc. go to the slammer or, in the case of the criminal warmongers and torture mongers, go to the gallows. No, not everything is bad. For yes, there has been some material progress -- we have the internet, better TV sets, better cars, cell phones, and iPods, although we probably eat far less healthily. Yes, many African Americans have a better chance in life than before, viz. the Obamas themselves. Women too have a better chance. Nonetheless, as a general matter, this country has an exceptional amount to be ashamed of, an exceptional amount.
But when Michelle Obama -- who, as an African American, has even more to be angry about than even the Jews of my generation -- uttered this truth by saying that her husband’s candidacy and its reception were the first time she had ever been proud of America, she caught hell in the media and elsewhere. Giving her hell in the media, among the pols, in the right wing talk show/TV machine is another triumph of the effing Yahoos who are everywhere in this country.
Michelle Obama is a native Chicagoan. In the Chicago style remarked by Mamet’s biographer, she spoke in a way that “does not tolerate evasion,” in a way that is “on the level,” so the audience would “hear things straight.” And for that, for telling the truth straight, she caught her lunch.
Well, to put it in the traditional Chicago style, f*ck that.
This is not and for decades has never been a country that, to repeat Nadel, wants “honest expression of the text,” that “does not tolerate evasion,” that “want(s) things to be on the level, to hear things straight.” Those traits are Chicagoisms. They are not Americanisms. Americanisms are the lie, the bull sh*t, the expression of falsehoods that sound good. Michelle Obama’s problem is that she told it straight, told it as she feels about it, as she feels about it with much justification. America’s problem is that it does not want to discuss whether there is truth in what someone says, but instead wants to hear only bullshit that makes people thoughtlessly think well of what we do. Well, I say good for Michelle Obama.
To be sure, it is perhaps unseemly for Obama to say her own husband’s candidacy and its reception is the first time she’s been proud of America. That is surely inconsistent with the modesty taught in the Chicago of my youth, a trait which apparently reflected, at least in part, the Swedish influence in the Midwest. (And a trait which, like all Washingtonian political, media and legal types, Bob Woodward, originally from the Chicago area, has managed to extensively overcome, shall we say, if he ever had it to begin with.) But even if it were unseemly for her to say it in the context where she did say it, Mrs. Obama had vast truth as justification, and by rights people ought to debate the truth of her remark, instead of crucifying it for merely being said.
I gather, moreover, that lots of African Americans hold feelings similar to hers, which they express privately among themselves. And so do a lot of whites have similar feelings, although we almost never express them, even among ourselves, because we live too much in the all pervasive white yahoo world or its offshoots.
As for her husband’s views on her view, one cannot really know for sure at this point. I gather he has made much of his career as a “bringer together” of people, perhaps even as far back as Harvard Law Review days, if memory serves. (I believe I first heard about him at that time of his life, when he was written up in some publication or other because his achievement of being a black President of the Harvard Law Review was so rare, unique in fact.) He is still presenting himself as a bringer together.
What is more, I have to say that, unlike the derision with which I regard most political speeches, even all other political speeches, I think his recent speech on race was tremendous. It was the best political speech of my adult lifetime. True, it was way too long. True, though on the one hand he defended Reverend Wright -- many, though not all, of whose views are, like Michelle Obama’s one gathers, widely shared in the black community and among lots of us whites -- on the other hand he threw Wright under the bus overmuch, threw him under the bus many more times than he had to in what I took to be pandering to widely prevalent yahooism, pandering to people whose votes he wants and who are determined to loathe Wright.
Wright’s style of speech and presentation by the way, for which the Yahoos hate him, certainly seems to be what one is reading about when one reads of the early days of new white Protestant religions in America, although his style and presentation is foreign to today’s white churches. Moreover, it is a style which, one reads, is common to the particular denomination, especially in South Side Chicago, and has much in common with Sherwood Anderson’s remark that ‘“crudity is an inevitable quality in the production of a really significant present day American literature’” (emphasis added), i.e., in the production of real truth. These are still more reasons why Obama was far too excessive in the number of times he threw Wright under the bus.
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