Michael Chabon on Obama: Game On

Michael Chabon once taught here in the academic groves of Irvine Valley College. This was before the books and the short stories, the essays, the film adaptation with the original theme song penned and sung by Bob Dylan and then, of course, the Pulitzer Prize. Back then Chabon was just one of the many grad students who drove across town from the university to teach part-time. He was one of us for awhile.

Some faculty still remember his mop top of hair and every now and then an archival file is discovered and oohed and ahhed over. (See image to the right, a shrink-wrapped collection of readings dated fall 1988.) On rare occasions, desk copies still arrive addressed to Professor Michael Chabon.

Michael has an essay in the October 9th issue of the New York Review of Books: "Obama and the Conquest of Denver." Chabon accompanied his wife, the writer Ayelet Waldman, a pledged Obama delegate, to the convention. He writes about it. It's something.


excerpt:

It was not that, arriving for the DNC, I now felt less faith or confidence in Barack Obama than I did back in February. Obama turned out to be the kind of man he said he was in his books, dogged and perspicacious, considerate, principled but pragmatic, driven, and oddly blessed with a kind of universal point of human connection, of the understanding of loss, in the place where the memory of his father ought to be. No one who could see history the way Obama saw history, or who read the man’s books, would have expected him to emerge from a nasty, bitter, all but eternal presidential election campaign with his dignity or his principles entirely intact; but Obama had tried, and for the most part, I thought, he had conducted himself with honor. There could have been only one way for the idealized Obama—the perfect candidate he never claimed to be—to escape the rough and tumble of history, and that was too terrible to contemplate.

The problem was not Obama; the problem was that at the instant when Hillary Clinton at last conceded, the nature of the campaign changed. It was, I considered (perhaps under the influence of the kind smile and exhortatory squeeze on the arm bestowed on me by Jimmy Carter, president of my darkest adolescence, as he passed me in the doorway of a LoDo Mexican restaurant), like the change that might occur between the first and second volumes of some spectacular science fiction fantasy epic. At the end of the first volume, after bitter struggle, Obama had claimed the presumptive nomination. We Fremen had done the impossible, against Sardaukar and imperial shock troops alike. We had brought water to Arrakis. Now the gathered tribes of the Democratic Party—hacks, Teamsters, hat ladies, New Mexicans, residents of those states most nearly resembling Canada, Jews of South Florida, dreadlocks, crewcuts, elderlies and goths, a cowboy or two, sons and daughters of interned Japanese-Americans—had assembled on the plains of Denver to attempt to vanquish old Saruman McCain.

Suddenly it was hard not to feel that we were, once again, teetering on the point of something momentous, but something different than the previous momentousness. It was time to get serious. It was time to put on a little Curtis Mayfield (whose “Move On Up” has been one of the campaign’s unofficial theme songs) and take stock of our forces, our resolve, and the odds against us. It was time to take the fight directly to the Padishah Emperor himself. Game on was the nerdy expression I kept hearing people use.

To read the rest, click here.