Obama, Don’t Mess with My Kitsch

stewart

It’s a Wonderful Life

I have been continuously bewildered by the state of political discourse in this country over the past two years. The vituperation that normally reasonable conservative intellectuals have unleashed against President Obama has struck me as, at times, unhinged.

In his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Czech author Milan Kundera has provided me with a way of understanding their reaction. These commentators may feel that their kitsch is under attack. I’ll explain how in a moment.

First, however, I turn to blogger Andrew Sullivan, who describes the situation as I see it. Sullivan is a self-described conservative that now sees Obama closer to the conservative ideal than the American far right, which he believes has hijacked the Republican party. He wrote the following post yesterday for The Daily Dish:

It seems to me that the last year or so in America’s political culture has represented the triumph of untruth. And the untruth was propagated by a deliberate, simple and systemic campaign to kill Obama’s presidency in its crib. Emergency measures in a near-unprecedented economic collapse – the bank bailout, the auto-bailout, the stimulus – were described by the right as ideological moves of choice, when they were, in fact, pragmatic moves of necessity. The increasingly effective isolation of Iran’s regime – and destruction of its legitimacy from within – was portrayed as a function of Obama’s weakness, rather than his strength. The health insurance reform – almost identical to Romney’s, to the right of the Clintons in 1993, costed to reduce the deficit, without a public option, and with millions more customers for the insurance and drug companies – was turned into a socialist government take-over.

Every one of these moves could be criticized in many ways. What cannot be done honestly, in my view, is to create a narrative from all of them to describe Obama as an anti-American hyper-leftist, spending the US into oblivion. But since this seems to be the only shred of thinking left on the right (exacerbated by the justified flight of the educated classes from a party that is now openly contemptuous of learning), it became a familiar refrain – pummeled into our heads day and night by talk radio and Fox. If you think I’m exaggerating, try the following thought experiment.

If a black Republican president had come in, helped turn around the banking and auto industries (at a small profit!), insured millions through the private sector while cutting Medicare, overseen a sharp decline in illegal immigration, ramped up the war in Afghanistan, reinstituted pay-as-you go in the Congress, set up a debt commission to offer hard choices for future debt reduction, and seen private sector job growth outstrip the public sector’s in a slow but dogged recovery, somehow I don’t think that Republican would be regarded as a socialist.

How does kitsch enter into this? Kundera talks about kitsch as being those sentimental images that we cling to with almost passionate ferocity. Kitsch is problematic because it involves idealized images with all blemishes removed. It is therefore one-dimensional.

The idealized image that enthralls the American right is of an America that looks like New Bedford in It’s a Wonderful Life: homogeneous, small-town, hard-working, all white or mostly white. This image was evoked by Ronald Reagan, which is why he has achieved virtual sainthood amongst Republicans.The right sees this as “real America,” to use Sarah Palin’s phrase.

Little about Barack Obama fits this image, and the attacks against him go beyond policy differences. He is a cancer that must be excised.

Interestingly enough, when Kundera defines kitsch, he is at first thinking of his native Czechoslovakia during the communist years. Kitsch shows up in the annual May Day celebration:

The women all wore red, white, and blue blouses, and the public, looking on from balconies and windows, could make out various five-pointed starts, hearts, and letters when the marchers went into formation. Small brass bands accompanied the individual groups, keeping everyone in step. As a group approached the reviewing stand, even the most blasé faces would beam with dazzling smiles, as if trying to prove they were properly joyful or, to be more precise, in proper agreement. Nor were they merely expressing political agreement with Communism; no, theirs was an agreement with being as such. The May Day ceremony drew its inspiration from the deep well of the categorical agreement with being. The unwritten, unsung motto of the parade was not “Long live Communism!” but “Long live life!” The power and cunning of Communist politics lay in the fact that it appropriated this slogan. For it was this idiotic tautology (“Long live life!”) which attracted people indifferent to the theses of Communism to the Communist parade.

Communist kitsch is not the only kind of kitsch. Kundera also identifies kitsch that is “Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Commmunist, Fascist, democratic, feminist, European, American, national, international.” Here’s a description of U. S. kitsch as experienced by Sabina, his artist character:

Ten years later (by which time she was living in America), a friend of some friends, an American senator, took Sabina for a drive in his gigantic car, his four children bouncing up and down in the back. The senator stopped the car in front of a stadium with an artificial skating rink, and the children jumped out and started running along the large expanse of grass surrounding it. Sitting behind the wheel and gazing dreamily after the four little bounding figures, he said to Sabina, “Just look at them.” And describing a circle with his arm, a circle that was meant to take in stadium, grass, and children, he added, “Now, that’s what I call happiness.”

Behind his words there was more than joy at seeing children run and grass grow; there was a deep understanding of the plight of a refugee from a Communist country where, the senator was convinced, no grass grew or children ran.

At that moment an image of the Senator standing on a reviewing stand in a Prague square flashed through Sabina’s mind. The smile on his face was the smile Communist statesmen beamed from the height of their reviewing stands to the identically smiling citizens in the parade below.

Kundera goes on to say that kitsch operates on the emotions, not on the intellect, which would help explain the irrational attacks we are seeing against the president, including from rightwing intellectuals:

How did the senator know that children meant happiness? Could he see into their souls? What if, the moment they were out of sight, three of them jumped the fourth and began beating him up?

The senator had only one argument in his favor: his feeling. When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme.

The feeling induced by kitsch must be a kind the multitudes can share. Kitsch may not, therefore, depend on an unusual situation; it must derive from the basic images people have engraved in their memoires: the ungrateful daughter, the neglected father, children running on the grass, the motherland betrayed, first love.

Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass!

The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!

It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch . . .

And no one knows this better than politicians. Whenever a camera is in the offing, they immediately run to the nearest child, lift it in the air, kiss it on the cheek. Kitsch is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements.

Those of us who live in a society where various political tendencies exist side by side and competing influences cancel or limit one another can manage more or less to escape the kitsch inquisition: the individual can preserve his individuality; the artist can create unusual works. But whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch.

When I say “totalitarian,” what I mean is that everything that infringes on kitsch must be banished for life: every display of individualism (because a deviation from the collective is a spit in the eye of the smiling brotherhood); every doubt (because anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself); all irony (because in the realm of kitsch everything must be taken quite seriously); and the mother who abandons her family or the man who prefers men to women, thereby calling into question the holy decree “Be fruitful and multiply.”

In this light, we can regard the gulag as a septic tank used by totalitarian kitsch to dispose of its refuse.

Maybe Ronald Reagan was “the great communicator” because of his unparalleled ability to convincingly communicate kitsch.Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were also fairly effective communicators of kitsch.George Bush and Barack Obama, not so good.

Interestingly, there have been liberal commentators who, from what I can tell, want Obama to become better at conveying left wing kitsch. See, for instance, the article by the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof entitled “Mr. Obama, It’s Time for Some Poetry.” But with all due respect to Mr. Kristof, who I find an admirable man, I warn that poetry and politics seldom mix very well.  Poetry with a specific political agenda can veer very rapidly into kitsch.

Kundera, incidentally, complicates the concept of kitsch. Although Sabina sees herself at war with kitsch, she is not immune to its allure. For instance, in America she makes friends with an older couple who allow her to live in a dream she has always carried around with her:

Her kitsch was her image of home, all peace, quiet, and harmony, and ruled by a loving mother and wise father. It was an image that took shape within her after the death of her parents. The less her life resembled that sweetest of dreams, the more sensitive she was to its magic, and more than once she shed tears when the ungrateful daughter in a sentimental film embraced the neglected father as the windows of the happy family’s house shone out into the dying day.

I have my own idealized images. One is of Christmas and the image of my family around the tree. Another is a vision of a multicultural America, all of us metaphorically holding hands. When that image seemed to come true, when Barack Obama was delivering his victory address on election night in Grant Park, I sobbed aloud.

Here’s how Sabina responds to her own vulnerability to kitsch. Although she loves her relationship with the old couple (they sing mawkish songs together), she also recognizes it for what it is:

Though touched by the song, Sabina did not take her feeling seriously. She knew only too well that the song was a beautiful lie. As soon as kitsch is recognized for the lie it is, it moves into the context of non-kitsch, thus losing its authoritarian power and becoming as touching as any other human weakness. For none among us is superman enough to escape kitsch completely. No matter how we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.

In other words, Kundera is not telling us to reject kitsch. Only to recognize it for what it is.

This strikes me as necessary in a multicultural society where different groups will have different kitsch. Kitsch only becomes dangerous if its adherents lash out against nonbelievers.

Luckily, in America people are not being imprisoned for having differing idealized images of America. The differences, however, are leading to very unpleasant political conversations and a failure to collectively address our challenges. When kitsch collides, it seems to generate perpetual temper tantrums.

Sabina’s art, incidentally, consists of paintings where we see surfaces that at first appear one-dimensional but then reveal worlds beyond the surface. Likewise Kundera’s art seems to come at us as simple parables, only to become more and more complex. This is how these artists go to war with kitsch.

I don’t think that the angry political rhetoric we have been seeing will die down any time soon, by the way. If you think the left felt betrayed when Obama left the world of kitsch and got involved in serious governing, wait until you see the Republican leadership dealing with the Tea Partiers. Will John Boehner and Mitch McConnell acknowledge that there is more to America than a simplistic image and govern accordingly (which means, among other thing, compromising and engaging in give and take)? Or will they pretend that the kitsch is real and spend the next two years simply throwing brickbats at anyone who claims otherwise?

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