Tobias Wolff: ‘The coolness of his style has led to a lack of praise for what he has achieved’
Tobias Wolff is best known for his memoir This Boy’s Life, which won the Los Angeles Times book award for biography. His 1984 novella, The Barracks Thief, won the Pen/Faulkner award for fiction. He was the director of creative writing at Stanford from 2000 to 2002 and received a National Medal of Arts from the president in 2015.
Our candidates for president campaign as if they’re running for king, and not just any king – no quaint, hospital-touring symbol of national unity, no mere figurehead answerable to a constitution and a popular assembly. Congress? What’s that? If elected, our American candidate will, like an absolute monarch, resolve the thorniest problems of state simply by exerting his (or her!) will. Is the domestic economy on fire, and about to spread to our neighbours? He will “fix” it, because he “knows how”. Students drowning in debt? He’ll make college free! Islamic jihadists taking over cities in Syria and Iraq? He’ll carpet bomb them until we find out “if sand [and innocent civilians] can glow”.
Do suspected terrorists know more than they’re telling? He’ll have them tortured till they sing like Pavarotti, and kill their families into the bargain, and the military will just have to suck it up and do what he says, even if they say they won’t, and have the law to back them up. Law? What’s that? She’ll ban assault weapons; he’ll make sure you can take them to church.
The promise of immediate and radical change is a campaign fiction presented with such bald-faced effrontery that we hardly question it any more, unless it’s coming from the other side. Indeed, the performance can’t be sustained unless we support it with our credulity, like a tentful of rubes gaping at the tricks of a carnival magician, even offering ourselves up as subjects.
The wishful thinking that is the source of this credulity is, of course, a prelude to disappointment if our candidate actually gets elected. Take the case of candidate Barack Obama. He was going to get us out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and close Guantánamo. He would save our failing economy, mend our broken healthcare system, and enact sensible gun control legislation. He would overhaul our immigration system, address climate change with meaningful policies, and change the bilious tone of our political discourse. We weren’t a nation of red states and blue states, he reminded us: we were the United States. Despite my years, I believed – believed not only that he meant what he said, but that he could get it done.
My wife and I gathered several friends on a November night in 2008, and watched with joy and disbelief as this young, literary, ironical man with a Kenyan father was elected to the presidency. Some of us had tears in our eyes. I was one. But as time went on those tears began to burn. He wasn’t getting it done, or so it seemed to me. Guantánamo was still in business. The planet kept heating up, and the wars dragged on, though increasingly waged by special forces. As before, just about anybody was free to walk into a gun store and come out armed, and each year some 30,000 Americans continued to pay for that freedom with their lives.
And the tone of political life had become even more toxic than before the election. During President Obama’s first State of the Union address, a congressman from South Carolina shouted: “You lie!” and became a Republican hero, even as the leaders of that party dedicated themselves to obstructing President Obama’s legislative initiatives and judicial appointments, effectively disabling the government in order, as the senate majority leader shamelessly admitted, to make Obama a one-term president. The birthers continued to question his legitimacy, and, further, to imply that he was a secret Muslim and supporter of Isis. He was Hitler. He was Lenin.
None of this of this was Obama’s fault. Indeed, he reacted to the unrelenting stream of slander and congressional malfeasance with unflappable calm and an air of faintly amused detachment. And for that I did blame him. The coolness I had admired during his campaign became an irritant. In fact, it drove me sort of crazy. Why didn’t he fight back? Show some rage at what was truly outrageous, the obstruction, the name-calling, the attacks on Michelle Obama for encouraging schools to serve healthy food, even for occasionally wearing dresses that showed her arms? Call these liars and bullies out, damn it! Politics is mud wrestling, did he not understand that? And if he really didn’t feel anger, then why not take some acting lessons, and fake it?
Well, I was wrong. As Barack Obama prepares to leave office, I think about what he managed to do in the face of implacable resistance. No, he didn’t close Guantánamo; the Republican congress wouldn’t let him, nor would they let him bring sanity to our gun laws, or to our immigration policies. But as most economists agree, his financial initiatives, narrowly approved, did save us from a profound recession, possibly even a depression. His successful auto industry bailout, fiercely contested at the time, saved countless jobs at virtually no expense to the taxpayer. If Obama couldn’t entirely extricate us from the wars he inherited, he has refrained from entangling us in new wars, despite being constantly urged to do so by congressmen and senators who otherwise refuse to spend tax dollars – on, say, education, or roads, or environmental safeguards.
Finally, 20 million Americans who did not have health insurance when Barack Obama took office have it now; and in spite of dire Republican predictions, and umpteen votes for repeal, it has actually lowered the healthcare cost inflation rate. No one in this country, however poor, or sick, need be without insurance. This achievement eluded Theodore Roosevelt and Bill Clinton, among others.
So why has Obama not been celebrated for what he’s done? Why did so many of us so often feel a sense of impatience, even disappointment? I believe it comes down to immaturity – in us, not him. At least part of the reason for our failure to recognise and praise what he’s accomplished has to do with his style – that coolness. He doesn’t brag, or gloat. He doesn’t call attention to himself, or proclaim his deeds in the thoroughfares, or ridicule those who oppose him. But we wanted him to. We wanted heat. We wanted anger, slashing rhetoric, mockery. We wanted him to call liars liars, idiots idiots. We wanted him to bully the bullies. We wanted him to wage war, and crow over his fallen enemies. And because we did not get the melodrama we demanded, we lost the plot.
But now we have a candidate who will give us all the sound and fury we could ask for, or imagine. Let’s see how we like it. Me, I’m already nostalgic for Obama.
Akhil Sharma ‘Now I am much less tolerant of white stupidity’
Akhil Sharma is the author of the 2015 Folio prize-winning novel Family Life as well as An Obedient Father, for which he won the 2001 Hemingway Foundation/PEN award. Born in India, he moved to the US as a child and he is currently an assistant professor of creative writing at Rutgers University-Newark. His short story Cosmopolitan was turned into a 2003 film of the same name.
At the Times Square subway stop there is an electronics good store with TVs in the windows. For perhaps the first two years of the Obama presidency, one of the TVs was constantly showing Obama swearing the oath of office. Always there was a small knot of black people standing before the window, looking at the TV tenderly.
I am Indian and I have experienced some racism in America but I did not experience Obama’s inauguration or presidency as some great promise coming true.
When I saw the knot of black people watching the inauguration, what I felt was embarrassment. I understood the tenderness on the faces as hope. That things would change. To me, it seemed obvious that things would not change. That racism and fear of others getting ahead is so deeply rooted in the white American psyche that there was bound to be a backlash. To me, the tenderness seemed like people believing a lie they desperately wanted to believe.
In eight years a person can change quite a bit and, to me now, that tenderness I saw is not hope but joy. There can be joy in the moment and one can be joyful without believing that things will necessarily get much better. To me now, those black people standing before the window were smarter than I was in that they chose to enjoy their happiness.
One other way that I have experienced the Obama presidency is that I have begun to be intolerant of certain types of stupidity from white people. My role is no longer to help them become comfortable with racial issues or to help them see another point of view. My response to white stupidity now is to tell people to grow up. I have an acquaintance who was Obama’s boss when Obama had just gotten out of college. My acquaintance, a white man, was deeply irritated that Obama had become president and that he himself had not. I can certainly claim to my share of irrationality but when I heard this, it seemed to me a new level of bizarreness. Before the Obama presidency, if I had heard something so stupid I would have just laughed. Now I asked the man if he would have thought this if Obama had been white?
Attica Locke: ‘His healthcare reforms were humongous’
Attica Locke was born in Texas. Her first novel, Black Water Rising, was nominated for a 2010 Edgar award, an NAACP Image award, and a Los Angeles Times book prize. Her second, The Cutting Season, was a national bestseller and winner of the Ernest Gaines award for literature. She is an academy member for the Folio prize UK, as well as being on the board of directors for the Library Foundation of Los Angeles.
When Obama was elected, what I felt was bigger than joy – though I’m not sure I have a word for what it was. I remember watching the results on TV and saying over and over: “Is this actually happening? Is this real?” I just couldn’t take it in. I was stunned in my soul.
A few months later, I went to stay on a plantation in southern Louisiana, doing research for my second book. I was sleeping in a little cabin right by the field where slaves used to cut sugar cane. One night a storm was coming and you could hear the leaves rustling against each other, and it sounded to me like voices. I remember talking to whatever spirits were out there and telling them: “Your labour was not in vain. Everything you lived for was not in vain.” And I felt a deep sense of hope – hope beyond what was written on an election poster.
Has that hope been fulfilled? Not exactly. Don’t get me wrong, there was never a part of me that thought we were going to get a post-racial society. I’m not interested in living in a post-racial society. But I had a hope that we were about to move past the worst of our racial history. Right now, America is at a crossroads. The Obama presidency can move us forward, or we can backslide into racial intolerance and violence for good. One of the effects of Obama being elected is that there is a level of racism in America that can no longer be ignored. If a man like Barack Obama, so well-educated, so graceful, so intelligent, so charming, can be so reviled and denigrated on a daily basis in some parts of the country and in Congress (to the point that he can hardly do his job), you can no longer as a normal American ignore the profound problem of race in this country.
There are a lot of well-meaning white folks who for years could not see the breadth of racism in America, so I feel that one of the gifts of Obama’s presidency – a perverse gift – is the fact it allowed a sickness to bubble up to the surface, like a boil on the skin. You can’t treat what you can’t see. And now that we see it, maybe there’s a chance to treat this racial sickness for good.
As for my feelings about Obama, the man himself, I think he’s done a lot of positive things. He got dumped with an economy in freefall in 2009 but he’s managed to turn it around. And his healthcare reforms were humongous, as big to me as stuff that Lyndon Johnson did back in the 60s, like creating Medicare. Of course he’s done things that I do not agree with. I have a problem with the failure to close Guantánamo, I have a problem with drone strikes around the world. But you’re never going to like everything that any president does. What I’m not going to do is hold Obama to a higher standard, where he has to be a magical negro who is perfect. He’s allowed to make missteps.
I think we’re just beginning to see what this man and his wife together are going to do for the country. He’s done what he can within the office of the presidency, but now I think he could be like Jimmy Carter, who has done some incredible work since leaving office. We’re just seeing the beginning of Obama’s power as a human being. As told to Killian Fox
Hari Kunzru: ‘His rhetorical skill soothed the terror induced by his blackness’
British novelist Hari Kunzru left London for New York eight years ago. He was the recipient of the Betty Trask prize (2002) and the Somerset Maugham award (2003) for his debut novel, The Impressionist. His 2011 novel, Gods Without Men, led to the coining of the genre “translit”: novels that “cross history and geography without being historical nor changing psychic place” (New York Times).
The clearest legacy of the Obama presidency is symbolic. It’s hard for non-Americans (and, indeed, non-whites) to understand the psychic blow dealt to the nativist right by the ascent of a black man to the White House. That part of the Republican base that abandoned the Democrats after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, and which has been so irresponsibly indulged by the party of Lincoln, took the news like medieval villagers witnessing an eclipse. We’ve now spent eight years watching Republican congressmen scurrying hither and thither brandishing pitchforks, outraged at the latest whiff of terrorist fist-bumpery.
The obstructionist opposition to Obama came tricked out in 18th-century Founders’ drag, bewigged and buckle-shoed. Ostensibly they were angry that the framers of the constitution were being traduced by a stoner Kenyan community organiser, yet beneath the surface, their grievances often turned out to be rooted in the erosion of the racial deference that has been expected in this country since the days when Jefferson and Washington toured their slave quarters .
The presence of a black first family in the White House, the nation’s lifestyle fishbowl, is just as symbolically powerful as the sight of a black husband and father shouldering the responsibilities of the presidency. In their immaculate media presentation, the Obamas have communicated themselves to the readers of the kind of magazines found in supermarket checkouts as a family whose dignity and essential decency are well sheathed in the necessary American armour of glamour. Whoever wins the presidency in November, the first spouse will command a fraction of the respect that Michelle Obama enjoys. The sight of the two Obama daughters, young black women growing up with unlimited aspirations in a loving home, begs a response from a country where the number one cause of death for black women aged 15-34 is homicide by a current or former partner.
Many of the young people driving the Black Lives Matter movement came of age during the Obama presidency, their political consciousness formed by the 2008 election. For them, Obama turned out to be more hope than change, and his failure to speak in a full-throated way in their support has felt like a betrayal, but once the thick rind of symbolism has been peeled, the president has always been a cautious centrist Democrat with an instinct for consensus, not a man likely to align himself with the politics of black power.
In policy terms, the Obama legacy is mixed. The passing of the Affordable Care Act has curbed some of the more egregious iniquities of the dysfunctional US healthcare system, but hundreds of thousands of Americans still go bankrupt every year because of medical bills. Eight years after the financial crisis, the president has succeeded in keeping the wheels on American capitalism, but once the dust settled, it became clear that the crash accelerated the transfer of wealth from the middle class to the very rich, an injustice he has done nothing to address.
Middle Eastern policy has been rudderless. There were, to be honest, no good options available after the squalid disaster of the Bush wars, but Obama’s vacillation about engagement helped produce the chaos in Libya and the vacuum in Syria so ruthlessly exploited by Isis and the Russians. He allowed “red lines” to be crossed without sanction. The drone war, considered in many parts of the world as the administration’s signal moral disaster, has carried on with little serious domestic opposition. The failure to close Guantánamo is, in the scheme of things, the least of these failures. Only time will tell whether the vaunted Iran deal produces a harvest of peace and stability.
And yet Obama will be missed. Sometimes, out of his extensive rhetorical tool kit, the president pulls a weird folksy tone, a subliminal suggestion of Merle Haggard, designed, no doubt, to soothe the terror induced by his blackness. Desperate as it is to go on a psychic vacation in the magical kingdom of the “post-racial”, America will discover that it was lucky to have had a figure capable of such virtuosic code-switching, a man who demonstrated that it was possible to communicate across the lines.
Jayne Anne Phillips: ‘Just by being who he is he has made an enormous impact’
Guggenheim fellow Jayne Anne Phillips won the 1980 Sue Kaufman prize for first fiction when she was only 26, for her debut book of stories, Black Tickets. Twenty-one years later, her novel MotherKind won the Massachusetts Book award. She is the holder of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships.
Obama has been a transformational president, and this may not become entirely clear until he leaves office. People forget that when he assumed the presidency in 2009, he was handed a financial disaster in the making and his response to it really saved the country, and possibly the world, from financial collapse. But he’s done so much more. In the two years in which he had a Democratic Congress, he passed the Affordable Care Act and oversaw a $36bn dollar expansion in Pell Grants, which very much affects students at Rutgers University-Newark, where I direct the MFA programme.
Obama has been a stealth president. He’s had to be: six years of his presidency have been completely obstructed by the Republicans. But he’s managed to change energy policy, improve medical care and academic standards, he changed “don’t ask, don’t tell” in the military and influenced awareness of LGBTQ issues both legally and in popular culture. He went to Cuba, he went to Hiroshima. He has worked hard to fight climate change. Solar energy production has increased 30-fold since he became president. Jobs in the solar industry have grown exponentially, and he’s leading the effort to phase out damaging hydrofluorocarbons used in air conditioning. His presidency has accomplished so much of which citizens are not aware. He has embraced executive actions, unwilling to accept the stasis Congress embodies.
Then there’s the whole leadership case. He can’t end racism and sexism in America, but just by being who he is, he’s made an enormous impact. I think he is truly a visionary who is uniquely qualified to serve. He’s a biracial African American man who grew up in a white household. He came from a background of law and community organising. He’s an absolutely wonderful orator: funny, elegant and humane.
I suppose it’s clear that I’m a big Obama fan and that this election year has been a psychedelic nightmare. It’s like going from the sublime to – if Trump is actually elected – the ridiculously dangerous. It’s a very strange time in this country and we can only hope that Trump will continue to implode. Hillary Clinton is exceptionally qualified and I think she’d be a good president; American sexism plays a huge part in her supposed “unlikability”. She might not be as inspiring as Obama, she’s not cool or chic, but she is such a policy wonk, so prepared and careful. And constant. Her priorities – children, families, justice – are the same after 30 years. Yet she is suspected because she has breached the establishment. I’m just praying she’ll win. If Trump wins, there’ll be a lot of people in America trying to marry Canadians.
Obama has been a inspiring and provocative leader. The fact that this is more or less the consensus around the world really matters, because it means he’s not vulnerable to the sniping and griping, to the ridiculous “go low, no, go lower” tone that Trump has set in this election. I don’t think anything will change the fact that Obama’s presidency marks an honourable few years in American history. He is Trump’s polar opposite. What a country this is, to nurture and succour two such opposite cultural/political beings. The best and the worst have moved further and further apart; we are a completely divided nation. Those paradise moments – the very surprising 2008 Obama election, the crowds, the alliances, the decency, charm and intelligence of it all – exist alongside all that we now endure. It’s a world that only a 24-hour news cycle could love. What will Trump do or say next? Like everything Trump touches, it’s all about him. But I digress.
Desperation and chaos are distracting. How dark will it get? Regardless, Obama is not going away. The America that elected him twice is not going away either. Like Elvis, that America has left the building. Hopefully it will reappear on election day.
