Two Faces of America: Stranger or Traveler

Our two poster boys – Barack and Mitt.  Two faces of our nation.

Obama: Multicultural, metrosexual, urban, Hawaii, California and Asia.  Basketball.  Community organizer.  Single mom.  Two daughters.  Comfortable with gay culture.   Paid off his student loans only eight years ago.  Progressive Christian.  Does pretty good Al Green cover.

Romney: White, owns homes in three states, overseas experience as Morman missionary to the French, recent advice tour to countries about Olympics, Jewish culture.  Horse dressage.  Polygamous great-grandparents.  Five sons.  Homophobic.  Never had student loans. Mormon bishop.  Sings “Oh Beautiful for Spacious Skies” off key at campaign events.

Both: Private high school, Harvard grad school, family guys, a little restrained, faith important to them, both much richer than average American.  Both are northerners; almost all our presidents and candidates in recent memory have been southerners.

In my convalescence from total hip replacement surgery I am reading American novels.  Two great ones: Run, by Ann Patchett, and Old School by Tobias Woolf.  Simply put, the Obama novel and the Romney novel. 

Run is about an contemporary interracial family in Boston, “family” very broadly defined, thrown together in disaster, messy and loving and forgiving.  Old School is about 60’s New England boys’ private prep school, honor and plagiarism, privilege and tradition. (Also very funny and moving appearances by Robert Frost and Ayn Rand.)

Run and Obama embrace difference, and look to the future.

Old School and Romney control power, and cling to the past.

Both novels are primarily male.  Just like the whole presidential and legislative cast of characters in the novel known as America.  Where are the women?  Actually both novels have one fascinating woman character.  In Old School it’s a brief encounter with a no nonsense young woman who totally rejects tradition.  In Run it’s the surprising appearance of an unknown sibling, a young girl that reminded me of Gabby Douglas, the US gymnast phenom, nicknamed the Flying Squirrel.  This girl “runs” into the all male family and transforms them.  In both books the women, mercifully free from being stereotypical novelistic mothers or love interests, represent a new way, the future.

So my two thoughts about Obama and Romney, inspired by my random convalescence reading.  The cast of characters in a person’s life, and the plot line.

Obama is surrounded by strong women; his single mother, live-in mother-in-law, wife and daughters.  He is not threatened by how they “run” in very unorthodox ways into the future.  He knows in this country we need to learn to live “with,” to be in unusual families, to care for one another.

Romney had a strong businessman/politician father, a big-boy male business career, five sons, very patriarchal religion.  He’s about maintaining control, tradition, secrets, getting his way.  Because I said so.

And second thought, the plot of their lives.  William Faulkner said that all novels have one of only two possible plot lines: a person sets out on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. 

Both of my novels and both candidates embody being strangers.

Run is about the stranger girl coming to town, to the family.  Old School is about a stranger also, narrated by a scholarship kid from the Northwest who pretends to be rich old school and at the same time loathes that culture.  He is so strange he gets kicked out, and in a sense is then freed of that old tradition. 

(I went to a similarly restrictive all-girls New England boarding school a decade later than Old School, just when that whole system was crumbling.  Within a year of my graduation the school was coed, no longer church affiliated, open to the future.  The times, they are a changin’.  But 40 years later, the strongest indicator of wealth and success in the US is still parents’ wealth and education – that 1%.  Both Obama and Romney had that educational hand up, their children also.  It’s been a long time since we had a president like Andrew Jackson, frontier man without much education.)

So it seems to me that both Obama and Romney are strangers come to town; neither seems like “the average” American, whatever that is.  Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter intentionally cast their stories as men on a journey.  Maybe this analogy only applies to Democrats – I can’t for the life of me figure out the plot of Reagan or the Bushes; they are neither strangers, nor travelers. Maybe I can’t get over my sense that not just Reagan, but the Bushes always seemed to be acting, playing a role. Clinton’s big asset was how warm he was; everyone said he could “feel your pain.”  Obama gets raked by the liberal press for being aloof, mostly, I think, in comparison to slobbery Bill.

I prefer a smart aloof stranger surrounded by strong women any day over Mitt Macho Mystery Man.  Maybe American voters are also readers and thinkers – we can only hope…..

Copyright © 2012 Deborah Streeter