Wicked

Well, I am just back from my college reunion--I'm not a nostalgist, but you can still buy a beer for seventy-five cents--which happened to coincide with the 175th anniversary of the founding of the college. It has in its time transitioned from an austere, abolitionist, Prohibitory Methodism to lefty agitation to its current incarnation as a sort of slums of the Ivy League, the latter having had its genesis when I was a student there lo these not-so-many years ago. Already in my freshman year the joke was that we were a repository for kids too fucked-up to get into Brown. (Apocryphally, a kid at Bennington once told me that they had the same joke about us. I believe it.) The transformation continued apace after I left, and I am informed that the school's former motto, which was actually several variations on the theme "One Person Can Change the World," and which in retrospect had the advantage of being merely ridiculous, has now been changed to the more market-tested "Fearless," which belongs in an athletic shoe commercial. As recently as six or so years ago, a gaggle of soi-disant Socialist student agitators were able to heckle former Clintonista, former Yalie punching bag Larry Summers out of Finney Chappel when he came for a convocation address, and were subsequently denounced (I'm sure to their delight) for a lack of "civility" and for violating the big dummy's right to speak, the sort of on-its-head First Amendment argument made by folks who imagine themselves as guardians of the "discourse" against the perversions of the left and the excesses of the right.

Now the predominant political ideology is Obamamania, and the commencement speaker was Fareed Zakaria, for chrissake. Dommage. Like Professor Smith, I find myself at a loss when it comes to this fervor. I'm not one to privilege substance over style; it is impossible to be substantive without style, and impossible to be stylish without substance; but Obama seems to me, as Robert Lowell said of Il Duce, to be "one of us / only, pure prose." I understand the attraction to Boomers craving an MLK-JFK-RFK moment once more before they pass into sensence and death, but I entered this campaign season with a firm conviction that whatever else could be said about my lazy-ass (and I mean that as a compliment) generation, it was surely immune to flowered oratory, given the industrialization of irony, video games, hook ups, ritalin, Monica Lewinsky, the Real World, Kurt Cobain's suicide, Columbine, etc., but it turns out that all this organic food and a catastrophic decline in the amount of Bovine Growth Hormone contained in our daily victuals has engendered a resurgence of the very vapid sincerity that characterized so much of the vaunted sixties generation. Obamites are, after all, nothing if not catastrophically sincere. "Think one person can change the world?" No? Yes.

It was probably inevitable that this would happen. It has, finally, been decades since Kennedy got popped, and everyone hungers for more Ask-Not-ery, one of the periodic reminders that the subjects are, well, subject. Obama suggests Higher Purpose, as did that handsome New England poon-hound, and if he blunders into near-nuclear war or invades an island nation or embroils us ever-more-deeply in the greater Middle East, well, he sherr do talk purty bout puttin men on the moon. But everyone knows that the moon landing was filmed on a soundstage in Burbank. You can see a man hang himself from a tree if you look at the background carefully, and the key is to start playing "Speak to Me" when the MGM lion roars exactly, or it won't match up. Thing is: if Obama supporters did find themselves in Oz with the option of a heel-clicking return home, they'd elect to keep the slippers--to hell with Black-and-White Kansas.