Driving Home, page 49
Yet Obama, brought up by his white mother as a secular humanist, was a stranger to black religion until he went to Chicago in 1984, to take up a job as a trainee community organizer. His boss prepped him at his interview in New York: “If poor and working-class people want to build real power, they have to have some sort of institutional base. With the unions in the shape they’re in, the churches are the only game in town.” In Chicago, a black pastor extolled the church as “an example of segregation’s hidden blessings”:
… the way it forced the lawyer and the doctor to live and worship right next to the maid and the laborer. Like a great pumping heart, the church had circulated goods, information, values, and ideas back and forth and back again, between rich and poor, learned and unlearned, sinner and saved.
Always by necessity a chameleon, Obama picked up in Chicago the style and rhythms of the black charismatic preacher, just as he’d picked up vernacular Indonesian when he was a child in Jakarta. He can now instantly turn a basketball stadium, a high-school gym, or a university auditorium into the pumping heart of a black church, with uninitiated whites taking their cue from him (“Yes, we can,” he murmurs into the mike, to signal that a hallelujah would not be out of order) and from the blacks in the audience who’ve been doing this on Sundays all their lives. For the suburban white kids, it’s a novel transportation into an exuberant community of souls. No wonder the French class was a washout.
But his rallies, galling as they must be to the Clinton campaign, convey a misleading impression of his political skills. Better to eavesdrop on him, via unedited video on the Internet, at dinner with four constituents in a District of Columbia restaurant or answering questions from the editorial board of a local newspaper. What strikes one first is his gravity and intentness as a listener and observer: a negative capability so unusual in a politician that, when one watches these clips, it’s hard to remember that he’s running for office and not chairing a seminar in a department of public policy. When his turn comes to speak, he is at first hesitant, a man of many ums and ers, but as he articulates his answer you realize that he has wholly assimilated the question, inspected it from a distance and seen around its corners, as well as having taken on board both the character and the motive of his questioner. The campaign trail is the last place where one expects to see an original intellect at work in real time, pausing to think, rephrase, acknowledge an implicit contradiction, in such even tones and with such warmth and sombre humor.
He’s an old hand at this. Early in Dreams from My Father, the boy, aged seven or eight, is playing a boisterous game with his Indonesian stepfather in the backyard of their Jakarta house, when Obama suddenly takes leave of his own skin and jumps inside the mind of his mother, watching from behind the window. For the next five pages, we see their situation through her eyes, with all her building dissatisfaction and anxiety at her bold new life as an expatriate. It’s the first of many such narrative leaps, as Obama experiments with the novelistic privilege of inhabiting other people’s points of view and endowing them with an eloquence that they almost certainly could not have summoned for themselves. Giving voice to other people, which he does with grace in his writing, with a sensitive ear for their speech and thought patterns, was also his job as a community organizer in Chicago, and it’s hard to think of anyone for whom the ideas of literary and political power seem so naturally entwined.
In Dreams from My Father, there’s an often-repeated moment when Obama learns something important about the world, the adults around him, or his school and college contemporaries, but has to hug it to himself. Describing his dawning recognition of the subordinate roles handed out to blacks on television and in print, he explains why he couldn’t communicate the discovery to his mother: “I kept these observations to myself, deciding that either my mother didn’t see them or she was trying to protect me and that I shouldn’t expose her efforts as having failed.” It’s the story of many writers—the solitary child who learns to keep such knowledge secret, and finds in that concealment hidden power.
Even when Obama’s at his most public, firing up an audience at a rally, one notices a detachment, a distinct aloofness, as if part of him remains a skeptical and laconic watcher in the wings, keeping his own counsel, as he appears to have been doing since infancy. In more intimate and less artificial circumstances, his capacity for empathy and his innate reserve work in consort. He’s hungry for the details of other people’s lives. He conducts each meeting with his trademark ambassadorial good manners, sussing out his companions and playing his own hand cautiously close to his chest (as a state senator in Illinois, he was a leading member of a cross-party poker school). In the heat of a fierce election, he could be mistaken for a writer doing research for a book.
Hillary Clinton, armed with a relentlessly detailed, bullet-pointed position paper for every human eventuality, is a classic technocrat and rationalist; Obama is that exotic political animal, a left-of-center empiricist. The great strength of his writing is his determination to incorporate into the narrative what he calls “unwelcome details,” and you can see the same principle at work in the small print of his policy proposals. Abroad, he accepts the world as it is and, on that basis, is ready to parlay with Ahmadinejad, Assad, and Castro, while Clinton requires the world to conform to her preconditions before she’ll talk directly to such dangerous types. At home, Obama refuses to compel every American to sign up for his health care plan (as Clinton would), on the grounds that penalizing those who lack the wherewithal to do so will only compound their problems. Where Clinton promises to abolish the Bush education program known as No Child Left Behind, Obama wants “to make some adjustments” to it (like moving the standardized tests from late in the school year to the beginning, so that they are neutral measures of attainment and don’t dictate the syllabus like an impending guillotine).
Clinton’s world is one of absolutes, with no exceptions to the rules; Obama’s is far messier and less amenable to the blunt machinery of government. During the last televised debate in Cleveland, Ohio, he won a big round of applause when he said, “A fundamental difference between us is how change comes about,” meaning that for her it comes about by legislation from the top down, for him by inspiring and organizing a shift in popular consciousness from the bottom up.
Traditionally, such empiricism has been associated with the political right, and such rationalism with the left. In the UK, Michael Oakeshott liked to blame Rationalists (always spelled with a capital R) and their “politics of the book” for every benighted socialist scheme from the Beveridge Report and the 1944 Education Act to the revival of Gaelic as the official language of Ireland. And his description of the Rationalist as someone who “reduces the tangle and variety of experience to a set of principles which he will then attack or defend only upon rational grounds” rather nicely fits Clinton, with her dogmatic certainties and simplifications. Although their specific promises are so similar as to be often indistinguishable, Clinton always stresses the transformative power of government, while Obama’s speeches are littered with reminders that government has strict limits, as when, every time No Child Left Behind comes up, he segues into a riff on the importance of parenting. That’s why so many Republicans and independents have turned out to vote for him in the Democratic primaries: for a liberal, he speaks in a language that conservatives, to their surprise, instinctively recognize as their own: a language that comes partly straight from the living room and the street and partly from the twin traditions of empiricism and realism. Clinton has lately tried to take Obama down by snapping out the line, “Get real!”; it generally falls flat because to most people’s ears he sounds more real than she does by an easy mile. He’s transparently at home in the “irksome diversity” of American life, while she appears to be on a day pass from a D.C. think tank.
Henry James famously said that to be an American is a complex fate. Few living Americans have as fully embodied that complexity in their own lives as Obama has, and none has written about it with such intelligent regard for its difficulties and rewards. His differences with Clinton aren’t ones of merely rhetorical positioning and presentation; they’re rooted in the temper of his mind. My hope is that, on the road to Pennsylvania and his next big showdown with Clinton on April 22, he’ll articulate that temper more plainly than he’s done so far. He does it with small audiences. He does it brilliantly in his memoir. But many voters still know him by hearsay as a feel-good evangelist of hope and change—a false impression that Clinton does everything she can to foster and which may yet end his candidacy. Obama has been relying on speechwriters of late: this is one he has to write himself.
London Review of Books, March 2008
Going, Going, Gone
ONCE, WELL WITHIN my adult lifetime, the chief lure of the big city was the prospect of living in a community of strangers who were different from you in every respect—age, income, language, class, manners, skin color, and occupation. The city was the ultimate human charivari, a polyglot honeycomb of social possibility, where unlike collided with unlike on the streets. As Dr. Johnson said to Boswell, “A great city is, to be sure, the school for studying life.” But that idea is dying on us fast.
In Seattle, a massive civic reconstruction project is under way on a hundred and eighty acres of land immediately north of downtown. Paul Allen, the Microsoft cofounder, and his real-estate company, Vulcan, which owns around sixty of those acres, are the prime movers in the attempt to create a new inner-city neighborhood. The area, known as South Lake Union, is now an enormous building site: beneath the swinging booms of tower cranes, dozens of office buildings and condo blocks are climbing skyward while fleets of excavators dig pits in the ground for more still to come. Brand-new candy-colored streetcars, each with only three or four passengers aboard, ply the 1.3-mile line connecting the site to the downtown hub.
Until recently, this was a relatively low-rent quarter of the city, a place to visit for its junk shops, its odd, specialist services (the man who fixed the creased hood of my convertible, the man who restored and rephotographed a torn sepia snapshot and blew it up to full-plate size), its workmen’s bars and cafes, its down-at-heel arts organizations. Where else would the Seattle Gilbert & Sullivan Society make its home, or the amiable, gloomy emporium selling secondhand office furniture? South Lake Union was a place where new immigrants could get a start in business, alongside old Seattleites practicing useful if obscure crafts with meagre profit margins.
But it’s going, going, gone. I walk its streets now for the last chance to set eyes on that half-demolished Victorian brick warehouse, those century-old frame houses, their blue and green paint flaking from their shingles, the ornate art-deco car showroom, built in the age of the Packard and the Hupmobile. Soon, if all goes as planned, twenty thousand people will be working here and ten thousand will be living in the half-built apartments and condos, paying $400,000 for a studio. Existing biotech companies and institutions are the anchor, and Amazon recently signed up to move into eleven office buildings, bringing its Seattle workforce of six thousand people from its present headquarters in an old naval hospital. Already, new street-level businesses are opening every week to cater to this influx of population: gyms, coffee houses, boutiques, restaurants, sporting goods stores, a Whole Foods organic supermarket, all aimed at the affluent, well-educated twentysomethings in whom the quarter will shortly be awash.
There’s a lot to applaud here. Not only will South Lake Union dramatically broaden and deepen the city’s tax base (something dear to the hearts of mayors and their councils), it’ll also have admirable density, at the equivalent of thirty-eight thousand people to a square mile, and be eminently walkable, safe, and green in its construction methods and materials. Its one snag is that it promises to have all the exhilarating diversity of the Stepford wives.
For South Lake Union goes far beyond mere gentrification. As the Vulcan website says, it is “rethinking the urban” to claim a big chunk of the city for a narrow demographic defined by age, education, income, and marital status (singles and couples welcome, children a problem). The provision of a hundred units of “affordable housing” and an upscale retirement community won’t do much to dent the impression made by hordes of well-heeled twenty-seven-year-olds clad in Seattle’s working uniform of cargo pants, T-shirts, Converse hightops, and iPhones, all with college degrees, all eco-conscious Democrats.
Meanwhile, diversity has gone suburban. The best dim sum in the Seattle metro area are no longer to be found in Chinatown (known here as the International District) but in Kent, nearly twenty miles south, an unlovely congeries of new tract housing and office and industrial parks, which until the 1970s was a broad valley of market gardens that liked to bill itself as the lettuce capital of the world. To go to the Imperial Garden restaurant in the Great Wall Mall on a Sunday lunchtime is to enter the kind of many-hued, motley society that used to thrive in the inner city. Here are the ethnically blended families—Anglo-Chinese, Korean-Chinese, African-American-Chinese, Hispanic-Chinese. Here are Chinese grannies, so elaborately wrinkled that they could date back to the Qing dynasty, rocking squalling American babies on their laps. The melting pot survives, but ambitious planning and high rents are driving it from its traditional home in the city to the remote suburbs.
I imagine a woman in her twenties sitting in a studio apartment in South Lake Union, reading Our Mutual Friend on the screen of her Kindle and marveling at the extraordinary vitality of Dickens’s city compared with the strangely anemic character of her own. She has every amenity to hand, is within easy walking distance of restaurants, theatres, cinemas, the opera house, the symphony hall, the ballet, the downtown clubs with their rock bands, all the advertised pleasures of urban life except one—the essential element of human variety and surprise. The plum-colored, energy-saving electric streetcar whispers past beneath her window, which commands a view of the dense constellation of city lights around the shimmering black bombazine of the lake. To the mayor, to Paul Allen, to the architects and designers who have rethought the urban, here’s a picture-perfect life.
But what a price we’re paying for it. Suburbia—once the synonym for dullness and conformity—is growing ever more socially and economically diverse, while the central city grows more and more “suburban,” as we used to condescendingly say. It seems to me a bad bargain for everyone, from the woman in her twelfth-floor apartment to the immigrant stranded out in Kent. And it’s happening everywhere, this steady dilution and dispersement of life in the city, which threatens to undermine our best reasons for choosing to live in the city in the first place.
Monocle, August 2008
An Englishman in America
AS BARACK OBAMA never tires of saying, America is a country where “ordinary people can do extraordinary things.” In January 2006, Neil Entwistle, a seemingly ordinary twenty-seven-year-old Englishman with an honors degree from the University of York, who’d been living in the United States for barely four months, shot dead his American wife, Rachel, and their baby daughter, Lillian, with a long-barreled Colt .22 revolver borrowed from his father-in-law’s gun collection. By the time the bodies were discovered in their house in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, huddled together beneath a rumpled duvet in the brand-new four-poster bed bought by the couple just ten days before, Entwistle was home in England, living with his parents in Worksop, as if what had happened in America was a violent dream from which he’d woken to reality in his old back bedroom at 27 Coleridge Road.
For several days, it seemed that he was going to get away with it. The police then had no weapon and no motive. People who knew the Entwistles remembered them as a happy couple, with Neil as the beau ideal of the doting father. Their family website, rachelandneil.org, still eerily preserved at web.archive.org, is a Hallmark-card-style commercial for wedded bliss, decorated with sepia-toned bridal sprays and full of pictures of the Mediterranean cruise, the weekend trip to Martha’s Vineyard, and baby Lillian at every stage of her nine months of life. Its home page is addressed to “Dearest family and friends” and is signed: “Love, the happy family.”
Neil was described as “not a suspect,” then later as a “person of interest.” The case against him wasn’t helped by a careless mistake on the part of the police. On the night of Saturday, January 21, some hours after Entwistle’s plane had landed at Heathrow, Rachel’s mother called the Hopkinton police department to say that her daughter hadn’t turned up for a lunch date that day and wasn’t answering the phone. Officers made a “well-being check” of the house at 6 Cubs Path, upstairs and down, but found nothing amiss. The next morning, two of Rachel’s friends borrowed a key from a neighbor and made their own search, but it wasn’t until 5:30 p.m. on Sunday that the police, going through the place for a second time, smelled a “foul odour” and traced it to what lay beneath the duvet. After the news of the murders broke, American cable stations paraded a chorus of defense attorneys and legal experts who deplored the botched forensics of the crime scene, explained the demanding subtleties of extradition from the United Kingdom, and forecast that Neil Entwistle could well live out the rest of his days in Worksop.
Had he not driven back to his in-laws’ house in Carver, Massachusetts, and replaced the revolver, he might be in Worksop now. But tests on the Colt, done on February 8, identified it as the murder weapon and connected it with Entwistle. On February 9, three weeks after the killings, he was charged in the United States on two counts of first-degree murder and arrested by police from Scotland Yard at Royal Oak tube station in London. He waived his right of appeal against extradition and was flown back to Boston in the custody of the U.S. police.
