There was a code
Sorry but this is just silly. Obama doing the book promo:
“I think about the classic male hero in American culture when you and I were growing up,” Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of the Atlantic. “The John Waynes, the Gary Coopers, the Jimmy Stewarts, the Clint Eastwoods, for that matter. There was a code … the code of masculinity that I grew up with that harkens back to the 30s and 40s and before that.
“There’s a notion that a man is true to his word, that he takes responsibility, that he doesn’t complain, that he isn’t a bully – in fact, he defends the vulnerable against bullies. And so even if you are someone who is annoyed by wokeness and political correctness and wants men to be men again and is tired about everyone complaining about the patriarchy, I thought that the model wouldn’t be Richie Rich – the complaining, lying, doesn’t-take-responsibility-for-anything type of figure,” Obama added.
Those are all actors. In fact they’re all the specific type of actors known as movie stars. They didn’t always play the strong silent cowboy role, much less the defender of the vulnerable against bullies. I get what he’s driving at, I think, but I wish we could manage to think about such things without needing to point to movie stars.
Still.
Richie Rich, the comic book character, is a decent and intelligent kid who is absurdly rich. He has nothing in common with Trump except that last… um, he has nothing at all in common with Trump.
I don’t think it’s silly; I think it’s shrewd. He’s using favorite conservative manly-man tropes to criticize someone who was basically elected because he was seen as a manly-man. The image of the Hollywood Hero is something that sticks in the brain. This then might be quotable enough to make it out of the interview and into the purview of people who wouldn’t listen to that interview.
He’s wrong about “Richie Rich” the cartoon character, but it certainly sounds like a Trumpian taunt. They like taunts.
I suspect the reason he has to use movie characters is that there really aren’t many examples of this sort of man in real life. Real men, like the rest of us, lead messy, complicated lives that don’t fit into the heroic manly man stereotype, but many of them want it to, and like to pretend they do. Without real examples, he reaches toward the characters from whom we develop our perceptions of male/female and manly man.
I have witnessed in my playwriting group that many people do not recognize women written as women live as being “believable”. They must be the way women are portrayed on movies or TV, even though nearly no one knows very many (if any) women like that. Women written by women playwrights are seen as unbelievable and not like “women really are”, because we often write women based on women. Men who write women get “how do you write women so well?” when all their women fit movie and TV stereotypes; most of them probably don’t know any women like that, but just assume the women they know are somehow “weird” or “different”.
So it’s the same thing with men…we get our images from John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, etc.
I think it’s also interesting that all of his examples are white men.
A few months ago, Tom Nichols had a piece in The Atlantic that’s basically a longer version of this (though less reliant on movie characters) — that Trump is an odd fit for followers who claim to respect traditional notions of masculinity.
Yes, about the absence of such men in real life. I think that’s what I was thinking when I started the post but then I dropped the train of thought. The men named are movie stars and the parts they played are movie parts, few of which had much to do with real life or real people.
Seeing as how Trump’s fans haven’t noticed that he’s not a Gary Cooper-type by now I don’t think they’ll notice it via Obama’s comparison. They’re determined never to notice it.
About that Tom Nichols piece –
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2020/marcus-aurelius-he-isnt/
Claire wrote a fine post on it, too –
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2020/guest-post-he-articulates-their-misplaced-rage/
Also, with the exception of Eastwood, those are movie stars from the ’40s and ’50s, and their image, as Obama describes it, represents an ideal from those years. People who grew up watching Sly Stallone or Star Wars movies or more recent superhero movies probably don’t relate. These days being brash and loud and cracking wise and shooting first is the ideal.
Given that all I know of the US is looking in from outside, I don’t think Obama had much choice. Fictional heros are the only ones the Right would ever accept.
America has produced may real life heroes such as MLK, The Catonsville Nine, Edward Snowden, et al, who lived the code of the vulnerable against bullies. Of course, these are real life, not fantasy, and progressive, not regressive, so Obama had to ignore their real life contribution to have any chance of being heard.
Actually even as a young guy, the only one of those guys listed that ranked as a ‘hero’ to me was Jimmy Stewart. He had a decades long marriage, Insisted on enlisting when he was already considered too old, flew combat missions over Germany (and like a lot of actual veterans, never promoted it) and continued to serve in the Airforce reserves. He came home to a difficult time finding work initially because those that stayed home had all the roles. It was only another vet (Capra) who got him jump started again.
John Wayne? bah
Seriously. I’ve always had a soft spot for Jimmy Stewart because I knew people who’d known him a bit – he went to Princeton and I grew up there so I had classmates with connections to the university. I gathered he was much liked. (Weird fact: Bob Mueller went to the boys’ version of my school. Later the two schools combined so now I get alumni news about Bob Mueller.)
Some other real life heroes:
John Lewis
Eugene Debs
Frederick Douglass (doing well these days we hear)
Cesar Chavez
Pete Seeger
Eugene Debs. I wrote a research paper on him in one of my Political Science classes. He’s fascinating. Then when I took a class on the Presidency, I had to inform the instructor that yes, you could run for president as a convicted felon. I asked him to remember Eugene Debs. He said “Who?” He was only an adjunct, but still…
Art imitates life, even in Shakepeare we see people of good moral character, and are invited to make our own judgements. Go back further to Greek philosophers and their ethical inquiries, etc. I agree with the gist of what President Obama is saying. I have had the good fortune of knowing people of good character throughout my life. They were the actual charcters that guys like James Stewart played. There are people like this around, though you wouldn’t know it because they don’t get caught up in the ugliness of social media. I could complain about this “younger generation”, but that’s what my parents did, and their parents before them. It’s not necessarily a “code” per se, but there are a lot clues to knowing what a good person is if you give half a shit and pay attention. Trump and his ilk have none of these qualities. American society seems to be decadent beyond tolerability, and while the good people still outnumber the bad ones, the bad ones have a louder voice than they ever have, and they are fast to congregate to spread their nastiness or find like minded others to share their miserableness. The media in general reports only the bad things or the most salacious, and some people sit and watch this enough to start thinking the world has gone to hell in a handcart. Chicken Little would be proud. The good guys (and gals) are still out there, and Obama is one of them. Idealistic and willing to fight for what’s right. The sky is not actually falling, but we should not tolerate people who are destructive, abusive, and contemptuous. They suck.
iknklast – oy. That’s pathetic.
I guess maybe the school thought so, too. He wasn’t teaching there long.
Good.
I’m not so sure it’s silly. Referring to an actor like John Wayne, who was prolific and known for portraying particular sorts of characters, is immediately evocative of that sort of character. It’s a convenient shorthand for pointing to an archetype that is as universal as any in Western (pun not intended, but it works, so nyah) culture. Sure, John Wayne was an actor, and he was not his character’s, but Obama’s not really pointing to the actor. He is gesturing toward the ideal represented by Wayne’s iconic character type. He’s pointing to myth.
Mythic and quasi-mythic figures are useful in describing ideals succinctly and with resonance. We don’t even have to explicitly list the important traits of such characters the way Obama does. Often, we’re hard-pressed to do so without sounding trite. Nevertheless, even someone who cannot verbalize it knows what it means to be like Shane, or Atticus Finch, or Jean-Luc Picard, or Luke Skywalker, or Kwai Chang Caine, or Captain America. As we are reminded in “Darmok”, myth can be a language unto itself, and using that language to communicate across boundaries when other languages fail is simple wisdom.
I did say I think I get what he’s driving at. There’s also the fact that it was an interview, not an essay. I still think naming actors, especially without “the kinds of men played by” first, is a tad silly. You can’t count on people to think “Shane” or “Atticus Finch” or “Jean-Luc Picard” or “Luke Skywalker” when someone says “the John Waynes, the Gary Coopers, the Jimmy Stewarts, the Clint Eastwoods” – especially since none of those actors played any of those parts. Clint Eastwood may suggest Dirty Harry; John Wayne may suggest his history as a rat during the HUAC hearings; Jimmy Stewart could evoke an invisible giant rabbit.