EPISODE 201: Bye, BO

Season Two! Welcome back. 2017...it's happening, y'all. (Oh God. It's actually happening.)

Is Barack Obama pop culture? Hmm. He’s definitely got some spiritual going on, and for my money quite a bit of wow. Also, it’s inauguration day. How can I not comment?

Especially when eight years ago today I sat on the steps of the Capitol and watched as Barack Hussein Obama became the 44th president of the United States.

Wait, it wasn’t the steps, was it? I feel like that’s where Senators and Supreme Court justices and Beyonce sit. It must have been just beyond the steps. Near Michelle and the girls.

Okay, no, I was absolutely not near Michelle and the girls. I was a little farther back. But through the insane generosity of a friend, I was far closer than you’d expect, relatively speaking. I had an actual seat, I got a special commemorative badge. It was ridiculous.

Yep, those are my feet sitting on the desk in the Oval Office.
Don't Google the image. It's definitely me.

As much as I was excited to be there at this incredible moment in history, as much as I spent the night of Obama’s election wandering wide-eyed through a mobbed and screaming Times Square, cheering as cabs coasted through honking, the immigrant drivers waving and smiling those giddy smiles we all felt, like we’d been given a last minute reprieve after Katrina and Iraq and the investment banks and Dick Cheney had showed up like a for real bad ass Legion of Doom and threatened to wipe us all out...

All of us in Times Square were penned in, our eyes turned up watching for...

This.

As much as all that, still, sitting there under a tree I think stage right of the Capitol in my long winter coat and thick gloves – when we clapped instead of applause you just heard a collective “thump thump thump”-- I was surprised to find that I wasn’t all that into the pomp and circumstance (though I do wonder whether the term “pomp and circumstance” wasn’t a product of that event, because ooh, child, was there pomp and circumstance). For me, all of the events leading up to the inauguration, all the wonderful moments wandering around Washington in the days before relishing the unexpected sense of gratitude, wonder and community, so much more like a family reunion than something political were actually far more rich and meaningful than 99% of the actual ceremony, including, of all things that I couldn’t possibly have imagined, Obama’s inaugural speech. The moment was so historic I expected him to gather us all like a prophet on a mountaintop and tell us a story about who we are and where we need to go, something new and eloquent and challenging. Instead we heard pretty much the same thing he’d been saying all along, how as much as we vote one way or another, think one way or another we are one people who have come through a hard time and emerged on the other side now, and we can help make America the place we were taught in school, a land where people are equal and every child can have a good life and our dreams and beliefs are not foolish things to have.

Just eight years later and despite his abiding presence as leader of our country, the U.S. -- burned dry as the Sahara by the years of campaigning and deriding -- would grasp at even just one complete sentence of more than 140 characters, one phrase of such resonance or meaning or hope. But back then Barack had said it all so many times already, it didn’t resonate so much. (And/or, I was greedy.)

Also it struck me in that moment that he was somehow more muted than he had been on the campaign trail. It was like there was air in the gas line, or he was pumping the brakes somehow. Years later he told journalists that he had consciously pulled back on his eloquence after getting elected, for fear that he’d be branded all talk, no action. It was a mistake (one in the face of social crises like Newtown and Trayvon Martin he would correct); though he would go on to create a lot of important policy, his most important role, I think, was as Inspirer-in Chief, calling us to our best selves and also calling his office to the same. Second terms have proven such a disaster for U.S. presidents. Barack Obama is the only president in my 47 years of life that has made it through a second term without a major, nation’s-faith-shaking scandal.

Some of that disconnection I felt on inauguration has remained with me the last eight years. Trying to get policy through Congress is not like reminding us of what this country can be, at least not in our current take-no-prisoners when-we’re-not-in- power-our-goal-is-not-to-serve-the-people-but-to-undermine-those-in-power attitude of our politicians. (We had a congresswoman shot, an epidemic of mass shootings that continues, including the murder of twenty children in Sandy Hook, and yet no change on federal gun regulations. How is that even possible?) At some point the constant shock of this boss-level cynicism can’t help but numb you and make you turn away, see what’s new on Twitter or HBO. (Strange but true: in the midst of one of our most optimistic administrations we’ve had produced some of our darkest television shows ever: “Game of Thrones”, “The Walking Dead”, the series finale of “How I Met Your Mother”, “Breaking Bad”.)

Still, as we sit here at the very end of that presidency, I find myself finally returning to that persistent Obama refrain of community and generosity and possibility. Of Yes We Can. And rediscovering all the great photos of him, too. Like this one:

Or this:

(If you go back, pretty much every photo of Obama with the Pope makes it look like they spent the day telling each other jokes.)

Or this:

You know, I had no idea how many pictures there are of Barack with kids. There are TONS.

This, of him and his bodyguard Reggie Love substitute coaching one of the girl's teams, might be my favorite. Imagine he's looking at us, cheering us on -- wasn't that what his presidency was all about?

But as much as Obama might have been our Inspirer-in-Chief, you know, he was also kind of America’s Dad, cool but also kind of goofy and awkward with his big ears and his silly dad grin and his smarts and his idealism. (And the fact that, like many dads, he seemed to somehow remain also a big kid.)

Michelle’s third child, a handful.

All of it has been helping me remember that even if the Republicans are successful in wiping out a good percentage of what Obama fought so hard to accomplish, what he reminded us of, who we are and what we’re about, remains. And only we can silence that, by forgetting or ignoring it.

On New Year’s Day I decided to block Trump on Twitter. I hadn't been following him anyway, but so much of my feed seemed to be filled with angry people retweeting his often-acerbic comments. And I have to say, that small choice has been an enormous source of relief. Trump can do his thing, I’m sure I’ll read about some of it in the press, but I don’t have to subject myself to the nonstop toxicity without choosing it.

Barack and Michelle are still out there, their words and actions reminding us to stay grounded. Remember who you are. Go high.

And they're not alone. Pope Francis puts out the same sort of positive, life-affirming message every day. And no matter how hard the new president may try to make himself the constant center of our attention, in the end we get to decide if that’s going to be the case.

++

In light of our surprising election (coming soon, my new children’s book, “Our Surprising Election!", featuring something bleeped or blurred out on every page—fun!), it seemed appropriate to return to my friend Chris Kent, who I’ve interviewed in these pages before about his work as a futurist. I must admit, I went into our conversation pretty concerned about the state of things; I was surprised at how talking to Chris actually left me with some hope.

For those who remember that first interview, the first question will be familiar and at the same time much less funny now.

Chris, let me get right to it: Are we all going to die? Is it going to happen soon? Is it going to be the robots?
CK: This is a great follow up question. Yes we’re all going to die, but it’s not going to be the robots, it’s going to be Donald Trump’s Twitter account. (Just kidding.)

Actually [still kidding] I don’t think in the last eight weeks things have fundamentally shifted in a way that my previous answer is invalid. I don’t think the election of Trump is going to accelerate the robot apocalypse. In fact he’s made some statements in the last six weeks about how about how computers have made everything worse and all the problems of today are because of computers. From an economic perspective, from a social freedom perspective, from a geopolitical perspective, that is one hundred percent false. I’m not saying we should give one hundred percent of our money to Silicon Valley and Peter Thiel, that way lies madness as well, but....

It’d be interesting to compare today’s discussion about are we all going to die coming from left-leaning people to the reactions that people on the right were having when Obama was elected. I bet you there was a lot of apocalyptic feeling stirred up eight years ago with the election of a black man as president, particularly among the really hardcore evangelical right, that would match some of the questions today on the left about whether Trump is going to kill us all.

If there’s any been any takeaway from the election, other than maybe we should consider the virtues of a life spent in a place where they say “aboot”, it seems to be that most of us have not been paying attention to the right trends or indicators. So I’m wondering what trends you think people should be looking at in the years to come? Do we all need to be reading about Appalachia and Rust Belt white people? Is that, as some in the media has been posing it, the real problem?
I think that no matter what area you live in or what the immediate proximate cause [of Trump’s election] is, you’re always better off paying attention to as many sources or viewpoints as you can. The more viewpoints you have, the better informed you are.

But I also think it’s interesting in this discussion about how we need to do a better job of getting out of our filter bubbles that all of that has been directed toward progressives or left-leaning people. Nobody has been saying to Trump supporters and people on the right, You need to stop listening to Rush Limbaugh and Hannity and listen to Noam Chomsky -- which everyone would like them to do because then maybe they’d be more open to the ideas of progressives on the left.

The downside of just targeting the left is that you start to reinforce that those [right wing] ideas are better ideas. But if you’re a progressive thinker or a centrist thinker, they’re not. If you think of all the ideas that give rise to Trump, they’re not things I’d like to see the country built on – regressive social policy, the end of things like health care for everybody, the marginalization of groups that had finally in the last eight years started to come out from the margins and feel like they were fully-fledged members of our multicultural society. Lots of those ideas seem to be a return to white Anglo-Saxon hegemony over the country, which, you know, we’ve spent the last forty or fifty years moving away from.

But would you say there are trends that people missed?
I don’t know that there are any specific trends. This is a question I still don’t have a good answer to. I think in some ways this election was a perfect storm of things. We had someone like Hillary Clinton, who was so well known to people, whether rightly or wrongly depending on how you feel about her, that was eminently qualified but also eminently beatable, and you had someone like Donald Trump, who was obviously eminently unqualified but had a celebrity and a mystique that he was able to ride in such a way that his celebrity was able to overcome his under-qualifications while her qualifications were unable to overcome her reputation.

There are some pretty hard reasons why Hillary didn’t win. And I think the one thing that people really talk about as one of the keys to her loss is that she herself ignored parts of America. It’s not that the country didn’t pay attention, it’s that she didn’t. What was it, the last four months of the campaign, she never set forth in Michigan, Wisconsin or Ohio?

I heard an interview with Debbie Dingell, John Dingell’s wife who is herself now a Congresswoman in Michigan. She said she’d been expressing concern to the campaign that Michigan is being ignored, and they said that their model numbers said they were okay, but she’d been talking to people in the union halls and the churches who were expressing frustration that they were being ignored by the Clinton campaign. She finally ran the message up the ranks, and the result was that Hillary showed up one time in Michigan.

I was reading last week a piece by danah boyd, a futurist and media theorist and researcher for Harvard. She was saying in regards to the rise of fake news that a lot of this models what minority communities have talked about for years, which is experts on poverty or economics or race relations tend to talk about the data and the numbers and they have and ignore the lived experience of the people. They’ll say look at how poverty is down amongst African Americans, wages are rising, more African Americans are rising out of the lower class. And yes, all of the numbers do point to that, but still the lived experience of that community is not that. People get very frustrated about number crunchers and eggheads coming in and saying I don’t know why you are so upset, under Democrats things have improved. They say Yes, but I’m still l living in my crappy ass apartment.

I think a lot of that has taken place in this election on a broader scale. Yes the economy is getting better, you can point to wages, the stock market, etc., but people’s lived experience does not reflect that. And it starts to call into question why am I even listening to these people in the first place. They’re telling me things are better but they’re not better.

So in terms of things we should be paying attention to going forward...
To make a really gross analogy here, a lot of the soul searching that seems to be going on right now post-election reminds me of the soul searching that went on after 9/11, how could this have happened, we should have seen this coming. And then you start to get the stories of the FBI in Minnesota having seen something odd and written to Washington but it got lost. It’s very easy to go back and say “Look at what they did, how come we didn’t catch this?” It’s only after the fact that we can go back and say things were completely obvious.

One of the things we do for our clients is help them to figure out what are the plausible scenarios, plausible outcomes, plausible futures going forward, and what are the signs [of each], so that you’re at least aware of them, when you start to see certain signs pop up, you can say oh wow, this is scenario 1a, let’s pay a little more attention to those signals. Trying to puzzle out plausible futures beyond the one you hope for or anticipate and what may lead to them is another way to keep yourself from being flat-footed and unawares when something like this happens. There is no obvious singular future, there is a range of futures, and our job is to help people understand what those futures would mean for them and why those futures are in the range of futures for them.

Let me put my question one other way: Does this surprising turn of events change anything in the way you do your job as a futurist?
No. It’s too soon – a good futurist, our minimal window looking out is something like five years. Not enough has happened yet to help us identify any new trends, new ideas that are going to impact the way we are looking at the future. Do we realize there’s been a change? Yes. But there’s not been enough time yet to understand what this means. As much as we think this election has been a tremendously monumental event that’s causing upheaval, it really hasn’t, it’s the election of a president. The way Donald Trump has done it and some of his behavior, things he’s ignored are new, but are some of the things he’s ignoring really legitimate things or just the way things have always been done , and may not hold any more?

It’s also too early to tell because who knows what he stands for. He stands for Donald Trump. He stands for being famous and being liked. The one thing that Donald Trump believes in is Donald Trump always being right, always being correct. That’s why he’s so quick to attack people who he feels are blurring or obscuring his message of Donald Trump is always right and he’s never wrong. You get the New York Times or Chicago Tribune printing a critical story and his immediate reaction is to attack them for being bad, failing losers, because Donald Trump is always right and so nothing a loser can say really matters.

My point in saying this is, he’s made nominations for a lot of people qualified or unqualified to run departments. But it’ll be interesting to see when things start to happen, whether he sticks by these people or he disavows them. Because he’s a classic person who takes credit for any victory and ignores anything that is not seen as a victory. So let’s say Betsy DeVos starts to be a complete and total disaster as education secretary and proposes something that is not going to fly and is seen by everyone as a mistake, Trump is going to completely ignore it and pretend like it never happened, probably pretend like he didn’t nominate her in the first place.

Before he got elected, I used to make the joke that between twelve and eighteen months after the election Trump was going to give an interview in which he denied ever having run for president. Because that’s how he does things. So it’s hard to say what he’s going to do, what his policies are going to be, because if polices are raised that get a lot of bad media coverage, he’s just going to pretend like these things never happened. Because ultimately he wants to be seen as a winner.

You know, a lot of this conversation has been more hopeful than I would have expected.
It gets back to the old saying about separating the signal from the noise. There’s a tremendous amount of noise right and it’s the noise that’s getting all the attention. You have to get back past the noise and listen for the signal.

I don’t want to come out and say the next four years are going to be totally okay. But in regard to your points about is there some sort of systematic failure that prevented us from seeing the rise of Trump or is there something deeply flawed within our society that is the cause of the rise of Trump, I don’t think it’s that serious a thing. I don’t think his election is a reflection of that serious a wound in American society or American culture.

That’s just not to say it’s not going to be bad for people, any kind of people, but I don’t think that there’s a cancer in the American society that gave rise to this that people haven’t paid attention to. ++

Under links I’m going to post some great work that’s been written about Obama lately. But if you’re looking for a little boost this morning, I highly suggest watching this. It’s the song that John Williams composed for Obama's first inauguration. For as much as that occasion was so joyful, Williams begins his piece with an incredibly lonely, plaintive melody that never quite goes away. For me it captures a really important part of America, the sense of a journey not completed but fragile, stark and just beginning.

Or, if you haven’t watched it already, listen to Dave Chappelle talk about the last big party at the White House. It begins at 8:50 in this clip, and it’s very moving.

Or watch this 106-year-old black woman meet Barack and Michelle.

Or enjoy a couple more of my favorite photos.

Barack Obama, Your College Poly Sci Teacher

How We Do It

++ LINKS ++

“My President was Black” : Ta-Nehisi Coates gives a good long look at Obama’s legacy.

“Embracing Executive Power” : Part One of a six part series from The New York Times series on Obama’s presidency.

“The Optimism of Barack Obama”, from the Sunday NY Times.

Photos of Obama collected by L.A. Magazine; of Sasha and Malia’s first visit to the White House; of Obama and the girls playing on a snow day; of Barack and Michelle (some GREAT shots there).

For those jonesing for a pop culture deep cut, what would you say if I told you all of the Pixar films are going on in the same universe?

Or – and hat tip to Chris Kent for this – the deepest best Rogue One cut possible.

(Speaking of which, if you made it way through my War & Peace treatise on the film, thank you. I know, it was a lot. Having said that, I've now finished the novelization, “The Art of Rogue One” and may actually send along an addendum sometime. But then I'll let it go, I promise.)

What's the next four years going to be like? No idea. Probably at least in part a real mess.

But my newsletter Yoda Warren Ellis had some words that resonate:

Will the new year be better? he asked. “It will be memorable. It will have beauty in it, and new things, and it will sing and light up skies. There will be joy.

Will it be better? No. But I trust that it will be worth sticking around for, and that it will not be boring. That’s enough for me.”

Keep your head up. Let's hold hands when we need to. Nobody walks alone.

Until we Meet Again.