THE TRUE NATURE OF THINGS POLITICAL

“The whole experience makes me want to pull aside politicians and business leaders and maybe everyone else and offer some pious advice: Don’t try to be everyman. Don’t pretend you’re a member of every community you visit. Don’t try to be citizens of some artificial globalized community. Go deeper into your own tradition. Call more upon the geography of your past. Be distinct and credible. People will come.”



These wise words were the final paragraph of a column in the New York Times by David Brooks, one of my favorite columnists. He had written this column about attending Bruce Springsteen concerts in Spain with a group (or should it be groupie?) of friends. He noted 50,000 Spanish concertgoers of all ages screaming with Bruce, “Born in the USA”. He took this incident and built upon it as an example of “paracosms”, internal worlds of comfort and stability that we build in order to learn to deal with reality. These Spanish fans, in their minds, were one with Bruce Springsteen and “born in the USA”, a collective reality they built together. From there Brooks went on to explain how we “particularize” experiences drawn from our own background and how these experiences help us to deal with the world. He decries the globalized non-specific thinkers of today who don’t relate their experiences to life and live in fuzzy abstractions.


How this applies to our Presidential candidates. Don’t try to be an amorphous everyman and to fit everybody’s criteria; rather, take a position of showing who you are and what you are. Mitt Romney, who probably is a moderate centrist in his core, is trying to be all things to all conservatives in his party, playing up to the far right constituency. Obama is equally guilty of composing a synthetic personality comprised of diverse parts, being a friend to liberals and a safe centrist to the middle so that he can attract enough moderate independents and disaffected Republicans to pull off a repeat election. Trying to be all thing to all people is hypocritical and wrong.


Be yourselves, boys, and let it all hang out. I think it is possible people might come. Let’s see what would happen if they exposed their true natures.