Oedipus and Ordinariness: A Meditation on Barack Obama

seriousbarack

"Negroes are suddenly shocked to discover that Obama is nothing more than a mulatto version of Ronald Reagan. Tea baggers are too stupid to see that Obama is only a colored version of the Reagan philosophy that they claim to admire."—Anonymous

by Rudolph Lewis

I suppose we, the nation, will get a clearer sense of Mr. Obama between now and November 2012. Much more so than what we thought we knew and understood before November 2008. Or at least what we refused to acknowledge, that is, excessive racial pride can blind one to the truth of things. The Greeks warned us so long ago that hubris was a fault. They passed down to us kindly through the ages the character Oedipus as a poetic reminder. Here I do not propose to be Mr. Obama's analyst. I possess no talent and training for what is Oedipal and what is not Oedipal.

This I can say. Many of us expected wrongly that Mr. Obama would change the context in which we in our efforts strive to make a more perfect union. That was hope beyond reason, possibly. But maybe that was Oedipus' failing also. That is, to hope beyond reason. To state the matter in the context of folk knowledge, to hope beyond one's own fate is folly, and depending on one's place in society, can bring blight and poverty upon a nation. Some small-minded Freudians think that the Oedipus fault was sleeping with his mother and killing out of anger his father. Maybe those thinking parameters are there in Obama's psyche. But his situation is much more normal, I believe, than those fanciful acts of matriarchal desire and patriarchal revenge.

If truth be told, what Obama tried to escape was not the murder of his father and incest with his mother. The urge of the young Mr. Obama who finally ended up in law school was his middle-class attempt to escape ordinariness. He wanted to become special when his fate was to be an imitator of flawed but successful ordinary men accidentally raised to high places. Many of us mistakenly thought him a genius, a godlike creature, a view which he encouraged by making himself over in the religious consciousness of Negroes, namely, to proclaim himself a Joshua, to the well-agreed upon characterization of Martin King as Moses, the Deliverer. But in African-American history the folks allow the existence of the arrival into the world countless approximations of the biblical prophet Moses.

Those kinds of individuals appear as well in African history. For instance, there was the successor to the Albanian Muhammad Ali, namely, Muhammad Ahmad, a Sudanese who was to fulfill his fate by way of a religious teacher, maybe in ways not too unlike a Jeremiah Wright. And Ahmad, though a rather ordinary fellow himself, remade himself imaginatively into the Mahdi and by historical chance became the father of modern Sudan, or Sudanese nationalism, by laying the foundation by which the colonized tribes finally expelled their Anglo-Egyptian oppressors.

Ahmad lived a rather short life and probably hoped like all such leaders in a monarchial climate that he would be able to establish a family dynasty. Of course, religion is never really established on or in or as a rock and after his death from some disease or poison all that he left by inspiration was remade into something else that did little to advance Sudan toward righteousness or a more perfect nation. Arabism has never really solidified or fully substantiated its love for its black acolytes. That has been the case also with the supercilious Puritans and their successors, the blackness of African skin always reminded them of the blackness of their hearts.

Maybe a similar messenger can be found in African American history, namely in the mulatto Nathaniel Turner, the prophet of Southampton. Turner was one of those ordinary persons who was saved from the fate of ordinariness by self-criticism, sexual piety, and self-sacrifice. Mr. Obama, I suspect now, never possessed Turner's correcting traits. "Ole Nat Turner," born old like Obama, was probably, though a murderer from necessity because of his religious beliefs (a modern-day Jesus), was much closer to being a disciple and saint than our present-day Joshua could ever approach. Why? Turner grew gradually and with much introspection to the view that he could only become truly a man by changing the context in which he lived.

But to change the context in which one lives, rather than changing one's self, is to be a revolutionary. That aspect of American character never really dawned on Mr. Obama to the point he found it an attractive career to pursue. Mr. Obama was born to be ordinary, not to change the context of his life, but to learn how to live within the context in which he was born, the context he deemed truly American. That is, Mr. Obama discovered that to be exceptional within limits, within the context of the given, is no small matter to be snubbed.

The Tea Party and their sympathizers, once called the white moral majority or Dixiecrats, are hounds barking at a knot on a tree limb thinking they have treed a coon. Rather than his parents, more likely, Mr. Obama was made the ordinary American by the influence of his white American grandparents. He thus chose the most typical and ordinary of American careers, namely the salesman, with an exceptional talent at orating, one who could make the ordinary glow as if it were a vision, not quite with the flamboyance of Burt Lancaster's Elmer Gantry.

Yet Mr. Obama concluded after organizing within Chicago's black Protestant communities that fanciful acts of orating could, if dressed in clothes and terms of middle-class respectability, as it had for others, bring wealth, power and even more powerful allies. In these career choice meanderings, Mr. Obama has accomplished his goals and accomplished them exceedingly, and probably fortunately for family, friends and associates in the Democratic Party and Corporate America far, very far beyond his youthful fertile imagination. Now what? Well, we really don't know. Surely, I don't have Jim Jordan's visionary ball into which I can peer and see both past and future. But I know for certain that the next eighteen months will make him or break him.

With his new adventures (acts of political gamesmanship) in promoting war against Gaddafi's revolutionary Libya and the building of two new nuclear reactors in the South, Mr. Obama is walking on hot coals. Maybe he has the political soles for it when he has a Republican opposition in disarray. Ronald Reagan in his white substantiation is dead. In new clothes, however, Mr. Obama is indeed, probably, a worthy successor to Mr. Communicator, with his lawyerly combative intellectual attributes. But he may take it to heart, at some point, like Elmer Gantry the false prophet, and discover his ordinariness causes misery.

Rudolph Lewis (born 1948 in Baltimore, Maryland) graduated with a B.A (1978) and M.A. (1981) degrees in English, and MLS (1997) from University of Maryland, College Park. He edited I Am New Orleans & Other Poems by Marcus B. Christian. His poems have been published in Black Magnolias: A Literary Journal (2009), the anthology Let Loose on the World: Celebrating Amiri Baraka at 75 (2009), and The Journal of Pan African Studies (2011). His 1985 interview was published in Conversations with Yusef Komunyakaa (2010), edited by Shirley A. James Hanshaw.

He is the founder (2001) and editor of ChickenBones: A Journal (www.nathanielturner.com), an educational-literary website.