12 April 2010
Clinton & Barney (Paris to the Moon)
)Published on April 12th, 2010 @ 11:10:40 am, using 615 words, 770 views
Back in 2000, I read a book of essays entitled Paris to the Moon by New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik about his experience living in France. Something about Americans experiencing France always seems to lead straight to either uproarious laughter (David Sedaris comes to mind, always first in line in that regard) or the stirring recognition that some tidbit, observation or insight makes TOTAL sense (Gopnik cued in here.)
For D.
Without further ado, Adam Gopnik in his own words…
There are certain insights that can come to an American only when he is abroad, because only there does the endless ribbon of American television become segmented enough so that you can pay attention to its parts, instead of just being overwhelmed by the relentlessness of its presence. In the middle of the winter I happened to see, during some stray roundup of the year’s events on CNN International, a clip of another familiar American figure, his arms around his wife and child, swaying and humming as he watched fireworks going off.
Suddenly I got it. The nose; the rocking motion; above all, the squinty-eyed, aw-shucks, just-a-big-lug smile: Barney is Bill Clinton for three-year-olds. Or rather, Bill Clinton is Barney for adults. He serves the same role for jumpy American liberals that Barney does for their children: He reassures without actually instructing. The physical resemblance alone is eerie. There’s the odd combination of hauteur and rondeur (both are very tall without really being imposing), the perpetually swaying body, the unvarying smile, even the disconcerting chubby thighs - everything but the purple skin. Barney and Bill are not amiable authority figure, like the Friendly Giant and Ronald Reagan. They are, instead, representations of pure need: Wanting to be hug, they hug.
For the first time, I also understood Clinton hating, of the violent irrational kind that, when I left America, was being practiced on the editorial page of the Times and in the New Republic and had always seemed incomprehensible, directed, as it was, at so anodyne a character. Suddenly I saw that the psychology of the Clinton hater was exactly that of the Barney basher; the objections were not moral but peevishly aesthetic. Like Barney, Bill stripped away our pet illusions by showing just how much we could do without. We had persuaded ourselves that the modern child needed irony, wit, humor, parody to be reached and affected; Sesame Street and Bullwinkle were our exhibits in this argument.
Barney showed that this was not the case. At the same time, we had persuaded ourselves that the modern citizen, similarly wary (he is, after all, merely the Bullwinkle viewer grown old), could be recalled to liberalism only through a heightened, self-conscious, soul-searching high-mindedness. Bill showed that this was not the case. Both dinosaur and Arkansas governor had discovered that the way to win the hearts of their countrymen was to reduce their occupation to its most primitive form. Where Kermit the Frog on Sesame Street, had sung the principle of brotherhood to children through the poetic metaphor of his own greenness, Barney just grabbed the kids and told them that he loved them and that they loved him too, damn it. Where Mario Cuomo had orated about Lincoln and the immigrants and the metaphor of family, Bill Clinton just held out his arms and watched people leap into them. It turns out that you don’t need to be especially witty or wise to entertain children, just as you don’t need to believe in anything much to be an extremely effective president. All you need is to know your audience’s insecurities and how to keep swaying in time to them forever.
(Paris to the moon - Adam Gopnik)
Books, essays, Paris, moon, Adam, Gopnik, Bill Clinton, Barney, swaying, nose, three-year-olds, adults, tall, imposing, resemblance, eerie
Permanent Link
