Barack Obama and the Rebirth of Cool

Watching the news these days is eerie. No other word for it. For example: McCain is at a rally where a confused supporter declares, “I can’t trust Obama. I have read about him and...He’s an Arab.” McCain is forced to correct her, saying, “No, ma’am. He’s a decent man.” Then he must, to the audible booing of the crowd, defend Obama’s character, and say that an Obama presidency is “nothing to be afraid of.” But the crowd doesn’t want to hear it. It’s like a scene in a movie just before the mutiny where the roaring, angry sailors run over the short, ineffective captain and seize control of the ship.

The comments that have been coming out of McCain-Palin supporters at rallies this past week are appalling, as the campaign, and Governor Palin in particular, have fanned the flames of anti-Obama sentiment, xenophobia, and seething racism with reckless abandon, even as the economy is crumbling all around us and our nation is at war. Such an act, as Republican Frank Shaeffer expostulated, is “deliberately feeding the most unhinged elements of our society the red meat of hate, and therefore potentially instigating violence.”

How did this happen? Is this, as some pundits have mused, because these are the only supporters the Republican ticket has left? In any case, the comments that have been coming out of audiences at these rallies over the past week: “Terrorist!” “Treason!” “Kill him!” “Bomb Obama!” have been enough to turn the blood cold in my veins.

I find myself caught between 1) utter revulsion and yes, fear, the combination of which manifests itself as a slightly unhealthy desire to shun the TV and online news and listen to Broadway show tunes all day while reading fashion magazines, and 2) a macabre fascination with the convoluted racial politics that snake through this entire, weird, time-travel-back-to-the-60s unnerving reality that makes me desperate to dissect how we got here in the first place.

The bizarre twist to the 60s throwback vibe, however, is the strange fact that the McCain-Palin campaign must resort to pitching Barack as a Muslim/terrorist/danger to the country because they know they can not effectively smear him as a black man. Consider the smears that emerged around McCain’s own campaign in 2004, those insinuations about his adopted Bangladeshi daughter Bridget (whom Cindy heroically scooped up from an orphanage in Dhaka and bundled off to one of the McMansions, kind of like “oh, look at this cute puppy I saved from the gutter”). Anyway, the Republicans smeared McCain by suggesting that Bridget was McCain’s black love child. For crying out loud. But: how can he similarly smear Obama by casting aspersions on his race/blackness? Truth is, there are lot of ways he could do it, by portraying Obama as a philandering, lazy, irresponsible, thieving, law-evading, scary black man. Except that Obama himself, whom more and more Americans have gotten to know over the past two years, does not make any of those accusations particularly believable.

And this I find super fascinating. Let’s dig deeper.

After the second presidential debate, the commentary was pretty revealing. Everyone seemed to agree that Obama was “a cool customer,” the “better performer,” the one who “looked more presidential.” Cool especially is a word that has been used often in connection to Obama throughout his entire campaign, and it holds so many meanings. First of all, staying cool is paramount for Obama, no two ways about it, because in this country people are scared of black men. We are taught to believe that all black men are angry and violent. Obama has to stay perpetually cool in order to refute the “angry black man” stereotype. And he has. He’s kept it cool. And that is one of the few positive images in circulation about African-American males: the cool black man.

It’s a persona that has its roots in the jazz style of saxophonist Lester Young and trumpeter Miles Davis, with a parallel vein running through Hollywood’s bloodline in the legacy of actors Sidney Poitier to Denzel Washington to Will Smith. Let’s talk about Lester, since it all really started with him. He was the first jazz musician to regularly wear sunglasses during indoor performances, and a pioneer in his understated refusal to respond to white audiences’ desire to see black performers get "hot,” wild, and out of control (read: savage). He burst on the scene in the late 1930s, and really made his mark musically in the mid 1940s, when Southern blacks were moving north in unprecedented numbers, and when black men were necessarily forging a new identity that would make sense within an urban context. Scholar Nelson George writes: “Many Southern boys now wise to the concrete jungle started to move with a fluid, no-sweat attitude everyone called ‘cool.’ Cool came to define a certain sartorial elegance, smooth charm and self-possession that in the hurly-burly of the city suggested a dude that controlled not only himself but his environment” (Elevating the Game, p. 62).

It’s interesting to think of the particular brand of (similar?) challenges faced by black men of Barack’s generation as they began to move in larger numbers than ever before into elite academic institutions like Harvard, and the survival strategies such men (and women) had to develop in order to function within that intellectual maze. I think their strategies probably had something to do with coolness, and something similar to the jazz musician’s superhuman work ethic (as a young musician Lester Young often practiced for 7 hours a day), in order to combat all those minstrel-tinged expectations. Tulane professor Joel Dinerstein writes, “Young’s soaring saxophone style was “cool” because he generated excitement without getting excited; he stayed cool” (“Lester Young and the Birth of Cool,” p. 250). Dinerstein also notes, as did Jack Kerouac, that unlike the typical jazzer’s posture of holding the horn high in the air (high-testosterone phallic implications pretty clear here, right?), Lester Young held the horn down low in front of him. And it’s not that he wasn’t sexy. Billie Holliday was crazy about him, and gave him a nickname that stuck for life: “Prez”...as in President of all Saxophone Players. Muy interesante.

For Obama, at this juncture in history, an especially useful function of coolness is that historically, (white) Americans have associated it with good performers, and (white) Americans tend to think that black people should be good performers. So Obama’s persona is mapping out in perfect alignment with one of the few positive images available to black men in this country. And what’s more, “coolness” is something that Americans of all stripes have long (fetishized?) sought to emulate. It is super marketable. Perhaps the defining feature of cool is that it’s something other people want to get close to, whether by adopting it themselves, or being in the circle of the one who embodies it. And so, on a number of levels, the mythology around black people is working in Obama’s favor. Who knew?

This is why the Republicans have no choice but to brand him a terrorist. (We’ll talk another time about the super-scary way their rhetoric seamlessly links “Arab” and “terrorist.”) Barack’s blackness is an asset. Okay, don’t get all Geraldine Ferraro on me here...The way Barack Obama is able to use his blackness to his advantage, almost without anyone noticing, that is the real asset to him and to his campaign. It encourages me to realize that in this race there are battles being fought on many levels that most of us are not even aware of, and that even as jeering racists devolve into waving Barack monkey dolls and uttering incendiary threats, Senator Obama has the fortitude and the cool to sail through the melee and make sure this country gets its act together.