Rejecting History – or why Barack Obama will win

Why are so many Americans voting for Barack Obama? The short answer has to do with Obama’s campaign themes – the future, hope, change – each nicely affirmative and innocent. The longer answer is a bit more fraught. All the January candidates, including Mitt Romney and John Edwards, copped the theme of change, but none could so embody the rejection of history, key to understanding this election, as Barack Obama. He sounds like Martin Luther King, but as a young black man, he also looks like a repudiation of the past.

Walt Whitman knew and approved the American principle of the upstart new. In his first bardic pronouncement in 1855, Whitman declared, “America does not the repel the past. . .,” but of course he knew it does. Later in that same sentence the past is “the corpse. . . slowly borne from the eating and sleeping rooms of the house.” Oh, the past, history, might reside still in the drawing room, where the books are and guests are entertained, but not where people actually live.

Is this anti-intellectual? Yes, it can take that form. Is it risky for America? Again, yes. But so is fear, even fear grounded in history and its precedents, both of which can be misunderstood.
What history is it that informs the war in Iraq—Munich in 1938? Vietnam? And which Vietnam – the one I remember of an ill-conceived imperial interference in somebody else’s civil war, or the one Ronald Reagan described, of an American army betrayed by sissy civilians unwilling to win?

If Whitman has an opposite in American literary history, it is William Faulkner – dark, haunted by the past that “is never dead. It’s not even past.” Yet Faulkner recognized that sometimes the past requires the exercise of conscience to reject it utterly, as does Isaac in Faulkner’s 1942 story “The Bear,” who conceives of America as refuge from “the old world’s worthless evening.”

Alas, the new world has gotten so old and so guilty.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign has erred from the start. Her trumpeted “experience” – albeit much of it as someone’s wife – has hit precisely the wrong notes. Experience equals the past. The Clintons have had their turn, and many Americans no more want a continuation of that past than they do the immediate past of the Bush years.

The decisive mood of the American people this year is driven less by a specific set of hopes than by exhaustion, and a consequent desire to escape a history that has become altogether too burdensome for an impatient people. We want to turn from the history book to science fiction. Science, we think, will save us and the planet.

In less general terms, many of us simply want to blot out the last seven years in as dramatic a way as we can. We want to “repel” a recent history marked by a President’s arrogance and willful ignorance. We want to redefine ourselves anew. We want to light out for a new territory.