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American candidates as transformers
Posted By katie allison granju
No, no, not the kind that turn into giant, battling robots.
We live in a culture of amazing personal transfigurations, a culture run by Oprah Winfrey and the latest James Frey, in which each story of personal pain and degradation ends with a caterpillar-to-butterfly blossoming into spiritual fulfillment. That these stories are simplistic and superficial exercises in fantastic wish-fulfillment is, I guess, what makes them universally accessible and inspiring.
And we live in a culture in which fiction and fact are inextricable, in which people model themselves on fictional characters, and fictional characters on people; in which novelists give the main character of the novel the same name as their own; in which authors try to decide whether their book should be published as fiction or nonfiction. It is very easy for a fictional character to be transformed. All you have to do is write it: “Then Hillary became an agent of change and lived happily ever after.” See? Done.
Americans, as Romney insists, are an optimistic people. We tell our children that anything you can dream of being, you can be. That this is false doesn’t seem to bother anyone, and the net effect is to replace reality with fantasy, attributing to every child the ability that is only really displayed by our great leaders: to be a kind of human Jell-O, taking the shape of whatever container it’s poured into.
Jan 28th, 2008
