Metaphor Extended November 8th, 2010 Obama’s car-in-a-ditch metaphor for our country was a good one, perfectly selected to reference the kind of conflict we have in life every day that is constructive, ultimately towards some end, and rooted in the fact that we have a lot more in common than we don’t, specifically that we want and need to move forward, fast, and can only do so together. I’ve got another metaphor, also car-related, that I’d like to offer for how the press and the political public usually misses the point of Obama’s conciliatory messages. The idea’s simple: Two people can decide to do the same thing for two different reasons. You can want to go get, say, a slurpee and I can want to go get a magazine, and we can then drive to the gas station together and solve both our problems. Indeed, if you think about it, we really only had one, shared problem: getting to the gas station. Your slurpee and my magazine were just details, actually irrelevant, and not actually worth discussion. The press, and politicians on the campaign trail, talk like gas stations only had slurpees, or only had magazines. Then they talk about what is more important for a gas station to have, magazines or slurpees. Then magazine lovers get angry because we think there’s only going to be slurpees at gas stations now, and slurpee lovers get angry about the same thing, or, well, the opposite thing, which is really the same thing. What we should do is just shut up about slurpees and magazines and get in the car and go. We can buy whatever we want when we get there, and then drive back home and enjoy our respective products from our end of the couch. What we should do is just shut up sometimes, recognizing that we can create conflict simply by talking about it. And I think we do. Recognize that fact, I mean. But we definitely don’t always shut up when we need to. I’ve got an idea of why that is too. I call it “identity politics.” I’m not talking about what that phrase meant in the nineties. I think it’s best we replace that definition of the phrase with a new one. I looked up what it meant on Wikipedia, and I don’t think we have use for its old meaning anymore. Instead it should mean this: Politics where the positions that people take come from their identity, rather than their mind. In the last post I wrote, my first one in a sense, I talked about how when I studied writing in high school and college, it was work that was rooted in my identity, rather than, I guess, work in which my identity was rooted. I think that’s the way young people do things. Learning to do something without an actual field to do it in requires that you root it in itself. You write because you’re a writer. You study because you’re a nerd. You run because you’re a jock. These identities aren’t your true self. As Glee would have us know, sometimes jocks just want to sing. As I’ve gotten older and worked with more adults, I have been amazed at how these identities fall away. Jocks get glasses and get into the tech sector. Nerds get Lasik and become financial analysts with hot girlfriends, who used to have braces. In the end none of it mattered, not in any predictable way. You realize that as you get to be an adult. Unless you’re talking about politics. Democrats are nerds and Republicans are jocks and none of them ever grow up. In all of our lives our identities are complex, actually made up of lots of different identities that show differently at different times of the day or depending upon the song we woke up to on the radio. We leave behind certain hangups and acquire new ones. We are unpredictable. But not in politics. Washington looks like a casting call for character bits on Law and Order. John Boehner, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, Barney Frank, they’re all freakish reproductions of old cliche characters from movies about Washington. Fred Thompson’s presidential candidacy was based on his actually having been a character bit on Law and Order. It’s a joke. Real people are weird. In Wisconsin, Montana, Kansas, any guy at a gas station will say something strange and wonderful if you listen long enough. The only place I’ve ever seen with a cast of characters like our Congress is a high school cafeteria, with Dorks and Rich Kids and Bullies all perfectly striated at their big tables. I think this a larger point Obama brings to his thinking, underlying the one I co-opted his metaphor for. Sometimes we can work together to do the same thing for different reasons. But in order to do that, we have to avoid talking about our individual reasons. Identity may be malleable, but it’s still important to us. We all need to have our personal motives for action foremost in our mind to work hard at that action. And if all of our motives are different, we need to keep them there, foremost in our mind, but not an inch further out into the world. We need to shut up sometimes, in part just to get to work, but also just to let others get to work with us.