All in the Game

You talked about faith, and you were sincere when you did, but the faith you talked about never sounded like the infinite task you had read about in old books, the kind of faith that may have been on the mind of that still-young man, the writer, when he killed himself. How hard it is, how not even possible, to remain convinced of the value of here, this nation and this earth, this mortality.

You were not like that. You were post-partisan pragmatic, after all, and in secret moments you figured people should not be surprised when those principles extended to God as well. The truth is just what works, pragmatism says, and what works better than that as an answer to any demand for the truth? Game on.

Your speech was almost over. It had been a good one, of course, uplifting but realistic, emotional but hard headed. You were really very good at this. You wanted everyone to know you were ready, that they had made the right choice. You promised oversight and stimulus and the double lever of free markets and higher taxes. You reminded the nation of the grave challenges ahead, the need for goodwill and courage. You called them to their better selves.

You did not specify what those better selves might be, except in general terms of family and so on, the usual stuff, because specificity would not respect the desires of this great democratic nation, where each one counted for one, where freedom was everything. Everyone here gets to dream! And if the dream is empty, that’s a good thing, that’s a positive. That’s what makes the dream everyone’s dream.

You realized then something that had nagged at your fine mind, your subtle mind, throughout the many months leading to this moment, to this speech. The hope you had spoken of, over and over, the change you called for, they were just like the dream. In fact, you saw now, they were the dream. And it followed that they, too, were free of content. They were empty categories, levers without purchase.

But now, you thought, now that you are in the big chair, that was okay. That, in fact, was your special genius. Not your height and good looks and racial category. Not your fitness and charisma. Not your fashion sense, your magazine covers, your comic book appearances, bobblehead dolls, and action figures. Not your ability to succeed where others had failed. Certainly not your will to change the system, or to articulate any bold new vision. None of that was going to happen. Not just because the system was too big for anyone to change it, though that was certainly true.

Yes, everyone was going to be disappointed. That was inevitable, you thought, not for the first time. The expectations were too great to avoid disappointment. You recalled, with an inward smile, the fake newspaper headlines in the parody issue of the New York Times. Remember? The one distributed the week after the election and dated July 4, 2009. Nation Sets Its Sights on Building a Sane Economy. Pentagon Ends Secret Budget. USA Patriot Act Repealed. Public Relations Industry Forecasts a Series of Massive Layoffs. Court Indicts Bush on High Treason Charge. Torture, Rendition “Not Such Good Ideas After All.” It was funny because it wasn’t true. And it wasn’t going to be true, not even close, though you couldn’t say that, especially not now, not here, you thought, standing there.

No, despite everything you had said, despite your command of the difference, your awareness that everyone said so, everyone agreed, your special genius was not change. Your gift was not even political — it was more metaphysical, more spectral. You saw that, oddly enough, you were bound to become a sort of philosopher king after all. Not in your decisions or actions, not because of your special vision, but by your example. In the very fact of you and your inevitable failure, the inescapable disappointment, the pre-compromised nature of the whole undertaking, the entire game. You didn’t tell the noble lie, you were the noble lie. Your special genius was to show that democracy is impossible but that we have to play it anyway.

“Hope” was the right word all along, because it is nothing more or less than the unresolved remainder of politics. Hope is that which will not submit either to policy analysis or to dialectic reasoning. Hope forever extends and remains, it is always not yet, always to come. You can make speeches about it, but you can’t bring it to the mat later on, you can’t implement it. There are no policy implications, no legislative measures, that move hope from theory to application. But — and here was the crux of the thing, the gist of the matter — without that hope, we would surely be lost to the same despair as the still-young man, the writer who took his life. The emptiness of our desires and our dreams, the paltry contours of our lives and efforts, the smallness of our vision, would swallow us up. Without hope, we would see that the bleakness of the world is not that it is unjust but that it is meaningless.

You would not change that. Nobody would change that, ever. No we can’t! But you would make your own specific failure into hope’s success. And then someone else, pointing up at another God, would have to try.