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Michael Chabon and Frank Rich

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from: Michael Chabon

Rotisserie-League Politics

Posted Monday, Jan. 22, 2001, at 9:32 PM ET

Dear Frank,

I confess that I am still in denial about the whole thing and tried to pay as little attention to the "festivities" as possible. Even in this age of 24-hour information typhoons, it is still surprisingly easy, when the denial-drive is strong enough, to remain partially sheltered in one's ignorance. This approach is in contrast to that of my wife, Ayelet, who has reacted to the Bush Restoration by the clever means of a kind of benign psychotic break with reality. She has decided to pretend not merely that Gore won, but actually to spend the next four years in an alternate universe where Andrew Cuomo is president, Kathleen Sullivan is the attorney general, Marian Wright-Edelman is secretary of HHS, etc. It's sort of like rotisserie-league politics.

Though I grew up in the Washington suburbs, too, I don't have a whole lot of clear memories of inaugurations past except for two: Nixon's first, when my Uncle Roy took me to his law office on Pennsylvania Avenue, along the parade route, and my attention was transfixed and my consciousness forever altered by the sight of hippies burning American flags; and Reagan's first, where there was all that talk of the change of style, the fancy-dress aspect to the presidency that had been missing during the Carter years. My mother somehow managed to get herself invited to one of the inauguration balls and the bugle-beaded black dress she wore seemed to me to embody that talk and certain aspects of the Reagan years themselves.

The item in today's paper that got me really steamed, frankly, was the report on the Rose Center For Earth and Space's bizarre, outrageous, and unwarranted decision to demote Pluto from the status of planet to that of large, dirty iceball, a mere member of the Kuyper Belt. The thing that cracked me up was the way that my own reaction, which seemed to involve a surprising degree of anthropomorphizing of what is, after all, a large, dirty iceball, was so clearly identical to that not only of the planetarium-going general public (one little kid was quoted as referring to the planet as "my friend Pluto") but of the scientific community as well, even the woman from the Rose Center itself, who tried to argue that Pluto was "happier" among its own kind. I guess it's impossible for a certain kind of person not to identify with a small, cold, isolated, lonely little world way out there on the margins of everything ...

Talk to you later!
Michael

the breakfast table
entries
12345678910111213141516
from: Michael Chabon

Rotisserie-League Politics

Posted Monday, Jan. 22, 2001, at 9:32 PM ET
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Michael Chabon's latest novel is The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Frank Rich is an op-ed columnist for the New York Times and author, most recently, of Ghost Light.
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Reader Comments From The Fray:




Thank you Mr Rich for bringing up the no tanks in the streets comment repeated by all the talking heads on TV. I too was shocked by it. We should be celebrating because there are no tanks in the streets? We settle for so little. They had an election in Canada recently, with very high turnout(by American standards) modern voting machines, and yes no tank in the streets. The winner was declared within hours. Unlike the US they can be certain that the man in charge was elected fair and square.

Why do the talking heads repeat empty pieties? Healing, closure, no tanks, peaceful transfer? Is it to create a false sense that the system works even when there are signs that the system failed?

--James Lynch

(To reply, click here.)


The news coverage of the inauguration seemed so rote. It reminded me of my local cable access channel, which replays the same prom footage over and over and at odd times. It's odd to channel surf and come across high-schoolers decked out in tuxes and gowns, standing awkwardly on lawns, getting into limos, walking into a dance hall over and again. I'm sure the kids in the video might like the event, and must love seeing it.

So too this inauguration. The hard core Bushies and the hard core Clinton-haters were likely cheered and moved by the whole coronation process. But really. It was so forlorn.

And even Bush's well-crafted--it's a pleasure to read--acceptance speech sounded tin coming from him. Every time he speaks, even when the rhetoric's lofty, I can't help but hear the C- student he usually is, the one who describes or explains things by restating the obvious (I'm a uniter, not divider, and that means I try to bring people together, not push them apart.). I'm so used to circular logic from Bush that I'm edge whenever he speaks.

And too, Clinton's 7.5 minute farewell, it seemed to me, had more oomph and staying power than W.'s 14 minute at bat. So as Rich suggests, W. pales not only because I usually find him dim, but also, in this case, by comparison to Clinton's superior oratory style.

--Nick Carbone

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