ManicDDaily

Part of the Problem?

I have to say that I find almost any presidential speech made from the Oval Office desk immediately suspect.

I can remember Nixon looking shifty (even before we were sure he was), his face shining with sweat and the nervousness of sweat; Johnson managing to combine both elephant and basset hound in one sorrowful gaze; Reagan with the actorly aw-shucks confidence of the perfect-haired;  Carter, lips moving less than a ventriloquist’s, irritated arrogance barely hidden by humble bangs.  I can even summon up a few traces of Kennedy, elegance nearly obscuring message.   (Johnson weirdly enough is one of the most compelling memories;  there is something about a massive and slightly rumpled head that counters the irritatingly punctiliousness of the desk’s carefully staked-out surface.)

My dislike does not particularly target the Oval Office desk;  I dislike desks generally.   I am a floor sitter (or bed sitter) by nature.  When I do sit at a desk, I tend to squat or sit cross-legged.  (Thank God for  “modesty panels.”)

Desks are automatically a little disempowering—the person is foreshortened;  their breath doesn’t flow right;  their gestures are crimped.  (How many opera singers do you see singing from desks?)

A desk is particularly bad for Obama whose youthful appearance and natural neatness already give him an overly-studenty aspect.

What’s on the desks bugs me too.  (Enough, I know….)  I can understand wanting photos of one’s wonderful family as talismen for one’s self, but when I see the photos facing out to the audience, I feel, well, manipulated.

Given my feelings about desks, I was a bit put off by Obama’s speech at the start.

I was also put off by the end, the story of the fishermen’s prayer ritual.  Obama may be a genuinely religious person (I think he is), and he may be right that a collective consciousness of suffering, a collective prayer, is worth some promotion (though a little of this goes an awfully long way.)  But an extended discussion of prayer tends to make one feel as if there is no hope for human solutions.

Now for the middle of the speech.   Yes, I know problems need to be studied, but arranging for a commission sounds  like “sending something off to committee”—a way to keep change from happening rather than to make it happen.

So what part of the speech sat well with me, as it were (though not at a desk)?   We simply have to change the way we consume and produce energy in this country, and the ways in which we regulate exploration and production.  Obama has got it absolutely right here, and, hopefully, in the wake of all of the despoliation and waste, in the midst of the desk and prayers, people will sit up and listen.