Burn the drafts!

A recurrent problem exposed with each move: what to do with the accumulated drafts and discards and works-in-progress--boxes and file drawers and binders filled with hundreds--nay, thousands... many thousands of pages--writing that goes back more than 40 years (most of it, from the last 27 years). Why do I save this stuff? Do I harbor secret dreams of donating it to some University Library? 63 volumes of journals. Some 2 million words. Do I imagine anyone will ever want to read them? That there are of any value to anyone but me? And then, really only the journals and finished work that are of any contemporary interest.

Oh you young writers and poets, in your 30's and 40's and 50's, what forests will be felled to fill torn cardboard boxes, brittle dessicated file folders in your basements, closets and attics? Or do writers and poets now store it all in distant binary cloud banks and thumb drives... or those smart phones I see you holding at your readings?.

What a jolly funeral pyre all that paper would make! My poor sons, having to wade through this stuff. I think, one more move will be enough to convince me to fill a half dozen blue recycling bins and be done with it.

@223, 224, 225

Insane Idealism of Obama

If your model of the role of the Chief Executive, and that upon which you craft both policy and strategy, is that of the ultimate mediator, such that advocacy is reserved for what remains when possibilities for negotiation have been exhausted, with the assumption that what has survived the grinder of compromise is, at this stage, the last and final responsibility of the President to explain, defend and push through to completion, the origin of policy will always be in the hands of others, whether from the legislative branch, or from agencies within the Executive branch itself (military, justice, surveillance), and of even greater consequence, will depend entirely on those who have been accepted as legitimate partners in this elite, extraordinarily limited dialog.

There is clearly no place for assuming even a rhetorical place for something like The American People, not even for Richard Nixon’s semi-mythical “Silent Majority. This is the reading I keep coming back to for Obama. A powerful, almost delusional idealism that sees the compromises he works to mediate, as representing, maybe the best and only possible representation of the national interests of the people, such that, he’s stopped cold at any critical examination of what this in fact comes down to.

I think this is a kind of insanity.

I don’t know how else to explain his opacity to the larger political reality; even a self-defined political pragmatist like Nixon saw the necessity of invoking the pretense of representing more than the interests of power that surged around him, but also, even if it was mostly rhetorical, like Presidents before him, cast himself as the one figure in government who was also the people’s ombudsmen and advocate. I see nothing of that in Obama… not a sign. There is something strangely out of place in how he operates—a neglect, if not a repudiation of what was once a central pillar of Presidential image and power.

I don’t imagine he thinks of it like this, but it’s as though he’s recognized this for what it largely was, part of the spectacle, a myth that it’s possible to dispense with—if you are a serious realist, which is how Obama seems to see and describe himself—a realism that disguises that essential, pathological idealism: his belief that working out compromises between the elite will ultimately work out for the best of all possible worlds.