Hope in the Time of Cholera [politics]
Posted by N8 in A special kind of hope, N8, N8's Advice and Consent Column
With the recent double-swearing in of Jesus as president, the world seems back on track. In just a few days, it has been remarkable the amount of progress accomplished just by undoing the regressive executive orders of the last eight years...
As the resident contrarian around here, I was challenged to name a single thing about the advent of the Age Of Obama that made the world materially worse off than it was before. Not some Fox News fabrication, but an actual true fact about the state of the world that makes it less appealing now than it was before. Not as easy as I thought it might have been, when I started to think about it. But then I thought about the great romantic poets.
Echoing others and to be echoed by so many others, Shakespeare's plays and sonnets are good examples of a very common poetic backdrop. Romantic poets in all ages are quick to invoke the idea that life is short, so that it more easily follows that you should grab love while you are still vertical. For example,
Nature's own sweet and cunning hand laid on:
Lady, you are the cruell'st she alive,
If you will lead these graces to the grave
And leave the world no copy.
Some of the most invoked sonnets make use of mortality as the literary backdrop to the wooer's immediate request that their love be requited. Summer's lease hath all too short a date is the poetic equivalent of "none of us will be young and beautiful forever, so are you sure you don't want to see the back of my Nisan Sentra?"
As a poetic go-to theme, you don't have to look far to see the transitory nature of life, beauty and youth invoked as an incitement to ill-advised coupling. Staring the prospect of death in the face has a way of loosening the corsets of young ladies, and the backdrop of Time's scythe isn't uncommon in poetry. It's an odd image to go with the flowers, unless you think about why it's there.
You see the idea everywhere in modern movies, too, from the girl in Airplane ("I don't know if we're going to get out of this, and I don't want to die a virgin") to that little kid in the back of the truck with the drunk crop-duster's daughter in Independence Day, whose incitement to sex is the simple line: the world is ending.
Well, that's what Obama has taken from some of us. It is much more difficult to declare to a would-be lover that the end is neigh with the same conviction as it was a week ago. Under Bush, "the sky is falling" was a frighteningly appropriate refrain, and I fear that the foregrounding of the end of days as a romantic hook has receded before this new tide of Hope. If "Yes, We Can" doesn't develop it's own free-love cache soon, I'm going to have to go back to asking the duty nurse at the maternity ward which birth certificates only have one parent's name on them...
