Reapproaching Positive Thinking 1

Maureen Dowd, a New York Times columnist that academics love to hate. Well, that's one point in her favor...

At the IABA 2010 conference, Nancy K. Miller mentioned Maureen Dowd’s June 1, 2010 column “A Storyteller Loses the Story Line” as evidence of the popular equivalence between the story of recovery and recovery itself. Miller seemed to me clearly following Barbara Ehrenreich, and when I brought this up with her she just nodded -- “I’m just nodding here, you’re so right,” she said. In any case, when I heard that Dowd had taken an interest in storytelling, however utilitarian, my interest was piqued, and so I read some Dowd. The climax of Dowd’s June 1 column is as follows:

In “Dreams From My Father,” Obama showed passion, lyricism, empathy and an exquisite understanding of character and psychological context — all the qualities that he has stubbornly resisted showing as president. It was a book that promised a president who could see into the hearts of other people. But there’s so much you don’t learn about candidates in campaigns, even when they seem completely exposed.

This president has made it clear that he’s not comfortable outside whatever domain he’s defined. But unless he wants his story to be marred by a pattern of passivity, detachment, acquiescence and compromise, he’d better seize control of the story line of his White House years. Woe-is-me is not an attractive narrative.

We can see here something of what Miller means when she speaks of an equivalence between the story’s positive and the real positive that is so desired. Dowd took the qualities Obama assigns himself in his life story for qualities he would take into his presidency. Obama doesn’t display those qualities in the story as Dowd sees it today, hence Dowd’s lack of satisfaction. Miller deduces a much stronger, and more stupid, reading here: Dowd wants Obama to come up with a story that seems more positive, and thus more attractive. Damn the facts. But a more sympathetic reading of Dowd is available to us. She wants Obama to display the qualities that he displayed before. She may even believe, as I do, that he really is an empathic and well-meaning man, but simply unable to project in this moment of multiple, interrelated crises. So her meaning may be for him to project what she still believes from his earlier story to actually, really be there. Miller makes this sound very bad indeed: a confusion of story and reality. But what needles me in both Miller and Ehrenreich is that in their current “realist” moment they deny any application to positive-seeking vision. I’ll be working to respond to this -- in part with the very careers of these thinkers.