The Love Song of J. Alfred Barack

While I'm not sure how much value there is in rereading love letters that Barack Obama sent nearly 30 years ago, this much is certain -- they are funny as hell:

I haven’t read “The Waste Land” for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will hazard these statements—Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this. Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when he’s less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak. Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.) And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?

Forget Eliot, Yeats or Pound -- this is Joycean. It's the Portrait of the President as a Young Bullshit Artist.

Then again, this precious paragraph from a letter Obama sent to his then-current girlfriend, Alex McNear, captures a few things that have come true during his presidency, to wit:

• The "choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order" is a pretty good description of the difference between Obama's 2008 campaign and what he's attempting to peddle this year.
• Like his administration, this paragraph has a bunch of words and little meaning.

Now, to be fair, this sort of sophomoric rambling is part of the game in college -- if you're trying to make time with the ladies, one way to do it is to spout off nonsense like this. I can think of one young woman who received letters of this sort from me back in the mid 80s, and I can only hope that she tossed those letters and those words never see the light of day. Still, one can't help but think that Eliot had Obama figured out:

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;         

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

We'll be serving toast and tea in November.