Leading up to this President’s Day, I caught myself feeling surrounded by the image of Barack Obama.
First, passing by a parking garage on my usual walk to work, I noticed the attendant’s computer flanked by two identical photos of a waving Obama. “Whatever gets you through the day,” I thought dismissively.
Later, I saw a similar photo pasted above the desk of a colleague whose life experience is probably the polar opposite of those garage attendants’—Ivy League educated, terminally degreed, widely traveled—hardly the type I’d suspect of hero worship. What, I wondered, does she think when she sees Obama’s picture out of the corner of her eye, just beyond her color-coordinated to-do lists?
I’m not the only one who’s got pictures of Obama dancing in their heads.
This week we heard the news that Shepherd Fairey, the artist behind the Warhol-esque Obama “hope” posters, was suing the Associated Press over the photo he had used to create the blue and red image.
And in this week’s Time Out Chicago, “sexpert” Debby Herbenick predicted that despite the economic hardships sure to plague us in 2009, “some may even have more sex now that our President and First Lady are, let’s face it, hot and probably a part of some Americans’ sexual fantasies.”
My qualifications in the realm of presidential history are practically nil, so I can do little more than wonder when in our history have we been this captivated by the image of America’s president.
All I can say is I don’t remember people hanging up pictures of George H. W. Bush, Clinton, or “W,” except for people I knew who had invested deeply in their campaigns. Furthermore, I’ve never been one to have heroes, or to put my loyalties up on the wall. Even when I was working in churches and studying to be a minister, you wouldn’t have found me with a cross hung up, and I only liked Ben Harper’s song “Picture of Jesus” because it sounded like something from Paul Simon’s Graceland.
When Bill Maher appeared on Larry King Live last week, he seemed floored by Obama’s speech about fellow former Illinois Senator-turned-President Abraham Lincoln.
“He can put a sentence together,” Mahler said of Obama. “He’s eloquent and he’s—he’s unflappable. I mean, he’s so cool and calm. Is he on Xanax? I mean … sometimes I wonder about this guy. I wish my broker was that calm.”
And that, I believe—that palpable having-it-handled-ness Mahler identified—explains the fascination with Obama’s image. Far beyond sex appeal, we want our president to always tell us it will all be OK, and if he can do it without words, so much the better.
Whoever you are—skinny brainiac, kid with and absent father, person with big ears, law student during finals week, community organizer for whom the last presidential race was a short campaign compared to the ones you’re involved in—you can find some reason to hope in Barack Obama’s story.
Psychologists call it positive projection, that thing we do with famous faces, letting them carry and represent everything about ourselves that we don’t yet see or own in ourselves—the part of ourselves that is (or wants to be) sexy, magnificent, infinitely capable, and so on.
Putting all this on President Obama seems to me to be exactly what he warned us against when he said, “I’m asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington…I’m asking you to believe in yours.”
Harper’s song is honest about this tendency we have to project our hope onto others. It begins by describing the splintered-wood-framed and wallet pictures of Jesus he has, then references Martin Luther King, Jr. and asks whether we would recognize a modern-day picture of Jesus if we saw it. It concludes, “I want to be a picture of Jesus.”
Our pin-ups should do more than make us feel good; they need to make us be someone we wouldn’t otherwise have dared to be.
Right now, the pictures on my desk are people I know personally and love dearly—my nuclear family and my Valentine. But this week I’m going to be thinking if I were to put up a photo of anyone else to inspire my days, who would it be? It’s not a question of whose picture I want to have but of whose picture I want to be.
