The Church of Obama: Just For You

Matt Frei: Taming the cyber beast | Comment is free | The Guardian

The Clinton White House leaked like a sieve. The Bush White House circled the wagons and lived in a bubble; it turned loyalty into a test of service and largely disdained the clutter of opinions from the world outside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. If the last year is anything to go by, the Obama administration will be a curious mixture: it too will demand absolute loyalty and discretion from its staff while feeding the hungry cyber-masses with the impression of involvement.

I wandered into Obama's campaign website once looking for information about a volunteer training program for a friend that I'd heard about through my local Democratic Party organization. I never found it but by the time I had managed to extricate myself from the site I had given the Obama campaign my cell phone number and signed on to a special interest email list. I searched through page after busy page of slick web design without finding what I needed until I was so overwhelmed by the links, hype and innumerable options for social networking that I left in a state of near panic.

It reminded me of the time, at a conference in China, a group of us went to the Old Silk Market in Beijing (pictured above). It was jammed with shoppers, merchandise of every kind, and aggressive shopkeepers hustling tourists. By the time I managed to squeeze my way back to the edge of the crowd I was panicked. Once I broke free I ran the last lap at top speed to my friends who were waiting at the exit laughing: they'd been through it too and knew exactly how I felt.

I never went back to the Obama site but Barak kept in touch with innumerable emails and text messages that occasionally came in the middle of the night but more often during one of my logic classes, invariably while I was doing a especially intricate proof on the board.

The email list was worst of all. List members, at least those who posted, were convinced that they were on intimate terms with Obama, that he followed discussion on the list (or, at least, that his inner circle did and reported back to him) and looked to them for advice.

I couldn't imagine why. Manifestly there were millions of participants in Obama's social networking structure: we were just numbers. I've never minded being just a number--in fact I rather like it. What I definitely don't like is bogus intimacy--strangers with whom I do business addressing me by my first name and customized junk mail. At the Silk Market stall keepers adopted the same tactic: they assured me that they were giving me special deals because I was special--"five dollah, just for you, no, four dollah, four dollah--and just for you."

Lots of people must like it because if they didn't employees wouldn't be trained to use client's first names and junk mail wouldn't be personalized, but I can't imagine why: it seems so obviously patronizing, manipulative and humiliating.

I especially hate programs aimed at giving clients a sense of involvement by loading them with busywork. In my church this was called "empowering the laity." The assumption was that the laity were at lonely and loose ends, didn't know what to do with themselves, felt useless, isolated and of little worth. The church give them tasks to do which would get keep them occupied, boost their self-confidence, make them feel needed, and create the sense of involvement that would keep them in the fold. When I was involved in the church growth business it was a commonplace that no matter how enthusiastic new members of a congregation were they would never stick beyond a few weeks unless they were hustled into organizations and activities. Religion was ephemeral--sociability was the eternal verity.

It was a complete fake. Every profession is a conspiracy against the laity--the clerical profession in particular. Laypeople were never be heard and the only work we got to do was donkey work. Most weren't even trusted with that. Important donkey work was done by paid staff. Laypeople were given busywork and pretend work.

So, at one particularly painful vestry meeting the Junior Warden, whose titular responsibilities were grounds and facilities, told a long story about his research in local ordinances to determine whether the church door could be tethered by a spring so that it would close of its own accord or whether it had to stay open to comply with handicapped access regulations. Of course, the church employed a facilities supervisor, overlord of 4 Mexican sextons, who looked into such matters and made decisions about the disposition of doors. The Junior Warden was just being allowed to play pretend.

I found it humiliating and find the whole Obama cult creepy for the same reason. I voted for an ideology and a program: for more social safety nets and less military adventurism, for a more activist government, for the agenda of the left. Obama was the icon of that program, the button you pushed to get it. As a voter, I made my goals for the country known by pushing the Obama button.

I'm no expert. I don't know how to implement the objectives of the left, I don't understand the means to the ends I support, or the details and, frankly, I'm not interested. I just want a result. I want that program to pop out of the black box of government and don't want to know what's going on inside. So I'm glad that Obama has appointed a team of experts and technocrats to work on those details inside the black box. I don't want to be involved. What I resent isn't beng locked out of the black box but these attempts to create the illusion of involvement.

People of normal intelligence can't really believe that Obama or his advisors are really paying any attention to what they say and, if they don't, I can't see how they could fail to be outraged by this humiliating, patronizing treatment--the hype, manipulation, vacuous slogans, contrived sentimentalities and pieties, and slick packaging.

I suppose if the church didn't exist it would have to be invented

Obama, we hardly knew ye

[W]ith Barack Hussein Obama officially becoming the Democratic presidential nominee on Wednesday night, some of the same qualities that have brought him just one election away from the White House — his virtuosity, his seriousness, his ability to inspire, his seeming immunity from the strains that afflict others — may be among his biggest obstacles to getting there. There is little about him that feels spontaneous or unpolished, and even after two books, thousands of campaign events and countless hours on television, many Americans say they do not feel they know him. The charges of elusiveness puzzle those closest to the candidate. Far more than most politicians, they say, he is the same in public as he is in private.

I prepared for California, where I had gotten a tenure-track position and so would likely spend the rest of my life, by re-reading Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One. A tale of the Hollywood funeral industry, an enterprise devoted to denial, it features Miss Thanatopolos, a junior embalmer whose toilette Waugh describes in excruciating detail. Every morning, Miss Thanatopolos depilatates and deoderizes herself. She showers, emulsifies, shaves, tweezes, colognes, brushes, polishes and makes up until she is the perfectly standardized, sanitized American virgin.

Americans must want this since firms spend millions training staff to be polished, pleasant and bland--from uniformed convention-hotel clerks and flight attendants to salesmen, trainers and facilitators in business casual. I've been to innumerable workshops and training sessions run by these facilitators on topics ranging from cultural sensitivity to alcohol awareness. "Training" is supposed to be the efficient, scientific alternative to education. Trainers organize topics into modular skill-sets which they inculcate by means of recipes, relating games and drill in an atmosphere of cheerful boosterism.

Everyone knows it's crap. Last spring, at a workshop on student advising, faculty who taught Friday classes were advised to dismiss their students with the formula, "Have a safe and sober weekend." None of us will. The functionary who offered this piece of advice knew that none of us would and all of us knew that even if we did it would have no effect whatsoever on student behavior. Academics are untrainable.

But even when training is successful we don't always like the results. Last night at the convention, Americans were charmed again by Bill Clinton. Bubba could never even be trained to keep his pants up but Americans forgave him seventy time seventy. Everyone loved Bill. But most cannot connect with Obama--perfectly trained, perfectly polished and flawless.

It isn't that we think he's an empty suit: we know he's smart--probably a lot smarter than we are. And it isn't the perception of elitism. All presidents and presidential aspirants are moneyed and educated. But even Poppy Bush, the uber-WASP and most overtly patrician president in office during my lifetime, didn't make Americans uneasy in the same way. I always warmed to Poppy in the way I, and everyone else, warmed to Bubba.

But I don't think anyone really warms to Obama. I'd love a beer with Bubba or a martini with Poppy Bush but I would not want to sip white wine with Obama. Bush Sr. and Bill have private lives and characters behind their public personae that occasionally extrude through their political facades, and inform their public personae. Obama is perfectly trained, completely disciplined and, we sense, the same in private as he is in public, his entire personality subsumed into his political persona. I imagine that a social conversation with Obama would be like drill at a training session.

But even if they would not want to have a glass of wine with him, Obama has a wildly enthusiastic following and he will be elected. Training works. We deplore the homogenization of the American landscape, the shopping malls, franchise restaurants and McMansions, and see the superficial slickness of trained personnel for exactly what it is. But we buy it anyway. We want airports to be antiseptic and glitzy, with mildly interesting displays of semi-art, Tie-Rack and Wilson's Leather, and flight attendants to be bland and polite. Above all, we want presidents to look presidential.

I confess that I'm actually not one of the "we" who wants this. I find shopping malls unpleasant and avoid them. I hate it when employees at my local supermarket interfere with me to ask whether I'm "finding everything ok." All that cleanliness, slickness and glitz is not only wasted on me--it makes me uncomfortable because it sets standards that I don't want to make the effort to meet. All the stylized little interactions that employees in stores, banks and public facilities have been trained to perform--"how are you today?", "have a nice day," and the like--are 1000 little paper-cuts to me. I want either real conversation or no contact at all. Contact is stressful: it has a cost. But one is willing to pay the price if it leads to interesting conversation. These little contacts are, for me, pure cost with no benefit because I am shy.

But most people it seems aren't. Walmart, which cuts costs to the bone wherever it can to maximize profits, hires greeters, presumably because they've determined that most people want to be greeted and my local Vons, which just upgraded its establishment, has trained personnel to ask shoppers whether they're finding everything ok because someone in management has ascertained that most like it. Shy people, like me, put up with it because we have no choice and usually play along politely because we're ashamed of being shy. But most people, it seems, want little interactions as they go about their daily lives and want to conduct their business in settings that are clean, bland, unobtrusive and predictable, so firms train employees to play the part consumers want them to play in casual contact and maintain the bland, sanitized facilities that make them comfortable--muzak for the soul.

But even if most people want slick blandness in casual contacts, all want something more. Beyond those staged interactions and business dealings, they want real conversation, real individuality, real emotion, oomph, unpredictability, soul and heart. And that is what Obama has not got, because he is trained to the core.

Looking every inch the ideal flight attendant in his perfectly tailored blazer, Obama steps off the plane. We want flight attendants to be well-trained but we're not so sure we want that in a president.