Live long and prosper
That’s what we hope for President-elect Obama and for the rest of us. The sooner the better.
There was a time that being a pop-culture fan was frowned upon. I remember when as a senior in Stephen Dunn’s fiction class I wandered into class early and found a largish student reading a magazine. “What are you reading?” I asked, because it looked familiar. None-too-pleased but caught in the headlights, he lifted it up for me to see, and it was indeed the Comics Journal. “Oh, I write for that,” I said. I watched the strain of being seen in flagrante delicto drain away and a friendship was born. In the 1970’s and 80’s, being a comic-book or fantasy or science-fiction or horror fan meant exchanging secret signals like the early Christians.
All this has drained away as the pop cult has grown from clandestine conclaves into the megachurches of Comic Con and the global multiplex. And being of this generation that did that, Barack Obama is revealed, unsurprisingly, as a “Star Trek” fan. This will delight my friend Larry Nemecek to no end, and rightly so: Like Obama’s election, “Star Trek” has always represented hope. Jesus had it almost right: It’s the geek who shall inherit the earth.
Now it’s the elitists I feel sorry for. This results partly from my usual siding with an underdog, and largely from my deep gratitude to great artists with small fan bases. Increasingly, we live in a post-text age. (As I often tell corporate writing clients when reviewing their existing efforts, “This is too texty. Nobody’s reading Great Russian Novels any more.”) As Wallace Shawn noted in “The Designated Mourner,” soon no one will grieve for the loss of John Donne.
As liberating as it is to publicly carry around a “graphic novel” (really just an overpriced and beautifully printed comic book, one that won’t decay into brittle but beautifully aromatic pulp), I continue to hope for a dialectical synthesis, one where a discussion of Tony Stark’s roiling inner conflict can glide effortlessly into references to “Hamlet” and onto Jung, and necessarily back to Joseph Campbell on Darth Vader, an unformed man hiding in an encasement of his own making. Mr. Obama holds hope for us in that arena as well, because while “Star Trek” inspired him, it’s a lifetime of heady reading that’s driving his policy efforts. So maybe that’s it: High culture rules the head, while pop culture holds our heart.