Barack Obama will never write an acclaimed vampire novel because
he has no respect for ritual.
To make sense of that statement and explain why the
indictment within it matters, let’s examine a few examples of genre
fiction before sifting through evidence offered by the president
himself.
Other literary genres have charms of their own, but the
choices that horror novelists make are especially important because
they often touch on questions of ritual. As any priest, liturgist,
relief pitcher, band leader, wedding planner, barista, chef,
musician, teacher, bonsai gardener, or tea ceremony devotee could
tell you, it is human to take comfort in ritual. A local Starbucks
said exactly that before ceding space on its door to an
announcement about the return of the pumpkin latte.
It’s hard to blend genres successfully, so my hat’s off to
Stephanie Meyer and
her bestselling “Twilight” series of vampire romances. That said, I
sympathize with horror writer Stephen King, who
took a swipe at Meyer for mixing “ethical and sensitive” with
“undead.”
King thinks vampires should be scary, and seems discomfited by
people who flout literary custom for artistic rather than satirical
purposes, as Meyer has done. One assumes he has no quarrel with
Terry Pratchett, because when Pratchett had a female vampire
renounce bloodsucking to join the City Watch that polices the
metropolis in his Discworld fantasy novels, he was playing
amusingly against (blood) type. But Meyer’s undead “Edward” is
another story.
Edward is freakishly strong and preternaturally quick, as
vampire lore suggests that he must be. Yet we meet him in high
school. However long he is alleged to have lived before being
smitten with a classmate named Bella, Edward acts like a lovestruck
teenager afterward, even seeking advice from a vampire
father-figure. In the Twilight saga, romance trumps horror, so it
seems fair to ask whether literary mashups of that kind make one
genre or the other a junior partner. Unfortunately,
Zombie Jane Austen does not provide helpful guidance in this
area.
The vampire “family” in Stephanie Meyer’s fiction owes a
debt to “The Twilight Zone.” Remember the episode of that iconic TV
series where the unresolved question was whether a monster visible
only to William Shatner was destroying the wing of an aircraft in
flight? That was innovative for its time, because an “old-school”
monster would have been visible to everyone on Shatner’s side of
the plane. It’s no great leap from that inverted convention to the
way that Meyer now treats favorite vampires and werewolves as
models of self-discipline.
Anyone with misgivings about Meyer’s approach might find
vindication in John Steakley’s “Vampire$,”
which looks at the battle between good and evil from a conservative
point of view. Writing more than a decade before Meyer hit it big,
Steakley updated customs of the horror genre rather than ignoring
them. Steakley’s vampires are evil creatures utterly incapable of
love, angst, or protective impulses. His tale of mercenaries who
hunt them with the backing of the church and the personal blessing
of the pope depends in part on ritual. His vampires do not cast
reflections, but can be hurt by wooden stakes. A crossbow-carrying
priest is part of the mercenary team, and whether they’re Catholic
or not, the vampire hunters attend Mass before doing battle with
particularly loathsome fiends. One member of the team is an expert
pistol shot, but Steakley bows to convention by having the gunman
discover that blessed silver bullets make better ammunition against
the undead than standard hollow-point rounds.
It will be obvious from what I’ve said so far that
although Stephanie Meyer is a bestselling author and John Steakley
is not, he has more respect for ritual than she does. That
predisposition combines with his talent to make his story more
engaging than hers. The
critic who called “Twilight” a “misogynistic piece of
hardboiled crapola” was being unduly and hilariously harsh, but it
would be fair to say that Stephanie Meyer has done more to subvert
the art of horror writing than to advance it.
That brings us back to Barack Obama, whose penchant for
informality is such that he torpedoes ritual even without meaning
to, as when presenting other heads of state with self-aggrandizing
gifts, or privately seething over rather than celebrating the
prowess of U.S. Navy SEAL teams, as Pamela Geller and Robert
Spencer (in their new book, The Post-American Presidency)
report happened when a SEAL sniper on the fantail of a destroyer
dispatched the Somali jihadist pirates who had been holding a
merchant marine captain hostage.
While that reaction was little-known because difficult to
substantiate, President Obama’s musical tastes have made headlines.
He nixed the playing of “Hail to the Chief” by an ensemble from the
U.S. Marine Band. As his Press Secretary explained at the time,
this president “is not a ‘Hail to the Chief’ kind of guy.” He
prefers to be introduced like a lounge act with access to a piano,
entering White House conference rooms over the strains of songs
like “Desert Rose,” and so another American ritual was
benched.
If you broaden the definition of “ritual” to include those
times when it is synonymous with “custom,” our president’s aversion
to both becomes even more obvious. Having confused informality with
authenticity, and grown by dint of community organizing and bad
sermons into an adversarial relationship with competence, Obama
stands alone among recent presidents in making private-sector
experience a disqualifier for top jobs on his economic team. He is
also alone in bowing to dictators, and alone in describing the
Muslim call to prayer as “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth.”
Ironically, that last remark (delivered to Nicholas Kristof of the
New York Times in March, 2007) might describe the only
ritual about which Barack Obama is publicly enthusiastic. We
already know that his enthusiasms
don’t extend to common American observances like the
Seventh-Inning Stretch or the hand over your heart during the
Star-Spangled Banner. Yet Kristof’s column bore the fulsome title,
“Obama: Man of the World.”
The presidential mania for informality would be a small
thing if all it meant was that even with ghostwriting help from
F.O.B. (Friend of Barack) Bill Ayers, Obama won’t intrude on
territory already settled by writers like Stephanie Meyer and John
Steakley. But anyone who dismisses ritual as fluff, shoehorns mere
rhetoric into places where ritual should be, or sneers at the pomp
and circumstance with which ritual sometimes travels, is chopping
at more than the foundations of horror literature. Willingness to
perform ritual when appropriate is a mark of respect. Ritual
bridges past, present, and future in ways that informality and
improvisation cannot. Anyone dead-set against ritual bears
watching, but perhaps not listening to.
