Maureen and the Obamanauts

Cyclops and Cunning
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: July 30, 2008

Maureen Dowd is still hooked on mythology and references a Daily Show bit about Obama slaying dragons.

At home, Jon Stewart was poking fun at the grandiosity of the “Obama Quest” and “the Obamanauts.” He showed film clips of “our hero” in chain mail fighting off dragons and a Cyclops in his crusade to come home and rule over Dreamerica.

She is also trying to get Obama to play her literary allusion game by tricking him into comparing himself to brave Ulysses:

By happenstance, on O-Force One I raised the matter of quests and Cyclops with the candidate. Having read that he had left the trail in early June to go back to Chicago and see his daughter Malia perform in “The Odyssey” for theater class, I wondered if that rang any bells on this trip? The hero on a foreign journey, battling through obstacles to get back home, where more trouble would wait?

“The whole sort of siren thing, the Cyclops, that’s interesting,” he said.

Note how cleverly Barack evades making any confirmation or denial of the validity of the analogy. Since he won’t open up to her, she uses the Icarus myth that he told a different reporter.

Unlike an idol, Bobby Kennedy, Obama does not see himself in terms of Greek myth, although he did tell The Times’s Jeff Zeleny on the trip that he knew the risks of “flying too close to the sun.”

And to truly mix the milieus, she throws in a newly appropriated and repurposed term Obamanaut (the phrase has been informally floating through the ether for several months now) as a portmanteau of Obama and Argonaut as in Jason And The Argonauts, today's Movies With Maureen®.

The Obamanauts were so pleased with navigating their complex thicket of global photo-ops — without even one embarrassing picture of Obama hugging an Arab — that they weren’t as wary with the press.

Maureen then lurches into a pointless anecdote whose only purpose is to reveal Obama’s choice of alcoholic beverage is not the beer he swigs on the campaign trial. This is important because Dowd has chronicled the vices of the other candidates.

The senator left his briefing books behind for a rare instance of mingling with his journalism posse at a Berlin restaurant as he sipped a rare “very dry” martini with olives.

It seems Obama is not familiar with the ways of international diplomacy and failed to get his hosts gifts even though they brought him White House warming presents.

I said he could be forgiven for not knowing the customs of a trip that had never taken place before — a mere presumptive nominee of one party being feted like a president. Or, given W.’s repellant effect on Old Europe and Obama’s pheromone effect, better than a president.

And the mention of Barack smelling nice is going to have to do as today’s Veiled Gay Slur®. It’s a stretch, but people expect and look for these small asides so that they can take umbrage at the continued existence of Maureen Dowd.

And speaking of pointless anecdotes, another involves Obama learning the German analogue of one of Maureen’s favorite phrases.

His meeting with Angela Merkel taught him a whole new expression.

“When we were talking about Iran,” he told me, “it turns out that carrots and sticks in German is sweetbread and whips, which I thought was a little more evocative.”

The mention of whips really drew a twinkle in Maureen’s eye, since she had once written a column about Hillary and Barack using nothing but bondage metaphors. She also name checks Borat's other alter-ego showing that she is in tune with all the top satirists.

I said it sounded like a skit with Ali G, sitting on a settee, talking to Madam Chancellor, the “Iron Frau,” about whips.

“That’s the equivalent German expression,” he continued, with an amused smile. “That was a little cultural lesson. Sweetbread and whips. I thought, man, we’re in Berlin ...”

But Obama stops himself before saying anything revealing, which makes him a smart man. And Maureen admires that with yet another tortured take on the Icarus myth.

Odysseus’s heroic trait is his cunning intelligence. Given his inability to get lift off, even flying close to the sun, Obama will need all he can muster.

And if he keeps taking language lessons from foreign heads of state, he may become a cunning linguist as well.

The Second Coming

"My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out."

-Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Is ‘The One’ Cocky or Commander in Chiefy?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: July 23, 2008

It seems that Maureen Dowd did manage to stow away aboard Barack Obama’s press plane or…

O-Force One, as The Chicago Sun Times mockingly calls the candidate’s freshly branded 757, with the captain’s chair embroidered with “Obama-’08/President.”

The psycho-sexual freight of anything called O-Force is not something I really want to touch so it’s good we have Lynn Sweet to blame for this phrase. Not that Maureen isn’t hard at work on the English language. We get our Crossword Puzzle Clue Of The Week® with “lacunae” which is a fancy –schmacy word for “gaps”:

The media behemoth slouching after the senator is scouring his every word, expression, bead of sweat, basketball shot and accessory — are those hiking boots too Bremer? Are the sunglasses too rapper? Will he leave enough time for his glittery groupie, Carla Bruni? — for hints of imperfection that would foretell lacunae in presidential judgment.

Since the column dateline is Jerusalem (aka the NYT Derry, NH field office) the use of slouching invokes either Joan Didion’s use of the phrase “slouching towards Bethlehem” which in and of itself is an allusion to Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming” below:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The apocalyptic imagery of Yeats is mocked, along with Obama with further ironic asides about his exalted image:

The One, as McCain aides sardonically call Obama, glided through Afghanistan, Iraq and Jordan, girding his messianic loins for the inevitable kvetching he would face in Israel as skeptical Jews “try to get a better sense of what’s in Obama’s kishkes.”

Dowd helpfully explains the Yiddish-ism:

So said Nathan Diament of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, in The Daily News, defining “kishkes” as Yiddish for gut.

But it is ‘loins’ that evokes another uncomfortable adjective:

At moments, Obama was acting as though he were already “on a coin,” as Jon Stewart would say. But cocky or not, he needs to swoop up to conquer so Americans can picture him in the role.

But it's not just Americans taken with Obama. He crosses cultural and religious lines.

The One left them swooning in Jordan. A member of the king’s inner circle who attended the chicken-and-rice dinner with King Abdullah and Queen Rania said that Obama had gone a long way toward assuaging their fears that he would be so eager to run away from his paternal family’s Muslim roots and to woo skeptical American Jews that he would not be “the honest broker” they long for after W.’s crazed missionary work in the Middle East.

And with missionary zeal, we can await the Second Coming of The One.