Obama: A Selection from Marilynne Robinson’s What Are We Doing Here? (2018)

“Let us say, as a thought experiment, that History and Providence conspired to create a president suited to twenty-first-century America. He might unite in his own person the two races that are shorthand for difference and division within the society, and have deep personal bonds with both black and white. Race has only the meaning culture gives it—and we learn every day that culture is a heavy-handed enforcer of the distinctions it has made. An ideal president would be one suited to his circumstance, to dealing with the potent aftershocks of an unjust and violent history. If it were clear that he loved and honored, and identified with, both streams of his heritage, he would bring as much humanity to this grievous old affliction as any one person could bring to it.

Only imagine how the unacknowledged empire our country has become would be made more knowing and refined if this president had the memory of passing his childhood among the children of societies that seem remote to most of us, chasing a tattered kite down a muddy road, hearing the call to prayer, learning new forms of courtesy, seeing the effects of lawless government on the lives of good people. Again, if this president had family who were part of the emergence of Africa from centuries of colonialism, a continent at the threshold of the world’s future, a complex and fragile phenomenon capable of igniting and also extinguishing extraordinary individual gifts, he would have a vantage point uniquely suited to his responsibilities toward this volatile planet. In both cases he would have ten thousand times the understanding that is supposed to be acquired in congressional junkets and sophomore years abroad. . . .

A president for whom other societies are not abstractions, who knows that the children of our enemies are as silly and lovely as our own children, would be well suited to helping us live more consistently with our values, granting all the obstacles history has put in his or her path. . . .

The success with which Barack Obama has been estranged in the minds of many Americans, made to seem foreign on precisely the grounds that made him singularly qualified for his office, reflects a refusal to accept what America is—not only a multiethnic and multiracial nation but a pervasive cultural and economic presence in the world, with responsibilities equal to our influence, a daunting thought. We are mighty and the world is, in every way, fragile. Tact and restraint, where possible, are indicated. But we—politicians, journalists, cultural figures—do little to encourage a temperament suited to our role. . . .

It is a remarkable thing to have some meaningful conversation with a president of the United States, in this case a man young enough to be my son. Barack Obama is gracious, poised, and intense in the face of concerns and demands I cannot imagine. There is a sentence in a benediction common in mainline churches like his and mine—‘Return no one evil for evil, but in all things seek the good.’ It seems to me always that his remarkable dignity and resilience must have its source in a transvaluation of this kind. He is extraordinarily alert. His attention runs a little ahead of the moment, to the next question, to the courtesy or reassurance he thinks the moment might be about to demand of him. It must be clear to anyone who has read his books that he is eager to learn from any encounter that might yield insight into a kind of query he brings to experience, which is, I think, an openness to an extremely inductive understanding of value, one that he is always ready to expand and refine. Though he would not apply such words to himself, the president is a philosopher, perhaps a theologian.

In the land of the blind the one-eyed man might seem delusional. There are risks in having an interesting mind in this odd climate we have made for ourselves. There are risks also in being in fact faithful to the faith so many of us claim. The president is taken in some quarters to be non-Christian because he is disinclined to hate his enemies. This can only mean that an uninstructed and unreflective ‘Christianity’ has indeed taken hold in the population. The wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God, according to the Epistle of James. But we have lived for years with the raucous influence of self-declared Christians who are clearly convinced that their wrath and God’s righteousness are one and the same. Then when the president, though he is insulted, balked, and provoked, refuses to yield to anger, his self-possession is apparently unreadable. A considerable part of the population must have ceased to recognize and respect piety, not to mention simple dignity. . . .

My respect for Barack Obama is vast and unshadowed. Given the information, advice, and reflection his decisions have proceeded from, I might have made other choices from time to time. But this by no means casts doubt on his wisdom or motives, any more than it endorses mine. A modern president is alone with endless decisions, many very grave. It is an accident of history that the weight of the world should fall on his or her shoulders, a consequence of our relative stability in a disorderly world and of the basic effectiveness of our political system, which have been indispensable to our ‘greatness,’ if one is inclined to use the word. To have been unfailingly dignified, gracious, competent, and humane under such pressures is a very moving achievement, an endurance that is more than heroic. That this president had no help from his opposition, that they did what they could do to shake and discredit him, to weaken him in this country and therefore in the world, and that he kept his poise through it all and met the demands of his office with deliberate, gentlemanly calm is a gift to our history, an example every one of us can learn from. It is true that he righted the economy, reformed health care, and protected our domestic tranquility as effectively as the availability of homicidal weapons will permit—all great achievements. He has had little help from certain of his friends, who think it is becoming in them to express disillusionment, to condemn drone warfare or the encroachments of national security, never proposing better options than these painful choices, which, by comparison with others on offer, clearly spare lives. The president has done nothing more important than to stand against, above, the vulgar, mean-spirited noise that disheartens the public and alienates good people from politics, which is the one true, essential, and indispensable life of democracy. . . .

There is a beauty at the center of American culture which, when it is understood, is expressed in a characteristic eloquence. Every new articulation renews the present life of the country and enriches historic memory to the benefit of future generations. Barack Obama speaks this language, a rare gift. He is ours, in the deep sense that Lincoln is ours, a proof, a test, and an instruction. We see ourselves in him, and in him we embrace or reject what we are.”—Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here? (2018)