Watching the last debate between Hillary and Obama, in which no punches were landed and niceness, even if slightly insincere, was the word of the day, I thought of my man in a new guise: The brother from another planet.
Whether or not you buy the whole transcendance-of-partisanship thing, you have to admit that his Kenyan-Kansan legacy puts an interesting twist on the black-white rift that has defined so much of modern American politics. And in his Motown suit and pre-fro sixties short haircut, he even looks like a throwback to the style of late fifties. Think of Michael Rennie in The Day the Earth Stood Still, whose character landed on earth preaching peace & harmony — before it was too late! (I know, I’ve invoked that movie here before; I guess I saw it an influential age. I can still remember the lobbying effort my brother Brian made in order to convince us to watch that on TV instead of our standby for that time slot, Rocky and Bullwinkle)
Just as I was slipping into a moonage daydream of Democratic peace making, I read that NASA had sent the Beatles’ song “Across the Universe” across the universe. The space agency sent the Lennon composition, via its Deep Space Network antenna, toward the North Star, Polaris, 431 light years away, before anyone (or thing) out there had a chance to request it. This was done with the blessings of Ringo and Paul, though perhaps the latter wondered why NASA had not considered one of his songs.
Actually, I always thought “Across the Universe” a kind of depressing song; that was part of its charm. Coming in the wake of the Beatles’ visit to India, the chorus couples the Hindu chant “Jai guru deva om” with John’s own odd non-affirmation: “Nothing’s going to change my world.”
Bummer! Is that the message we want to send to the universe? Sounds more like the message that the status quo of our party, and our country for that matter, want to send to the electorate. “You cannot change the rules of the game,” is what Clintonistas like Sidney Blumenthal mean when they speak of fulfilling partisanship rather than transcending it. In order for them to win, the other side must lose. It’s how they keep score.
The last time NASA sent a rock song into the stratosphere was when they included “Johnny B. Goode” on the Voyager playlist, amidst recordings of Bach, Beethoven and pan pipes from the Solomon Islands. That was launched over twenty years ago and they finally got word back from space:
“Send more Chuck Berry!”