Obama as illusionist. Drawing by Sasha Welm.
BY J.K. TROTTER
Before I review Jason Mattera’s book, Obama Zombies (Threshold; $25), I want to suggest two changes to his work that should make his ideas clearer to readers. Wherever Mattera mentions the word “conservative” or something variant thereof, scratch it out with an ink pen and write “conservative policy”. And where he writes “health care,” again scratch it out and write “health insurance”. His arguments, and his book, make much more sense after these edits are made.
Now, on to the book, which was born out of the election of Barack Obama. This event both surprised and did not surprise this book’s author, according to whom John McCain—Obama’s primary opponent—“was an atrocious presidential candidate” who “looked like death.” Mattera pumps much blood about McCain’s military history, specifically his experience as prisoner of war in Vietnam, yet the narrative McCain’s campaign built out of his heroism strikes Mattera as lukewarm and ineffectual. “McCain’s message was about self-sacrifice,” he writes, “which was, eh, okay.” The glib tone pervades the work, which might be an inheritance of its very real and consequential subject matter: the easy transformation, in contemporary America life, of cultural rapport into political power.
To be clear, Mattera deems Obama’s tenure an utter failure: “We’ve seen a president who distrusts his country, genuflects to dictators around the world, and takes massive dumps on the idea of American exceptionalism,” he writes. Obama’s various failings are not, as noted, the primary matter of Obama Zombies, as the book’s title suggests; rather, it is the generation (in which Mattera counts himself) largely credited with the success of Obama’s presidential campaign—namely, 18-29 year-olds, the demographic of which Mattera calls, yes, “Obama Zombies”.
Mattera’s first method of illustrating his thesis is plain, even shopworn: scouring televisual records of the 2008 Obama campaign and waiting for someone—usually a college student or celebrity—to say or do something ridiculous. For example: during election coverage arranged by MTV at a university in Florida, Sarah Phillips, a student, was recorded saying, upon witness of the night’s Democratic victory, “It’s probably the most excited I’ve ever been in my entire life. I seriously think I had an emotional seizure or something. My whole body siezed up. I couldn’t breathe. It’s like I really mattered . . . I picked the president! That was me! . . . I think I’m in love with America right now!” Such fervor, as anyone who was a conscious human being in 2008 will agree, was widespread.
All of this excitement baffles Mattera. Why are these young people so enamored by this unknown senator from Illinois? Because the Zombies were not drawn to him by default, i.e., by repulsion to another candidate. This is Mattera’s theory, anyway, which if evaluated in light of some of his “takedowns” of figures such as Jon Stewart (who is “self-loathing”, according to Mattera, presumably because he employs a stage name) and Stephen Colbert (who is merely “self-hating”), shall begin to draw concern.
Whom Mattera discusses in very little detail is George W. Bush, that president we had for eight years before Obama. The political moment of 2008 can be difficult to recall correctly because, while Obama was obviously incumbent to the presidency, he wasn’t yet the actual commander-in-chief. Bush was. And in the years leading up to that year’s election no person took a stronger beating than him. The possibility missing from Mattera’s book is that without Bush there would be no Obama, or, to be more specific, no particular fervor which swirled around him and anointed him with powers of foresight and wisdom. To many of the Americans quoted in Mattera’s book, Obama seems not only inspiring or affirming but penitential, the public’s reward for enduring eight long years of a very unpopular presidency.
But no. Mattera’s theory of Obama’s success is this: the voting public was systemically fed misinformation about the fiscal and social policies with which Obama marketed himself, and also suffered from the most technologically-advanced presidential campaign in history. The Republican party—or, variously, “conservatives”—had no chance winning. Plus, “Gramps,” Mattera repeats, speaking of McCain, “looked like death.”
Mattera is correct to recognize the evolving, and growing, influence of media on the outcomes of electoral politics. He writes somewhat well about the game the news cycle makes of campaigning. This game, he suggests, rotates through trials of identity, race, religion, class, education, and so on. But instead of reporting on this game, the primary product of which is caricature and distortion, Mattera elects to play it himself. For example, Mattera quotes from an on-air transcript of a conversation between MSNBC News Live host Tamron Hall and Chicago Tribune reporter Jill Zuckman, who was reporting on a television advertisement touting McCain’s military record. “Senator Obama’s got a great success story, too,” Zuckman says, “and it’s just a different one and I think voters are equally impressed with what he’s all about.”
Mattera, verbatim: “Ah, yes, the story of a kid who was sired by Ph.D. parents, went to two Ivy League schools, and grossed millions in book deals is somehow comparable to the hellish brutality Senator McCain faced as a prisoner of war. Beam yourself back down to reality, Zuckman.”
It’s true that though Obama’s father never finished his doctorate, his mother did, and it’s also true that Obama graduated from Columbia and Harvard, at both of which he almost certainly benefited from affirmative action policies in place. He has written two best-selling memoirs. And yet—and this is perhaps to Mattera’s credit—this remains a difficult position to argue from. It seems vulgar to discuss the extrapolitical life of John McCain, so I won’t here, but that leaves Mattera’s statement unanswered. Even so, do we really want to weigh the personal hardships of presidential candidates? Is that a productive discourse? After all, Mattera himself seems to resist any judgements not strictly based on policy.
The author persistently critiques Hollywood—and its central figure, the celebrity—because, as Mattera argues, its members gain the most from the free market yet consistently favor candidates who wish to regulate it. This dissonance has trickled down to mere consumers, especially Zombies, who vote against their own interests. This is Mattera’s central thesis: that popular culture has made us unable to recognize what it best for us; that individuals like Sean Combs—the overfamous rapper and entertainment mogul—have replaced politicians as the monuments of public life.
Combs, apparently, is an exemplar of the free market because of his out-sized success. Here is how Mattera sees it:
As a boy, Combs was born in the public housing projects of Harlem, New York, and was only a child when his father was tragically murdered. He attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., while interning at Uptown Records in New York City. . . . Today, for better or worse (for worse) . . . Combs is a household name. . . . Diddy loved music, loved promotion, loved the spotlight, and worked his derrière off to achieve his dreams. Uncle Sam didn’t orchestrate it. He did. Not Washington.
This paragraph is a rather large tactical error. Mattera wishes to see federal government—all government—end its involvement in the lives of private human beings. And yet he mentions that Combs was “born in the public housing projects of Harlem, New York.” Who funds public housing? Combs, had he lacked proper housing (and, very likely, health care via Medicaid) may have had a very different life: the reason for which the social contract—funded by taxpayers, administered by government agencies—exists in the first place.
It’s clear that Mattera has read his Ayn Rand. He salts his prose in a manner intended to convince the reader that he or she is essentially awesome and super-talented and hence should not be taxed. It’s Rand’s method, paraphrased and interspersed with one-liners, hey-ohs, jabs. For both clear policy and a humorous perspective on the political scene, Obama Zombies serves a poor, incoherent model. When Mattera has something to say, he tends to muddle either verifiable facts or his own arguments.
Take his stance on health care, for which he introduces Gabriel Humphreys, whom MTV interviewed for a report called “The Young, Hot, and Uninsured.” According to the report, Humphreys injured himself while snowboarding but delayed seeking medical treatment because he doesn’t possess health insurance and would therefor have to pay for the treatment (surgery) without subsidies.
Here is Mattera: “Hey, dude, if you don’t have health care, and don’t want to pay for it, then don’t go snowboarding! If you still believe in personal responsibility, any personal responsibility, raise your hand. Why should you, I, or anyone have to fund this brother’s [sic] snowboarding accident?” Two things. First: As mentioned before, Mattera shifts the discussion from health insurance to health care by equating the two terms. (This is an important and possibly conscious decision on Mattera’s part: it is the necessary condition of advancing the argument that health care—all health care—ought to go the way of plastic surgery and LASIK, which is to say the way of the free market.) Second: the idea of “personal responsibility” is, in fact, admissible here. If Humphreys wasn’t prepared to suffer injury, he should have avoided the possibility of injury. But what if, instead of tearing his rotator cuff, he was diagnosed with cancer? Is it within his personal responsibility to avoid cancer? Mattera’s question—why I should help subsidize this man’s health care with my tax dollars—is answered simply: because under that system he—everyone—would do the same for me.
A popular counterargument says that redistributive policies aren’t inherently anti-capitalist but inevitably become so when made government policy. Under this argument, various charities, and churches in particular, ought to administer (or subsidize) health care to those who cannot afford it by themselves. In theory, there’s nothing obviously wrong with this idea—it reflects the arrangement of early America—but tax dollars still go to those institutions in the first place, and those institutions would inevitably request more and more tax breaks and grants (given their responsibility to administer free health care) that eventually the arrangement would begin to resemble either the for-profit health care industry or the socialized systems of Western Europe. Since this experiment rests upon the certainty that tithing is preferable to taxing, that those who help others ought to do so out of their will rather than a forced contribution, then why would a more efficient means of ensuring affordable access to health care remain beyond the frame of a person’s will? Wouldn’t you want to guarantee, on a moral principle, that those less fortunate than yourself aren’t financially ruined by one hospital visit?
It’s not as if America doesn’t have a de facto socialized health care system—it does. But it operates not out of one policy but in isolated services to certain populations: Medicare (seniors), Medicaid (the poor), CHIP (children), various state laws (Romneycare, most famously), the EMTALA legislation (for those who cannot afford the emergency room), TRICARE (servicemembers and veterans), and a collection of government policies, charities and religious organizations for almost every condition or disease. Is this patchwork array preferable to a more open and less confusing system? It’s true that the status quo has enabled much innovation in health care, from which we get the koan that America has the “best health care system in the world.” But who would mistake our arrangement, which actively conspires to deny people treatment—either as a function of the profit motive or actuarial science—for some kind of international example? Who would confuse a Gucci store for a hospital?
Then Mattera attempts semantics. Is health care a “right” or a “commodity”? Mattera argues the latter by telling us—with complete seriousness—that “food is a much more basic necessity than health care, yet we do not have food-based insurance, or even food-based savings accounts.” Actually, we do. It’s called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps, into which every citizen pays.
Moments such as these deflate Mattera’s book, and will anger the reader, especially one who reads authors like Mattera in order to rehearse and confirm his own political convictions. What’s strange is that when Mattera confuses terms (namely, health insurance versus health care) it is often to his tactical disadvantage. It would be hard to argue that he believes himself when he insists that “personal responsibility” will solve the problem of how to provide health care to 300 million American citizens. I say this because I do not think Mattera understands what he is actually saying, particularly about health care.
For example: Why, he asks, not just exercise the free market? Why: because health care within a free market which is not profitable will not be administered. Mattera would be forced to admit this. It’s the free market. Yet in health care we are not talking about cellular phones or shoes. We are talking about the welfare of human beings. The market works in a lot of contexts, but it probably will never work in the health care industry, or at least not directly. Mattera might read this last sentence and think, but what about all those “for-profit” health insurance companies? Again: health insurance is not health care. The point of health care reform was to ensure the former to guarantee the latter. The underlying debate is whether we have a right to treatment. It’s a very good question. The only piece of insight Obama Zombies adds, however, is that Mattera is unaware of food stamps.
Mattera’s treatment of health care is intended to demonstrate the mortal sin of government: wealth redistribution. Mattera is slightly more skilled here than when he’s talking about celebrities or health care. The anecdote he provides to illustrate his point is fairly well-known. In April of 2009, a young woman named Alyssa Cordova videotaped interviews with students at George Mason University. The conceit was this: the students were asked whether they would favor a “grade redistribution” program whereby students with certain grade point averages would relinquish their extra points to students who didn’t earn enough good grades to graduate. This is, of course, a stupid idea, and the George Mason students said so. Then the students were asked if they supported raising tax rates on the upper echelon of taxpayers. The students were unanimous: they supported the tax hike, which is—yes—a method of wealth redistribution. Then Cordova asked what the difference was between redistributing grades and redistributing income. I won’t quote the students’ defenses, nor Mattera’s heckling, because the former were probably edited down to inanity (it was, after all, for YouTube) and because the latter just laughs. So there is no difference!
There is a difference. Unlike grades, which are only earned—and that’s to say nothing of the SAT tutors high school students either employ or (as college students) become—wealth comes to an individual from many sources. One of these is income. Another is inheritance. Wealth redistribution, as a model of social welfare, seeks to account for the fact that humans are born into wildly different circumstances; that the conditions, the household, the money in which a person is raised depend nothing on “individualism” or “working hard” or any language involving the straps of boots but pure, utter luck. It’s true that some very successful people arise from not much of anything. But the imaginary figure whom Mattera often conjures—the go-getter who doesn’t need and has never needed the government—is extinct. I will not bore you with the details of the government’s silent, benevolent influence on your life, from the food you eat to the roads on which you bike or drive, to the water you drink, to the food stamps you might need if you lose your job, from beneficial (but yes, sometimes messy and inefficient) government agencies to—as Mattera would surely agree—the most powerful military force in the world. Every successful American benefits, in some way, from the government. That’s bad news for someone who instinctively distrusts the government to do its job—to even exist.
Mattera devotes a delightful though often strange and misguided chapter to two important figures in entertainment: Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Mattera is correct to assert that, when considering the cultural forces involved in ensuring Obama’s victory, these two men cannot be ignored. Stewart (and by extension, Colbert, who was eventually granted his own show) is known for his satirical news program, The Daily Show, which Comedy Central broadcasts. The Daily Show in its present form debuted in 1999, but it rose to prominence only with the second election of George W. Bush. Stewart’s basic-cable status never limited his appeal. (His quips benefitted much from the nascent video-sharing website, YouTube.) And his influence is obvious: Stewart’s haranguing of Bush-era policies, and the cast of politicians who enabled them, created a generation of young viewers distrustful of the ability of grown-up policy-makers to say what they mean. And nearly all of them were capable of voting in November 2008. Did Stewart enable Obama’s presidency more than we’d like to think a “fake-news” anchor could?
Mattera thinks so. But this is not, he argues, to Stewart (or Colbert’s) credit. They merely indulge young people’s desire for a good joke. “Replacing any type of traditional news source with acerbic comedians is crazy,” he writes. “Young people would rather laugh than think, feel than analyze. Humor is a feeling, so it plays right into the left’s best weapon: emotion.” Mattera does not understand his own arguments here. Has he ever watched an episode of The Daily Show? If he’d chosen to sit down and watch, he might have recognized Stewart’s method. In place of critiquing the emotings of excited college students at political rallies, Stewart walks his audience through the prevarication and silliness of American politics, a model of investigation which “traditional news sources” have chosen, out of either fear or money, to eschew.
His indictment of comedy might be Mattera’s biggest mistake. To Mattera, it’s like a taste or a temperature: a physical sensation. Literally, a “feeling”. This is terribly wrong. Comedy is a subset of thought, a powerful tool of recognition and resistance. Stewart and Colbert employed it foremost for entertainment. It required the accident of a terrible presidency for their words to sublime into political power.
I think Mattera is trying to accomplish something similar with this book. The technique’s all wrong, though. He ventures African American Vernacular English for zero reason except shock. He brands Gideon Yago, a former news correspondent for MTV, “effete,” “the mother of all metrosexuals”, “the uberwoman of all men,” and “tight-pants Gideon”. He deploys the exclamation point in the same manner a better author might use a question mark, or a period. The effect is disarray: judgement and accusation without reason or reflection, and throughout a mercurial containment of his own hatred. I wonder if this was intentional in some way. Obama Zombies might be a purely performative work intended to communicate Barack Obama’s effect not on those who voted for him, but on Mattera himself.
Obama Zombies is a book in search of blame. Whom to charge, though? Mattera seems unsure. Is it MTV, whose undue influence on the minds of young people manufactured Obama’s victory? Is it academia, with its proliferation of books that aren’t The Federalist? Is it Obama himself? Mattera does offer a clear explanation for the Republican defeat: John McCain. Here I’m inclined to agree with him. McCain’s campaign, as Mattera notes, was painful to watch and must have been embarassing to support. (You need only one figure, Sarah Palin, to understand the cynicism and stupidity of McCain and his handlers.) This explanation would lend legitimacy to the idea that Obama is a bad President, at least according to the terms by which Mattera judges his leaders.
But Obama is in fact a pretty decent president. He inherited a broken economy and has worked assidously to fix it. He passed health care reform, which, though imperfect, will protect citizens from documented abuses and excesses. Though he won’t take credit for it—doing so would disadvantage his 2012 run—he is responsible for the maneuvering required to abolish “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”. And he ended the murderous legacy of Osama bin Laden.
The reality of the Obama presidency makes Mattera’s effort less a book than an aesthetic exercise. It physically pains Mattera that Obama sits in the White House. It is not a huge discovery that a lot of people, on the other hand, really like Obama, especially the facts which his skin color and upbringing convey: that you can be an ethnic minority, that you grow up in a single-parent home, and still become the President of the United States. Mattera treats this sort of recognition—Obama/President as symbol, not policy-maker—as an error in human judgement. It’s difficult to disagree with him here. You should vote in your interests, which is to say in terms of policy, not identity. But you’re not going to convince Mattera that a single voter favored Obama because of his policies. Though you’ll wonder which manner of voting, in terms of Obama, Mattera thinks is worse.
Mattera’s “six-point battle plan”, which concludes his book, is refreshing in its honesty. Bush was “reckless”. Government “ruins lives”. Reagan is “the greatest modern president”. But yet again I don’t think Mattera has walked himself through his own arguments. After and before which he encourages his readers to change the world they inhabit by embracing conservative policies, he informs us: “All the ‘we can change the world’ mumbo jumbo we hear on commencement day is utopian and immature. Truly. We’ve got to grow up.” Can or cannot young people—can anyone—do much of anything about their station in life? Mattera can’t quite decide.
The author could be discredited for his approach. He does, after all, argue that “Obama Zombies” would, with enough education, rescind their political convictions. This means that he thinks the Zombies are generally stupid, perhaps as a consequence of their youth or their generation’s anomie. But they’re not stupid, and Mattera knows this. The only level on which he can engage them is by calling them crazy, or brainless, or simply ridiculous. Which is, frankly, at least a little reassuring. Nobody ever gains much of anything with such little to say.
Yet it’s a little heartbreaking, I want to add, that Mattera has chosen to call those whom he hates most—the supporters of President Obama—as something other than human. This kind of strategy befits his book, which gives its reader everything it promises—several conspiracy theories, the “unmasking” of liberal media, and the frequent hypocrisies of celebrities. (Al Gore’s “Live Earth” concert series, and what it intended to accomplish, remains baffling.)
But such a method won’t work in politics, the arena Mattera obviously hopes to enter. In that sphere of American life, fractured and ridiculous as it is, you are required to engage your adversaries as human beings.
