I was reading the essay on the Clash in Lester Bangs' Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. No one wrote about rock music better. I laugh when I read Bangs, and that's a good thing.
But this time, I also saw some good advice for Barack Obama, as he prepared for his final debates with Mitt Romney, and, indeed, maps out a way to improve his connection with the average voter, not just leading up to the November election, but beyond, as he sketches out strategies for his second term.
Bangs loved the Clash. He didn't have much of a stomach for feebleness. Like Linda Ronstadt, who Bangs thought was a "mewly mouthed" simper-wimperer. He didn't have any patience for punks who merely griped either, "sprawling in the muck yodeling about what a drag everything is." He was looking for a band willing to stand for something. And he found it in the Clash. Much of what Bangs said about the Clash can serve as a starting point for the Obama campaign as they think about how to sell what they have to offer.
The Republican Party, for all of their loud and forceful celebration of the institution of marriage, and "faith," and the Constitution and the "American spirit," in actuality, like Bangs' misanthropic punks, hates everything. Well, except money. But they complain perpetually about the country - its character, its laziness, its neediness, its impurity. But in the end, except for the few hard-core fanatics occupying the fringes, all of this pessimism, this rejection of everything, is a drag. It's not what brings us into politics. It's what makes us turn away. That was Bangs' reaction to much of the early nihilist punk scene - it was dispiriting.
Bangs boiled it down to this:
(a) You can't like people who don't like themselves; and
(b) You gotta like people who stand up for what they believe in, as long as what they believe is
(c) Righteous.
But how do you define righteousness?
Being righteous means you're more or less on the side of the angels, waging Armageddon for the ultimate victory of the forces of Good over the Kingdom of Death, working to enlighten others as to their own possibilities rather than merely sprawling in the muck yodeling about what a drag everything is.
Like his party, Romney deplores Americans, starting with the intolerable forty-seven percent incapable of taking responsibility for their lives, living off the energy and entrepreneurial, wealth-producing gifts of better men. Aside from his uncompromising love of wealth, Romney is incapable of standing up for anything. A moral and ethical chameleon, he has no core beliefs, adopting any position that might, for pete's sake, help him get elected. And his appetite for office has no connection to anything righteous. Protecting wealth is not a righteous cause, but it is his primary public mission. The glorification of wealth, the impulse to ignore or diminish any other form of human accomplishment, to define success solely as financial achievement, is a practice that only makes sense in the Kingdom of Death. The messy striving and stumbling and searching that characterizes normal human existence is something Romney has never known. Yet that is what we do, it is the central feature of our lives, awkward and fearful and troubled as it may be. That is how we accomplish things. And I feel okay about that. Who needs Romney to tell us all of that is insufficient? That it doesn't count as real success?
So how can Obama be positioned by some polls to lose to this guy? His flat performance in the first debate, his professionalism, his sane matter-of-factness, is, for many, uninspiring. Bangs had always heard that the Clash were vibrant live, wired, electric, yet the first night he saw them they were merely accomplished, professional, talented musicians, playing with skill. And Bangs was bored by them. Much of America sees Obama the same way. They are bored by his professorial manner, his lack of drama, his talent and skill.
Several nights after being disappointed by the Clash, Bangs saw the performance he had been hoping for. Part of it was the venue - a shit hole, that looked "like an abandoned meatpacking room - large and empty with cold stone floors and stark white walls." Connecting with the spirit of rock and roll, one that thrives in garages and basement clubs and grimy bars, the Clash gave voice to something vital:
The politics of rock 'n' roll, in England or America or anywhere else, is that a whole lot of kids want to be fried out of their skins by the most scalding propulsion they can find, for a night they can pretend is the rest of their lives, and whether the next day they go back to working shops or to boredom on the dole or American TV doldrums in Mom 'n' Daddy's living room, nothing can cancel the reality of that night in the revivifying flames...
That's what Obama has to find a way to capture. He has to set aside his professionalism, even if it, like the Clash's, is in the service of righteousness. He has to conjure those "revivifying flames," pulling people out of their doldrums, restoring them to life, as a first step toward engaging them in the struggle against the forces of the Kingdom of Death.
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