Like many supporters of health care reform, I am distressed by what I see as right-wing attempts to disrupt civil discussions on the matter. Practically no one disputes that we are facing a financial crisis over health care costs and health care coverage. My own 27-year-old son and his wife, who have just started a small business, currently cannot afford health insurance. I find it demoralizing that, rather than working to fix things, people are more interested in scoring political points or (as is undoubtedly the case with some) throwing fits over the fact that they have a black president. Where are the grown-ups?
I believe we do have a grown-up for a president. But is that enough to restore order to the political arena?
I find myself wondering if Obama is a kind of Squire Allworthy from Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. Allworthy is the squire of an estate and a justice of the peace. He is a good and reasonable man who believes that he lives in a decent world. He thinks that if he is virtuous and prudent—those who are the key words in the book—then all will be well.
Squire Allworthy’s judgments are always being criticized by people who are moved more by passion than reason. Sometimes the same people will change their minds and, after first criticizing him for being too lenient in a case, change their minds and accuse him of being too harsh. Allworthy, however, doesn’t allow himself to be swayed by the whims of the mob and does what he believes is right.
But Allworthy doesn’t see just how dark the world can get. He doesn’t realize that there are people who, while professing virtue, will twist principle to serve their own selfish ends. These people include Blifil, his nephew, and the two men whom he has chosen to tutor Blifil and Tom. As a result of their plots, Allworthy almost loses Tom, the only one who really loves him, and must rely on a providential turn of events for a happy ending.
I remember reading a close stylistic analysis of Fielding’s writing a number of years back by literary scholar Claude Rawson. Rawson says that, in Tom Jones, Fielding is writing from the position of an upper class man who has every reason to believe that his humane, urbane, and reasoned view of the world will prevail. His sentences are balanced and his plot of virtue rewarded is masterfully worked out.
In Fielding’s later writings, however, Rawson detects panic. Fielding’s prose no longer moves forward with the same assurance. The world isn’t working out as Fielding planned—his values aren’t triumphing—and he doesn’t know how to respond.
I don’t know if Obama is an Allworthy, but I am. I operate under the premise that people can intelligently, sensitively, and maturely work through their differences. I acknowledge that there are difficulties. I know that no one can have everything he or she wants, that sometimes we must settle for less than the ideal, and that people have histories that make them difficult to work with. Yet still I think that enlightenment and progress will prevail.
In the final third of Tom Jones, Tom goes to the city and finds his values under assault as never before. While he never sacrifices his deeply held principles, he does start losing his way, becoming a kept man for a Lady Bellaston and telling half truths to Sophia, the love of his life. Then justice and virtue win out, he learns the lessons that he must learn if he is to become a responsible leader of society, and he returns to reconcile with Squire Allworthy.
After the Holocaust museum shooting, I wrote that we need leaders to stand up to hysteria the way Beowulf stands up to Grendel, whom I was reading as society’s simmering inner rage. I saw McCain being a Beowulf when he stood up to fanatics in his crowds, and I note that Newsweek columnist Eleanor Clift calls for Republican leaders to make similar stands today. I believe that Obama is trying to stand in a position of moral authority and, young though he is, I think he will succeed if he persists. It is as though his legitimacy as leader is being tested, with many of the protesters doing everything they can to test that legitimacy (including even calling his American birth certificate into question). He must not panic.
And we who want him to succeed can’t panic either. We too must stand tall as civil discourse is assailed, each in our own community.
So can America grow up like Tom grows up? Or are we doomed to be perpetual adolescents, forever acting out? I guess I still hold on to the Fielding belief that enough of us will act as grown-ups to insure a happy ending.
