Literary news

There is the oddest firestorm blowing up around sites I read over the Obama gossip book by the Times's Jodi Kantor, and the generous excerpts in today's Times dishing out a tale of conflict between Rahm Emanuel and Michelle Obama--between Firebaggers howling over its revelation of Barack's weak moral character (as if a book of this sort could "reveal" much of anything beyond a general pattern of reported movements from room to room, and quotes from those low enough in the hierarchy to be able to speak freely), and Obots screeching over it as part of a whole election-year conspiracy to make Michelle look "unlikeable"--so that the two sides never quite make contact, like King Pellinore and Sir Grummore in their duel in The Sword in the Stone, thwacking away at each other without effect until they both crash into trees and knock themselves out.

I couldn't find a visual of T.H. White's elderly knights, but here is a nice Questing Beast by Arthur Rackham, for someone else's retelling

I don't know if these people are just unfamiliar with gossip, [jump]
or with the narrative laws that good gossip must obey, but the First Lady is the unambiguous heroine of this story: it's about an Obama who is not in any sense weak but rather unresolved, between the opposing pressures of the wicked Realpolitiker Rahm over one shoulder and the good, but scarily bold Michelle over the other, and she ultimately wins, and we all get universal health care, or the closest to it we were going to come, with room for improvement built in. Heck, the story may even be true. Sort of.


It is not a question of making her "likeable" or "unlikeable", in any event, because she is likeable; that's one of the givens. Everybody except a few swamp creatures is aware of this, as all attempts to hang one of those pseudo-scandals or "gates" on her continue to prove vain in the long run. If anything, it makes the Affordable Care Act more likeable by tagging it with her initials. Since the television news won't discuss what is in the ACA (boring!) this will come to be the only thing most people know about it until one of its more helpful provisions drops into their lap ("I can't get insurance!" "Oh, actually, you can..."), and it's all to the good.

Though Kantor herself sounds a little Timesy-twee. From a 2004 profile:

Jodi Kantor was 6 when her mother taught her to find the “Ninas” in Al Hirschfeld drawings in The Times. By fifth grade, she was turning to theater critic Frank Rich to mine tips for her school productions. As a teenager, she so identified with the paper, that she woke up putting the day of the week together with The Times’ special section. “If it’s Tuesday, it’s ‘Science Times’....”