As I stood in the shower preparing to go to a Greensboro Grasshopper’s baseball game, an odd flurry of metaphors sprung to my mind. I’ve been reading Robert Morgan’s excellent biography of Daniel Boone, aptly and simply entitled, Boone, A Biography. Somehow the fascination so many apparently share for Daniel Boone had eluded me; my initial reason for selecting this biography of Boone was its author, Robert Morgan, a very fine North Carolina poet and writer. Morgan had the good fortune to have his novel, Gap Creek, included in Oprah’s Book Club about eight years ago, which boosted his name to instant literary celebrity in the world of book sales and general public acceptance. And, to her credit, Oprah had the good sense to recognize Morgan’s talent although his abilities as a poet and writer were already well established and should have been sufficient without indulging the glamorous notoriety of being paraded before an audience of screaming fans who display an almost blind fealty to the talk show host; however, there are worse punishments for literary accomplishment and a deserving author.
It was Morgan’s characterization of Boone as a poet of the wilderness, his comparisons of Boone’s calm genius for penetrating the dark abode of the untamed western landscape to the literary insights of the great introspective writers, Thoreau, Whitman, and Emerson, which made this retrospective of Daniel Boone even more compelling than the facts regarding the man’s already established ordination as one of the colossal figures in colonial America. Boone, Morgan suggests, was his own experiment, an alchemical paradigm of self transformation which mirrored his participation in the seminal efforts of pre-republican America to reshape itself by taming the new frontier; this indescribable yearning, the restless challenge of self-discovery, self-construction was a trait that exemplified one of the commonly shared characteristics of the typical immigrant. Not surprisingly, the average European immigrant was eager to escape the futility of feudalism, which had prefigured the possibility of the common man to a life devoid of any notion of self-determination: in the new world each man held fast to the promise that each could be his own lord and master, indentured only to himself and the land he claimed for himself and his family.
The metaphors cascading as I showered posited a different frontier, a shining horizon looming just beyond our own eroded, partisan landscape exhausted by self-indulgence, self-aggrandizement, and the loss of courage which distorts self-reliance into a tortured form of endless consumption and greed. The cyclic nature of our political system affords us the opportunity to reshape our institutions as well as the character of our citizenry; a new frontier beckons at the dawn of personal political aspirations and the articulation of the vision by which we may all participate and labor together in the journey to find a new Cumberland Gap.
We moderns are not so different from the settlers who longed for the freedom and solace whispered in the lore of a new Eden, the mythical Kanta-ke; we continue to explore the boundaries of self-awareness all the while endeavoring not to sacrifice either our individuality or our need for balance in the context of community. The complexities of modern societies may restrict the solitary tendencies we often associate with the pioneers of our own westward migration: to be alone in the modern world is perhaps a harsher reality than venturing into the unmarked forests and the shimmering cane breaks of colonial American wilderness.
The campaign to select a new president shares at least some of the ideological bases common in the metaphors alluding to the extension of the colonial American experience–physically and spiritually. While, I prefer to limit the nature and extent of any comparisons of Barack Obama and Daniel Boone, there does appear to be similarities in the way they approach life with a quiet sincerity that earnestly seeks to confront all of its challenges and accomplishments with dignity. Certainly, Obama has the opportunity to find a path through more foreboding figurative mountains which have divided not only a nation from itself but has jeopardized the health of the larger world-wide community. While the current administration has certainly failed to deliver on the obligations the Republic has to its constituency, we, as citizens, must acknowledge our complicity in this failure as we did not discharge our duties with the diligent a vigilant and vibrant democracy demands. Our free press failed us and our personal self-interests diverted serious considerations of the character and direction of the Bush administration. We found contentment in our slothful complaints of never being able to trust a politician while we proceeded to cede our rights to policies constructed on fear, innuendo, greed, and outright falsehood.
To be sure, there have been elements of demagoguery and hatred introduced in this campaign: race, religion, gender, ethnicity, patriotism have Medusan qualities which exact deadly tolls from their serpentine rattles, glib hissing, and seductive beauty. Hillary Clinton’s strident attempts at displaying her mastery of testosterone as if it were a mandatory human growth hormone peculiar only to qualified leaders coupled with the subterranean depths to which her husband and former president of the United States, Bill Clinton, descended when his blatant tactic of racism backfired in the South Carolina primary, eliminated any possibility that I could support her campaign. And to be honest, whether images of her husband’s infamous public denials and word-splitting unfairly shaped my view, or I simply found something in her eyes, her voice, her delivery, her demeanor, and the facts as she recounted them as unreliable, I cannot say; perhaps the damage was cumulative. Until she began her journey and, to use a favorite phrase of hers, was vetted by the primary process, I felt she was the first woman who could become president.
John McCain bears resemblance to a character in a much different tale than the folklore surrounding Daniel Boone: In Steven Vincent Benet’s short story, The Devil and Daniel Webster, the famed orator, Daniel Webster, defends Jabez Stone who sold his soul to the devil. Ole John, it seems, is not the same man who approached Democrats in 2001 to caucus with them as an independent after the rude and callous treatment he received at the hands of his own party. His closets may be filled with skeletons waiting to attend the Celebrity Ball. Sadly, the most valuable political collateral McCain had at his disposal, his military career and notoriety as a maverick, has been compromised by his embracing Bush’s policy on the war and the economy, specifically in the area of tax cuts. I remember a tune from the seventies which proudly announces in one of its lyrics, If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with: since politics routinely mates strange bedfellows, perhaps W and John are not so ill-suited after all.
Barack Obama nears the threshold of opportunity to plunge forward in the exploration of new terrain, pushed by the restless awakening of a re-invigorated electorate. The introspective Boone, partly from his Quaker heritage and upbringing and partly from his wandering in the vast unknown of the wilderness, was transformed by the epic challenges of his quests; he knew the value of loyalty and self-reliance, and he realized the temporal nature of the greatest achievements. No Boone, but a modern pioneer nonetheless, Obama has overcome great obstacles with common dignity, a trait which marked Boone, among other qualities, as an iconic natural leader. Obama substitutes an orator’s eloquence where Boone’s mastery of and immersion in his environment was his poetic capstone. The minions of old politics are still strong, old wounds fester whenever they are not properly dressed and attended, old habits return if we do not maintain our commitment to learning, war threatens when peace is abandoned as false patriotism, prejudice regales itself in fine linens in darkness and whenever our vigilance flags there are times when it parades shamelessly in the light of day.
It’s time to abandon the neo-con version of manifest destiny that has held this nation in its thrall for nearly eight years. If we are to venture into the future with the hope of forging equitable and enduring alliances without duplicitous invocations of self-justification, it ought not be predicated on a falsehood, not even one as well-meaning and provocative as Plato’s foundational lie in The Republic: the artificial distinction of gold and silver and bronze men. The way west has always claimed its casualties; truth must not be one of them.
