Tall Tales

The spurious folk legends and tall tales that grow up around a famous American often can tell us something real and valid about that person. That is because such yarns usually have and gain their popularity and plausibility from a connection with the person’s actual character and deeds. The stories that stick and spread tend to fit the person they are told about to some degree and to reflect something true about him, false though they may be. Thus the folklore is full of tales of the bold, daring, pathfinding, larger than life deeds of Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, and Davy Crocket, while there are no similar legends about, say, John Quincy Adams. That is because Boone, Carson, and Crockett really were the sort of men the exaggerated yarns make them out to be. Similarly there are all sorts of myths about the wisdom and good character of Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and George Washington but not about Aaron Burr or Franklin Pierce.

That is as true today as it was in the earlier days of the republic. Many of the silly yarns about Bill Clinton had to do with shifty deals, crooked politics, picaresque sexual exploits, and general slick business. We had such stories bouncing all over the country about Clinton (and not about such duller characters as Mondale or Dole) partly because he really was a slick operator with a yen for the bimbos and an eye for the main chance. (This doesn’t mean that he was a bad president. I think he was well above the recent average.)

With that in mind, it is interesting to look at the whoppers and tall tales circulating the internet about Barack Obama. We have the story that he is not really an American citizen, the story that he is secretly a Muslim, the story that he was born in Kenya, the story that his real father was an American communist named Davis, the story that as a boy he attended a madrassa run by Wahabis, the story that he refuses to say the pledge of allegiance, the story that he is secretly a tool of the Chicago mob, the story that he attended a California college as a foreign student from Indonesia, and all the various claims that he is somebody’s Manchurian Candidate. The recurring theme is obvious. It is a sense that he is in some deep way not what he claims to be and a feeling that he is at some level anti-American. It is interesting to consider whether here again, despite the outrageous falseness of many of the stories themselves, the folklore contains some folk wisdom.

Almost all politicians wear masks from time to time, but this president seems to do so more than most. And while he may not be anti-American by conscious conviction, he often gives the impression of being so by emotional inclination, particularly in unscripted moments.