Tag Archives: Obama

"Dream City" by Paul Klee, 1921

In a 2008 speech to the New York Public Library, Zadie Smith spoke about Obama and a place called Dream City:

It is a place of many voices, where the unified singular self is an illusion. Naturally, Obama was born there. So was I. When your personal multiplicity is printed on your face, in an almost too obviously thematic manner, in your DNA, in your hair and in the neither-this-nor-that beige of your skin—well, anyone can see you come from Dream City. In Dream City, everything is doubled, everything is various.  You have no choice but to cross borders and speak in tongues.…It’s the kind of town where the wise man says “I” cautiously, because I feels like too straight and singular a phenome to represent the true multiplicity of his experience. Instead, citizens of Dream City prefer to use the collective pronoun we.

...He had the audacity to suggest that, even if you can’t see it stamped on their faces, most people come from Dream City, too. Most of us have complicated backstories, messy histories, multiple narratives. It was a high-wire strategy, for Obama, this invocation of our collective messiness. His enemies latched on to its imprecision, emphasizing the exotic, un-American nature of Dream City, this ill-defined place where you could be from Hawaii and Kenya, Kansas and Indonesia all at the same time.

The President’s understanding of complexity, his willingness to see from multiple sides, to hear input from various voices, these skills in a leader that make me sleep soundly at night. I’m rarely disappointed in the man.

When asked in this week’s press conference about his views on gay marriage, President Dream City responded: “I struggle with this. I have friends, I have people who work for me, who are in powerful, strong, long-lasting gay or lesbian unions. And they are extraordinary people, and this is something that means a lot to them and they care deeply about.”

Not enough, Mr. President, not enough at all. The strength of It Gets Better is in the potential for formerly impossible dreams to be realized: to serve your country, to be respected by your peers, to find love, to have a family, and for some, to get married. To support steps 1 through 4 and hedge your bets at marriage, Mr. President, is an incomplete articulation of Dream City.

Maybe there’s hope after all, from a man who’s Dream City citizenship is not written across his face, skin or hair. This week, Vice President Joe Biden said on Good Morning America: “I think the country is evolving, and I think there is an inevitability for a national consensus on gay marriage. That is my view — but this is the President’s policy. But it is evolving.”