Whom to Model Life after …

Recently the publisher Alfred A. Knopf released a new “book” by U.S. President Barack Obama. I use the word “book” in quotation marks purposely. The text in this “book,” entitled “Of Thee I Sing,” barely takes up one page altogether. It is a letter from Obama to his daughters, richly illustrated by famous writer and artist Loren Long, the author of many children’s bestsellers.

The form of Obama’s letter is reminiscent of a poem by Mayakovsky,* in which the question is asked, “Whom to model life after?” and decisively answered in the rhyme, “Dzerzhinsky!”*

Obama does not call on his daughters and American youth to model their lives after the legendary directors of the FBI and CIA, Edward Hoover and Allen Dulles. He has different guiding marks. There are 13 of them. (The author, apparently, is not superstitious.) Who are they? They are the artist Georgia O’Keeffe, physicist Albert Einstein, athlete Jackie Robinson, Indian chief Sitting Bull, black singer Billie Holiday, social activist Helen Keller, architect Maya Lin, social activist and Nobel Peace Laureate Jane Addams, civil rights activist Martin Luther King, first man on the moon Neil Armstrong, farmers’ organizer Cesar Chavez and two American presidents, Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.

Obama’s letter is not controversial. His didactics are in the choice of heroes to emulate. For example, regarding the great baseball player Robinson, Obama does not mention what would seem to be important: Jackie was the first black man to break into that lily-white sports genre. Regarding Maya Lin, the creator of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, he does not mention one word about war, except indirectly: “Recalling the past and inspired to fix the future.” Regarding Indian chief Sitting Bull, Obama characterizes him as someone “who healed broken hearts,” who taught that “for peace, it is not necessary for eagles to be crows.” There is not one word about genocide. Not even a word about the famed battle at Little Bighorn, where Sitting Bull soundly crushed Gen. Custer’s battalion. And so forth, in the same spirit.

Naturally, it is complicated for children to digest such concepts as aggression, racism, genocide and social inequality. Those do not attract but repel a young reader. But then one must not forget that all children’s books are also written for adults, even primarily for them. Parents buy the books for their children, and they are the first readers. In the current political situation, when Obama has an approval rating of only 43 to 45 percent, and his Democratic Party has suffered a serious defeat in the midterm elections, conservative adults will hardly force-feed “propaganda” coming from the White House to their heirs. It seems to me that the “toothlessness” of Obama’s book is explained by this very fact. And more. Children do not vote. Their parents vote. And Obama is not only the father of two charming daughters, but he is also the head of a government with a population of more than 300 million people. And that is not just a statistic. In the 2008 presidential elections, Obama’s victory was secured by the votes of white women at 54 percent. In the 2010 elections, the same number of this same electorate voted for Republicans. At the 2012 presidential elections, women — mothers, grandmothers, older sisters — having read “Of Thee I Sing” to their children, will more likely vote for Obama the father than against Obama the president.

Of course, all of this does not mean in the slightest that Obama is a cold, calculating politician pretending to be a loving father, like a wolf in sheep’s clothing seeking Little Red Riding Hood. The selection of heroes that he sang to — whom he calls people to model life after — sufficiently and eloquently speaks for itself. Children have a tenacious memory. They will grow up, having remembering these figures, and then find out the whole truth about them.

*Editor’s Note: Vladimir Mayakovsky was a 20th century Russian poet and playwright. Felix Dzerzhinsky was the founder of the Bolshevik secret police in Russia.