The King’s Phallus: Gold or Lead?

It’s not a king I’m concerned about, of course. We in these United States don’t have a king. We have a president. The current president is named Obama.

Nor do I care about his phallus. Though it seems that a significant portion of the citizenry does. Well, not about his phallus as such, but about his authenticity, his legitimacy: gold or lead, real or fake?

And so we have this sorry business about his state of birth. Was he born in the USofA, making him a legitimate contender for the throne, I mean the presidency, or was he born somewhere else, Kenya perhaps, or Mars, or Alpha Centauri. So, he’s shown us an assay of his penis confirming that it’s gold – whoops! there I go again – he’s produced a certificate of live birth affirming that he was indeed born in Hawaii. That should settle it, no?

Well, not quite. In the course of taking credit for forcing the President to certify his purity, Donald Trump suggests that the certificate itself needs to be authenticated. And we know where that leads: Who’s going to authenticate the authenticators? And who, in turn, will authenticate them? And them? Ad infinitum.

It’ll never end.

Not until our mythology catches up with 21st century reality. And that’s going to take time, because it’s not at all clear how that reality’s shaping up.

This business of the King’s Phallus began when Clinton was president. Then it took the form of concern about just where Clinton’s penis had been. In that case the authenticating document was a little blue dress with a little white stain indicating that the Presidential Member had been where it shouldn’t have been. 

And no doubt it hadn’t. Still, that whole sordid business puzzled me. Why? And why’d the freakin’ media go along with this nonsense? It’s not as though Clinton had brought a new type of illicit behavior to the Oval Office. Yes, THEY were out to get him, at any cost. I know that, and that that was driving this out of control trolly. But how’d it get out of control?

I now conclude that that’s when the symbolic fabric of American national mythology finally became irrevocably detached from the realities of national and world institutional life. That tension began showing up in the 1950s with McCarthy’s hysteria about Commies; but also in the ‘duck and cover’ civil defense ad campaigns: when The Bomb hits, duck under something and cover yourself against radiation.

The Russians launched Sputnik in 1957 and the space race was on. A whole new arena lay before us: to the moon and beyond. The future was to be ours and it would bristle with new technology.

That all seemed normal enough. The mythology could handle it.

What wasn’t normal was the Civil Rights movement, which cut at the heart of national mythology, affirming ideals while exposing our failure to realize them. Then came the anti-war movement, and, along with it, sex drugs rock and roll and hippies. Kids had decided to disobey their parents, en masse. Some serious myth mixing was going on.

In 1973 OPEC jacked up oil prices. That act cascaded into the industrial heart of America, stressing the automobile industry and killing the steel industry. The nation’s industrial heartland was ill. And our mythology arose during the early years of the industrial revolution. The two went hand in hand, and now both were ill, mythological superstructure and productive industrial base.

High tech was on the rise, and it kept on rising. Until it began outsourcing. More dislocation.

The internet spawned the web. And the web changed the mythological diffusion system.

And so Monika Lewinsky’s little blue dress became a symbol of national anxiety, the fabric of national mythology had become irrevocably torn. The symbols that bound us together were no longer adequate to the job and we thrust President Clinton in the breech.

It’s HIS fault. It’s always the King’s fault when the world falls apart.

And the world really did begin to fall apart under King George. The nation suffered it first ever foreign attack on home turf: 9/11. The attack itself was horrendous enough. A wars go, it was small stuff. But the damage to national mythology was severe. And so national mythology went to war, the War on Terror. We are now in a permanent state of war.

Even worse, reality has parted ways with our belief system. And so the legitimacy issue came to rest on the matter of King George’s military career, if you can call it that. Was his stint in the Air National Guard legitimate, or did his Daddy exercise special privilege to get him the gig? Once he got the gig, did he do his duty or did he slack off? Well, Dan Rather got on the case and, ultimately, it cost him his credibility and his job. Again, it was about the documents. The one's Rather produced to prove his case were probably fakes; Rather's team hadn't done their homework. Online media, NEW media, played a central role in this controversy.

Whatever the truth in this matter, new media had won a showdown against old media. A substantial network of myth machinery had emerged in new hands. The mechanisms of cultural cohesion have changed, irrevocably.

And so Obama has had to produce his birth certificate. Maybe that will quell this particular eruption; maybe not. Even if it does, there will be other eruptions as the nation’s symbolic fabric keeps shredding. If McCain had won the election, he too would have had to defend his authenticity. Whoever wins in 2012 and then in 2016, more doubts.

How can there be an authentic leader when the certifying mythology is in tatters? When the mythology is gone, how can there be anything but chaos.

Addendum:

From today's NYTimes:

The facts about Barack Obama’s birth never wavered. But the more the fraudulent theories were debated and dispelled in major news media outlets, the more people seemed to believe them.

Right. The issue is a response to an ill-perceived and ill-conceptualized threat. Debunking just gives the threat more energy.