Suspicious Minds: My Farewell and Regrets, for President Obama

With President Obama’s imminent departure from office in mind, I thought of a photograph that I’d taken back in 2003, before I’d ever heard the name “Barack”:  “Mr. Lincoln’s Sympathy Viewed with Suspicion.”  If I’ve ever captured what Cartier-Bresson called a “decisive moment” (when “one’s head, one’s eye, and one’s heart [join] on the same axis”), this is evidence of it. 

I was sitting on a bench in the Town Square of Stamford, Connecticut, waiting to see what the world would bring my way.  Across from where I sat was the statue of Abraham Lincoln that you see in my photograph.  Abe sits, leaning forward, forearms on his thighs, head tilted downward, thoughtful, maybe melancholy.

Slowly, another critical element came into view, crossing the square toward the statue:  a heavy older woman with frizzy white hair glowing, backlit by the summer sun.  She wore a tight, hot-pink T-shirt with a picture of Minnie Mouse dressed as Carmen Miranda.  She lowered herself carefully onto the front of the concrete slab that supported the Great Emancipator.  Then she set down beside her a couple of plastic bags and a cup of Chock Full o’ Nuts coffee.  Certainly, this, too, was an American presence.

She looked around suspiciously, squinting at passersby with a wary disapproval.  And I started to think, “Oh, please, please, please, let her look at Abe’s face in just that way!”  I began, as covertly as I could, taking photographs of her and the statue — wishing and hoping all the while.  At the twelfth exposure, not only did the moment I prayed for arrive, but something else, entirely unforeseen and felicitous, had happened in the meantime.  Four pigeons had settled on the corners of the concrete plateau, surrounding Lincoln and his sour companion.  So, at the moment when I got the desired image, it also featured those avian sentinels, witnesses to the less-than-happy encounter. 

(For a better view of this photograph, see my website at:  http://www.lawrenceruss.com/index/C0000HrILmRgUq4A/G00004_tcloQpRik/I00006jzaFm0FQaw

I voted for Barack Obama in two presidential elections.  In my hopefulness, I’d been struck by his admiration for Lincoln, and by my sense, a sense shared by many other people, that Obama, too, had uncommon intelligence and uncommon concern for his fellow humans.  In the end, I think that most of us who supported him are disappointed that his Presidency didn’t come to more.  Yes, some of us think that he should have realized sooner what intransigent selfishness and malice he faced from Republicans, and that he should have confronted them with the central issues of “economic inequality” more directly and forcefully.  But we can’t justly blame him for the ruthlessness and heedlessness of his opposition.  Sitting on the sidelines, we can’t know if and how he might have accomplished more of what we wanted.  And we can’t know the pain, frustration, and sorrowing disbelief that he must have suffered while trying to swim against a terribly cold and unrelenting tide.

What I do believe is this:  that part of what thwarted Mr. Obama as President, in addition to the racism, the unconscionable greed, and the lust for partisan power, was that so many people are blind to honest virtue when they see it.  They’ve strayed so far from it, and society and its media have cast it in such a disdainful and worldly light that when people meet earnest good will, they frequently view it as weakness, simple-mindedness, or deceitful posturing.  Too many people just could not believe, given his seeming difference from them, that Obama did not wish to cause them harm.  Suspicion and projected selfishness faced our all-too-soon-to-be-former President whenever he came to the public square.