I went to see the Obama Presidential Library last week w my friend Bill who somehow was able to score advance tickets. A lot of attention has been paid to the (post) modern brutalism of a single windowless obelisk towering above the South Side of Chicago. I was more interested in the display itself, which one climbs from the bottom to the 9th floor. The display begins w images of the 1960s - Black power protests, anti war demonstrations, the feminist mvt - over which is superimposed the story of Obama’s parents meeting as students. The sets the narrative frame for the next half dozen floors: the conflation of historical mvts for social change - Harold Washington’s mayoralty, the anti-apartheid mvt, Jesse Jackson’s presidential runs - and Obama’s meteoric rise to the presidency. About the presidency itself far less is said: narrative story-telling gives way to ceremonial objects - Michelle Obama’s inaugural gown, Obama’s Air Force One leather jacket, a life sized model of the West Wing, a baseball, a seder plate, WH Christmas tree. The final floor - and the first window one sees, overlooking the entire South Side - is an abstract painting of Obama’s speeches, scrambled into random phrases - and spiraling into the skylight, as tho into heaven.

It is amazing - literally to feel oneself in a maze - to climb up this narrative staircase and then ascend literally into the light. I was suddenly reminded of how much narrative and national force was invested in the personal rise of Obama as redemptive of this nation’s many crimes and inequities: rather than broad social mvts that might undo structures of racialized capitalism - we were offered the fable of a single person’s rise to leadership as a symbolic placeholder. For a single moment at Obama’s inauguration there was I remember a national euphoria, or at least a liberal one, as tho these two moments might be the same. The absolute wild joy in SCal was other worldly: ppl hugging in the street, sharing drinks, cigarettes and joints, dancing on tables. Ofc the actual presidency, neoliberal, austere, cautiously but strategically imperial - was a different story. (My own personal commitments were more muted: I door knocked for Obama in NH, but voted Green Party in CA: (dialectics?). Still the victory, even to this asthmatic red diaper baby, was something to witness).

Being at the library and center some two decades later, it was hard to tell if I was climbing into a final celebration of American liberal multi-culturalism, or in the age of Trump, its fortress mausoleum.

Photo: the Lobby of Hope and Change