I had the opportunity to meet Hillary Rodham Clinton recently. (Actually, my wife was kind enough to introduce me after their conversation finished.) And I was surprised by what I was surprised by. It hit me with the force of lightning-bolt revelation that she was a real person.
Duh, you say? Well, yes, I already knew that—theoretically. Yet when I shook the hand of the First Lady, I could not get over the fact that normal conversation was possible (even easy, thanks to her graciousness), that she might dislike some aspects of being First Lady (like shaking hands with strangers), that she might have mixed reactions to all the news stories speculating on the private life of her husband, that she might not experience as humorous P. J. O’Rourke’s up-to-that-point-I-thought-hilarious review of her book, which he titled “It Takes a Village Idiot.”
I had abstracted Mrs. Clinton, I realized. She had lost flesh, become a digitized construct in the ongoing game in my head called How the World Works. There, soulless characters compete for dominance and prominence. The various brands of media score the players. What are her popularity ratings? Where is he in the rankings of Forbes‘s wealthiest, People‘s most interesting or sexiest, or Time‘s most powerful? In this Ayn Rand universe, the game is all important, who is ascending or descending, who is scoring points or taking hits. The goal is entertainment, to please the arena fans.
I’m all too aware of this temptation to abstraction. A lifetime spent in the suburban landscape of the Midwest taught me the technique. I was raised with the omnipresent tube, which mediated and abstracted the world. Everything important happened “out there”; New York, Washington, and Los Angeles seemed like huge properties on the cosmic Monopoly board. When race riots broke out in Detroit, the news program mentioned Woodward Avenue, a street I lived a few blocks from. Still, the anchor might as well have said Papua New Guinea. The race riots were an abstraction, having nothing to do with life on my portion of Woodward Avenue.
Abstractification (which strikes me as the perfect name for the malady) can prey upon all facets of my life. It took a trip to Israel to make me realize that Jesus must have had leg cramps. Only then did it occur to me that he must have often sat on a dusty rock on a side of a Judean hill and pondered the seeming absurdity of being the Son of God, walking one little corner of the world, and no one much catching on.
Despite intellectual vigilance, I fall victim too readily to this tendency to drain the full humanity out of our shared enterprises, to reduce everything to a game board. Theology becomes a contest between the progressives and the traditionalists; church, a tug-of-war over the desirability of our pastor. I try to keep in mind first things, the bigger picture, the original purpose, but I often succumb to the game.
Direct sensory connections can reverse abstractification. In shaking Mrs. Clinton’s hand, I could see her as a wife, a mother, a lawyer, and a Methodist, in addition to the political figure I had reduced her to. The issues surrounding her became both less important and more. I had given her back her soul.
The experience has birthed in me a new appreciation for pilgrimage, to go and see, touch, taste, smell, and hear “holy” sites, to make incarnate that which is abstract. Perhaps I’ll go visit a congressman, have lunch with an actor, tour the world. My intuition says that when I fully fathom Jesus’ Judean leg cramps, then the American Midwest will become the new Promised Land, and my abstractification will be cured.
Michael G. Maudlin.
B&C 1997 Mar/Apr p. 5
