That's a photo caption from a San Francisco Chronicle article about the arrival of a Barack Obama statue at the Wax Museum on Fisherman's Wharf. I bring it up here to...well, partly just to share one of the stranger and more delightful captions I've ever seen in a newspaper...but also to emphasize that we live in exciting times. The article goes on to tell how thrilled and awestruck even adult passersby were by the wax Obama. Not many of our recent presidents would have excited that kind of response in the flesh, let alone in wax. Whether you like how things are going or don't or (like me) feel some tense combination of the two, there's a universal sense of engagement in the present and future of the world that hasn't been typical of Americans for a while.
Which, I tell you, makes it hard to put writing a book set mostly in the 1920s at the top of my to-do list. I'm fascinated by American history, especially those decades between the world wars. I wrote another book set mostly then, and I liked it. But that was around 2003 and 2004, the depth of my disaffection from present reality. It was a great escape, writing about the Depression and FDR and the war. Thinking about the Manhattan el and bootlegging and business deals made on steamship cruises. But ever since I started throwing myself into political campaigning and blogging last January, it's just felt...not less interesting, but...less necessary to keep looking back.
So in moving to actually writing this book, I've had to adjust my expectations a little. I've stopped waiting for that intense, escapist infatuation with the lost world and I'm making myself look at what this book says about who we are now and where we're going. And that, like everything in this book that's felt like an obstacle at first, has turned out to be rewarding. The process that The Undressing of America describes—our first mass rejection of the "culture of concealment" in favor of a culture of revealing and exposing and making explicit—has entered a complex and challenging new phase in the last several years. Much of what's happening on "Web 2.0" is a fulfillment of the actions taken by Bernarr Macfadden and his peers ninety years ago.
I wrote a book once about kids and violent entertainment, and something I've been asked by parents at nearly every reading and talk is, "How do I keep my kids from seeing the things I don't think they should see?" The answer now is, "You can't." When they're really little you can, sure. Or if you want to lock them in the house you can. But any normally socialized kid will come in contact, by the age of ten or so, with computers that don't have parental controls. And on the web they can see everything we wish they wouldn't.
We're facing fully now what those publishers and writers in the '20s were first forcing us to consider: that preserving a humane society doesn't depend on what we don't let people know but how we teach them to deal the whole truth. Suddenly in writing about a phenomenon of the early 20th century I'm learning about the underlying principles of one of the big issues of the early 21st. I imagine this is what all those historians writing about FDR and the Depression in this age of wax Obamas are feeling.
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