I was roaming around on YouTube today, as I often do, and I came upon a famous and rather iconic moment in U.S. cultural history: Marilyn Monroe singing “Happy Birthday Mr. President” to John F. Kennedy in 1962.<\/p>\n
Watching her performance, it became clear to me that much of the wonderful humor Marilyn brought to that moment arose from the way she understood – and beautifully conveyed – that on some fundamental level JFK was as much of a sex symbol as she was.<\/p>\n
Recall that the two preceding U.S. presidents had been Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower – both highly respected in their way, but definitely not sex symbols. Suddenly, along comes this handsome, charismatic and brilliantly articulate man, with warmth, humor, and a smile to die for. If we were to rank cold war era politicians the way we rank current movie stars, Kennedy would be roughly on a par with George Clooney.<\/p>\n
And it struck me that the erotic charge of that moment finds a parallel in the kind of feeling that I sense toward Barack Obama within the popular culture. I’m not talking here about his particular policies – whether you think of him as a liberal or as a centrist. I’m talking about the man’s extreme charisma, his relaxed brilliance and ability to clearly communicate and discuss ideas without breaking a sweat. And of course the fact that he has a kind of lanky elegance, a comfort within his physical being, that we rarely associate with politicians.<\/p>\n
Ronald Reagan had an equivalently powerful charisma. Even if you utterly disagreed with his policies, you realized that the man was completely comfortable within his own skin. Although, as a man of seventy even when first elected, he served as a father figure in the popular mind, rather than a sex symbol.<\/p>\n
Bill Clinton had great charisma, but it was always a little complex – there was a feeling of conflict lurking just below the surface, even from the beginning – a sense of some kind of inner struggle beneath the poise and smooth southern charm, as though a part of him didn’t quite believe he deserved to be president.<\/p>\n
But president Obama has that gracious quality, that lèse majesté<\/i> of natural and confident leaders, which adds up to the kind of sex appeal that JFK brought to the office. There’s something about Obama that calls for a happy birthday song from Marilyn. And, like JFK, his response to such a tribute would gracefully convey the humor of the moment (in contrast, try to imagine either president Bush responding with easy humor to a winkingly sexy birthday song from Marilyn – such a moment wouldn’t make sense to them).<\/p>\n
I’ve been trying to imagine that moment, Marilyn Monroe singing to the heart-throb president, transposed to today, to 2009. There’s only one thing I can’t quite figure out: If Barack Obama is – in the culturally iconic sense – the JFK of our time, then who is the Marilyn of our time? Do we even have one?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was roaming around on YouTube today, as I often do, and I came upon a famous and rather iconic moment in U.S. cultural history: Marilyn Monroe singing “Happy Birthday Mr. President” to John F. Kennedy in 1962. Watching her performance, it became clear to me that much of the wonderful humor Marilyn brought to … Continue reading “Looking for Marilyn”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=815"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":818,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815\/revisions\/818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}