Parsing Mitt Romney's trip may require
a cultural context rather than political, starting with the Beatles’ 1967 LP
and TV film, “Magical Mystery Tour,” which was also greeted as “a disaster” by
British critics.
Like Romney, the Fab Four were
emblematic of their times, with mindset and lyrics not easily decoded. Their soothing
songs had embedded messages (LSD in “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”) of a
psychedelic worldview that infuriated insensitive onlookers.
Just so now with the GOP
contender. Below all his apparently aimless babbling is a vision. In contrast
to those cheeky outsiders, Romney is the embodiment of today’s country-club
insider. How else to explain his implicitly equating Palestinians’ economic
woes vs. Israelis with the culture gap between Americans and Mexicans?
Romney’s essence may be
glimpsed by going back even more to the 1920s and Sinclair Lewis’ Nobel Prize
portrait of “Babbitt,” the prototypically narrow-minded American businessman
with a booster mentality who “considers it God's purpose that man should work,
increase his income, and enjoy modern improvements.”
With such a challenger and the
President’s defensive status (Babbitt vs. the embattled), little wonder that the
campaign, according to David Brooks echoing Peggy Noonan, is “incredibly consequential
and incredibly boring all at the same time,” reaching “intellectual stagnation”
of political debate.
In the larger scheme, Mitt Romney’s trip won’t weigh heavily in the dehumanized, computerized mechanics of
the 2012 campaign, but for those who still care about the human side of it all,
the Beatles and Babbitt offer clues.
Update: Maureen Dowd weighs in: “Mitt’s foray showed some new colors, as
he intended, but they were not flattering ones. We now know how little he knows
about the world, how really slow on his feet he is, what meager social and
political agility he has.
“Wherever he went, whatever situation he was in, he remained frozen in
himself.”
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