why does the well-made whatever (speech, comic, pop single) raise suspicion? Since when did the "authentic" get signified as awkward, scratchy, crappy? When did we start to fear the imagination, and become such self-righteous literalists?
I don't know that I can answer that question simply. I can, however provide a great case study. President Bush's inability to speak coherently was widely viewed as a sign of his normalcy and authenticity. He's a guy you'd want to have a beer with, a real American. Similarly, Senator McCain's "maverick-ness" and thus, authenticity, arises both from his rejection of certain conservative ideologies (although, in true maverick style, he's gone back on plenty of them) and his impolitic, off-the-cuff-seeming style of speech. In contrast, Obama's polish is cause for suspicion.
I agree with Brian that much of this has to do with the way Bush and McCain placed oriented themselves with certain paradigms (The Rebel, The Average Joe). But this only invites a further question: when and why did we allow those certain paradigms to have such power over the way we view authenticity?
A brief (and albeit cherrypicked) tour of recent pop culture let's us see just how much our we have embraced these narratives (or paradigms. whatever). Quirky is authentic: the addition of non-standard instruments to a band makes one more authentic (Arcade Fire, Eisly); quirky characters means real characters (Juno, Garden State). I'd venture to add that in the contemporary literary world, the response to this has been to make the artifice as clear as possible--through self-aware narration, gratuitous wordplay, thematic obsession with "writing about writing". I just finished Tom Robbins's Villa Incognito, a fun, well-crafted book, that essentially makes its characters authentic by making everything as inauthentic as possible, reveling in its own artifice.
Culture-at-large has either fallen into the authenticity trap, as in the case of pop music and movies, or it has embraced the trap to such a degree that it must be taken as a kind of ironic rejection, as in the case of contemporary fiction (seriously, just page through McSweeny's.
I could give some of the trite, now almost meaningless reasons for this: the rise of the internet, the acceleration of culture, etc. But, I'm not sure that these keys fit the political topography as well as they do our cultural. The problem, I think, is that people in my generation are mis-applying these paradigms to politics, and thus seeing Obama's candidacy through the lens of hipster cultural criticism. After all, if you do view politics through this pomo lens, you do end up with Obama's oratory as something to be suspicious of. He is refusing to play into the paradigms that dominate our cultural definitions of authenticity.
In short, I don't have an answer, but it certainly is something to think about.
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