Thinking again about the Obama/Notre Dame tryst, there is an uncanny parallel in it.
Fr. Jenkins was really just exploiting Obama, as most schools do with their speakers. Commencement speakers are, in the end, just photo-ops, so that the school can use the likeness of the commencement speaker for years to come in their admissions campaigns.
But that triggered the following analogy...
Obama at ND is to Jenkins what Air Force One over NY is to Obama.
Both presidents managed to scare the bejeebers out of their constituencies for a very expensive but ultimately unnecessary photoshoot. Neither president has adequately managed to address the scares, or take sufficient responsibility for the boneheadedness of their actions.
It seems to me that this is part of the result of what scholars are describing as the re-emergence of visual culture. It's the hip thing to study now, even for literary scholars who used to, you know, try to understand the meaning of text (although even printed text can be described as "visual culture" since reading typically involves eyes scanning a page). Anyway, in a society that conveys meaning more through visual images of things rather than the literary signification of things through words (pictures are no longer worth a thousand words, they are worth a million things...those things often being dollars), we shouldn't be surprised by people thinking less about what Obama's words mean than how great he will look in a ND hood on the cover of a ND brochure.
What Fr. Jenkins wanted was an image -- not meaningful words. For years to come, the inky or pixellated representations Fr. Jenkins and Obama will be frozen in gleeful but silent smiles on ND publications. Obama's words will soon be forgotten, if they were ever heard at all -- but his face is now locked in the public imagination as that of a proud Notre Dame graduate
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