Our Etch A Sketch Moment

Crafting a successful simile is an immensely satisfying experience. It is one of the real pleasures of language—marrying together likeness while also scintillating with the risk of difference. To hazard one myself, it is one of the preeminent gambles we can take with words, because it requires daring, a dash of bravado, and a sympathetic ear. One might think that Erik Fehrnstrom, a senior advisor to Mitt Romney’s Presidential campaign, won the jackpot when he compared his boss’s transition to the upcoming general election campaign to a certain toy: “Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.” Fehrnstrom’s delivery is flawless; the statement of a general truth about universal change, the leap into simile, with the hedging qualification “almost” (poets are not yet, alas, the legislators of the world), and then the glossing of that simile, just in case our memories of Etch A Sketches are appropriately muddled. It is, without a doubt, the Simile of the Year. But when then was it greeted with more consternation than approbation by Team Romney?

Explicating a simile is almost as bad as explaining a joke, as both suffer rather than thrive under the microscope. But the image of the Etch A Sketch, with its interlocking resonances of writing and erasure, composition and blankness, is a plastic and aluminum (no, not sand) aperture into the consistently bedeviling problem of constancy in our politics. We demand unwavering conviction, but reality requires flexibility. Principles and pragmatism dance uneasily, with the former aspiring to the flexibility of the latter, and the second striving for the rectitude of the first.

As with so much else about our country, Ralph Waldo Emerson articulated a truth about us early on; “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” This certainly seems to be true in our politics, although Emerson most likely did not foresee the tribulations of his fellow Massachusite John F. Kerry, who was crucified on a windsurfing board and blown adrift by the winds of pro and con votes on the very same issues. But Lyndon B. Johnson, in his persistence in pursuing the war in Vietnam, would have done well to recall Emerson’s advice, and many of us would have liked to etch our own actions with erasable ink, turning the dial to obscure immature opinions, poorly constructed arguments, and intemperate ripostes.

Certainly, no one would like to more than Mitt Romney. A conservative persona punctured by such lacunae in orthodoxy as pro-choice positions and universal healthcare is especially vulnerable to the awkward edges of a palimpsestic personal history. So far, he has avoided the dogmatic bonfires of so many primary Savanarolas. But shape-shifting has its prices, especially if Obama, like Hercules, can get ahold of this ideological Proteus.

But turn the knob on your mental Etch A Sketch and return to our original contention that every simile is a risk, an essaying of the delicate balance between likeness and difference. The beauty of the Etch A Sketch is that it allows for risks; impermanence can be midwife to invention. Static sincerity tends to be imaginatively poor and stylistically stunted. People are interesting because they change, and notice themselves changing, and chart the courses of these micro-evolutions. Oftentimes, the call for pragmatism and compromise in politics is indicative of a kind of flabby impulse toward moderation, a lazy splitting of the difference. Romney’s late career reinvention strains all manner of credulity, as one’s political convictions often undergo renovations earlier in life. But still, we should be equally skeptical at claims to steadfastness.

The best kinds of leaders consistently admit their own inconsistency and remain certain about ends, even as they experiment with means. The Etch A Sketch, invented in 1960, was the perfect medium for a decade that erased so much of what came before and re-jumbled a whole host of relations, a decade where sex and family and politics all became breathtakingly and thrillingly erasable. Our age is still thinking about new ways to order all of the writing we do, all of the record we generate. As we grow into a world we have entirely inscribed, how we erase will become a question every bit as urgent as how we write.

Ari R. Hoffman ’10 is a Ph.D. candidate in English. His column appears on alternate Fridays.