Mitt Romney: A Postmodern Hero running for President

For those of us with backgrounds in literature or the social sciences, we should be familiar with the qualities embodied by the cliché character, the postmodern hero. This form of existence abandons with Modernistic pretenses that we somehow form a unified agent, who possesses the same underlying identity from one occasion to the next, despite the differences that are manifested in our behaviors and temperaments, which take on different forms depending upon the particularities of the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Rather than a single biography, the postmodern hero lives many existences with no underlying congruency that might provide a persistent identity that endures in the face of the differences that depict one’s character and environmental contingencies in situ. The postmodern hero goes from one micro-narrative to the next without integrating the manifold stories that he or she lives into an encompassing meta-narrative that would provide consistency to one’s ego.

Whether or not such a condition – the disintegration of the ego into splintered series of divergent adventures; not unified through a reflexively constructed compilation of overarching motives and intentions that might tell of a encapsulating, singular biography – deserves to be romanticized, which it tends to be in contemporary postmodern literature, merits no treatment in the context of this essay. Rather, I am primarily concerned with the prospects of electing a postmodern hero to the Office of President; an event that we would witness if the Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, succeeded in his present aspirations to win the Presidency of this Nation.

If we look to life of Mitt Romney we can find a stunning exemplar of the postmodern hero. This politico has gone from one existential embodiment to the next, caring little for consistency or the appearance of integrity. Indeed, Romney has crafted his persona in a fashion that reflects the immediacy of the present and the contingencies that are particular to it, rather than accounting for the public positions he has held in previous micro-narratives; whether as a Mormon; as the Governor of a liberal Northeastern State; or as a Republican candidate, who is pressured with appealing to the base of the Party: a collection of Evangelicals and economic elitist conservatives; both of which demand of their candidate the embrace of political positions that are in stark contradiction to the policies supported by the amorphous Romney during his performances in micro-narratives whose settings are spatiotemporally distinct from the situation in which he is constructing his current character.

The question then arises, would it be advantageous to elect a postmodern hero to the Presidency, taking into account the disjuncture of the many embodiments assumed by the many identities that have been referenced under Mitt Romney?

The most appropriate response to such a question would be: Who the hell knows?

Russ Cole

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