What Really Happened in President Obama's Private Meeting with Mitt

Yesterday, President Obama welcomed Mitt Romney into his private dining room at the White House at exactly 12:30 in the afternoon. One hour and eleven minutes later, Mr. Romney departed the premises, and the luncheon was supposedly one-on-one, with even elite members of the press corps not allowed inside. In the day and a half since the luncheon, speculation has run rampant about what actually went on, and official statements from both camps have been released.

All of it is wrong.

So today--after lingering long and thinking through my decision very carefully--I have decided to come clean. To confess. To spill the frijoles. To open the can of worms (even though many of you, like me, wonder why certain people derive joy out of canning worms; there's plenty else we could can: peas, carrots, perhaps thick marmalade, heck, even toe nail clippings--but worms, really?). To play the pied piper's tune (because I learned to play the pied pipe long ago (it's not much more difficult than learning to play a normal pipe)).

I was there.

I was there for the entire hour and eleven minutes, and after living with the knowledge of what those minutes held--caressed, nuanced, delicately balanced--I have decided to tell all.

First, the reason I was invited by both parties anyway. Many readers of this blog aren't aware of the fact that I am Ryan Gosling. Details of my life--like the fact that I "live" in York, England, am "married" and am a "father" to a four-year old son named "Tyler," am a "writer" and a "teacher" and I have a "real life history"--have all been invented in order to give me some level of secrecy. (As you can probably guess, I work harder than most other actors because of this need for a highly detailed fake life.)

But I am the Ry-master. And even though revealing that fact here (now) will undoubtedly make my life a heck of a lot more complicated, the Obama / Romney meeting yesterday has forced my hand (and I'm not even a card player).

Now, the meeting.

I could have tape recorded the entire thing on a tiny device that I happen to carry around with me everywhere. But I didn't. I don;t need that device, and I only carry it for purposes of establishing humility because I don't like to admit that I have a perfect photographic memory (which, in case you didn't know, also means I have a perfect phonographic memory (which, in case you didn't know, means that I can recall sounds and images at a moment's notice back to when I was three months old)).

Since one of the fake-details of my life is that I am a "writer," I decided to coat the big reveal with the cloak of my writerly self. Thus.

President Obama: Mitt, welcome.

Mr. Romney: Prez, thank you. Thank you very much. [Mr. Romney's hair is slicked back with copious gel, and I wonder if--perchance--he and I are consumers who zero in on the same gel brand at the store.]

President Obama: I hope you don't mind that I asked Ryan to join us? Members of your campaign staff assured me it wouldn't be a problem. [President Obama smiles wide enough to make me faint, and I don't faint easily.]

Mr. Romney: Members of my campaign staff assured me of a lot of things, too, Prez. [Mr. Romney pauses and when I gaze into his eyes, it looks as though he is lost in thought about why people ever decided to start canning worms, only to open up those cans at inappropriate moments. The more he thinks about this, the more he looks like he could cry, and it suddenly seems like his casting via media as a man without empathy might--perchance!--be wrong. Any man who can feel deeply enough about worms to practically tear up over their canning is an empathetic man in my book.]

President Obama: So, were members of your campaign staff correct? [President Obama shirts from foot to foot, and then finally throws his arm around me--a gesture of solidarity, for which I am thankful at this point. Because you can only think about the poor worms being canned for so long before you start to lose control.]

Mr. Romeny: About Ryan?

President Obama: About Ryan.

Mr. Romney: To be honest, I should have chosen Hilary Clinton. You and I both know that. We would have wiped the floor with you. No disrespect, of course, Prez. That Ryan guy--all he did for me was make me go to the extreme of Extreme Makeover.

President Obama: None taken. After all, this is still my private dining room, so you have permission to mourn your loss in any way you see fit. As long as it doesn't interrupt our agenda for the day. [President Obama winks at me. I wink back. Then I turn towards Mr. Romney and wink his way as well. I hate for anyone to feel left out. Mr. Romney winks back at me--the empathy this man has! And President Obama must interpret Romney's wink as directed at him, because he winks back at Mr. Romney and then Mr. Romney eventually winks at President Obama--only after a long, subdued, awkward silence.]

Me: My eyes are hurting.

Mr. Romney: [laughs]

President Obama: What's so funny, Mr. Romney. Haven't your eyes ever hurt before?

Mr. Romney: Never more than 47% of the time.

President Obama: Look, Mitt--I'm gonna call you Mitt from now on, okay?--I am really hungry and we're having an amazing Southwestern salad, so can you just tell me if it's alright if Ryan stays?

Mr. Romney: Yeah, yeah, the kid's alright. Bet he could eat fifty eggs and knock down a few parking meters if he wanted.

Me: I love that movie.

President Obama: Me too.

Mr. Romney: Well, let's get down to gold tacks and brass knuckles. The agenda. Does the kid know about it? [Mr. Romney wags his thumb at me and I feel slightly affronted. After all, I'm not that much younger than him, and we both use the same gel, and we both feel badly about the canned worms.]

President Obama: Mitt, Ryan is okay. In fact, he's solid. he's extremely solid in this area. That's why I asked him here in the first place.

[We all sit down at the table, on which glasses of water are already poured, seven pieces of silverware aligns the cloth in front of each of us, and chocolate Santa Clauses sit on each of our plates.]

Mr. Romney: Nice touch, Prez. [Holds up his personal chocolate Santa Clause.]

President Obama: You like that, do you Mitt?

Mr. Romney: I do, Prez.

[Awkward silence.]

[Continued awkward silence.]

[I decide to eat my chocolate Santa.]

[Awkward silence.]

[I decide to eat Mr. Romney's chocolate Santa.]

[Extremely awkward silence.]

[I decide to eat President Obama's chocolate Santa.]

President Obama: Ryan, please. I only had three of those, and they were especially made by a rare species of gnomes off the coast of Finland who work tirelessly day and night and produce a dozen chocolate Santa Clauses each decade.

Me: [Awkward.]

Mr. Romney: Aw, Prez, let the kid here off easy this time. He was famished after knocking all those parking meter heads off.

Me: I'm not Paul Newman.

Mr. Romney: Geesh, I know, I know. I'm, just saying.

President Obama: Salads please!

[A waiter rushes into the room carrying a tray on which sit three of the most perfect Southwestern salads I have ever seen in my entire human existence.]

Me: President Obama, were these made by those same gnomes off the coast of Finland? [laughing. Come on, it's funny.]

President Obama: Yes.

Mr. Romney: Checkmate.

Me: I don't play chess.

Mr. Romney: But did you ever think about the fact that maybe chess plays you? Bet you didn't. Maybe give that a think or two the next time you want to go our knocking parking meter heads off.

Me:

President Obama: Okay, gentlemen. It's about time we start with the real agenda for this meeting: Mitt's reading choices.

Mr. Romney: Look, when the guy from Time Magazine asked me, I didn't have time to prep--I couldn't think on the spot. You had time, Prez. You could expertly choose a few American classics, a few independent-spirit stuff, some Pulitzer winners. I didn't have the luxury of a whole team helped me narrow down my options.

President Obama: Look, Mitt, I didn't choose your campaign team for you--

Me: And I didn't choose to eat your chocolate Santas. It's a condition.

[Awkward silence.]

Me: But the thing about the reading choices--look, that's the real reason I'm here. And I'm here for BOTH of you.

Mr. Romney: [Aside] That and to knock off a few parking meter heads. [Laughs.]

Me: [Standing, flexing pectorals, biceps, and triceps] Cool it with the COOL HAND LUKE ALLUSIONS, MITT, OKAY!

Mr. Romney: [Sweats]

Me: [Suddenly this image comes to mind and I feel real bad about what I just did. The image is all these worms--nice, friendly, well-meaning worms--trapped in some can solely for the purpose of some rhetorical device in some silly blog post.] 

President Obama: Ryan, take a breath. Good, Now, can you just give us the reading list already?

Me: [I devour my Southwestern salad, and if there were any more of those gnomish chocolate Santas, I'd be hard pressed to not...] Okay. You ready?

President Obama and Mr. Romney: Yes.

Me: Well, you've got to check out MOCKINGBIRD  by Kathy Erskine. It'll seriously amaze you. And, yup, no way you want to miss THE SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK by Matthew Quick. Awwwwwwsome. And, you need to get your hands on a copy of Francisco Stork's MARCELO IN THE REAL WORLD--it'll blow you away.

Mr. Romney: [Aside] The way you blow away those parking meters?

Me: [Deep breath, deep breath, deep--]

President Obama: Can we get the last secret chocolate Santa Clause out here for Ryan please?

Me: You've got to get Mike Jung's GEEKS, GIRLS, AND SECRET IDENTITIES--hilarious and deeply moving. And Lynda Mullaly Hunt's ONE FOR THE MURPHYS. Whew. Be ready to cry though, and to change your life. And, let's see...

[Waiter brings chocolate Santa and I devour it on the spot, while stealing a forkful of Mr. Romney's Southwestern, gnome-made salad.]

Me: Oh! A.J. Paquette's NOWHERE GIRL is freaking marvelous, as is Mitali Perkins' RICKSHAW GIRL and if you somehow missed Jonathan Kozol's SAVAGE INEQUALITIES and Ross Greene's LOST AT SCHOOL, man, you guys need to get yourself to your closest indie bookstore yesterday and pick them up, too.

Mr. Romney: [Aside] Bet there are a few parking meters en route to the local indie, ey Ryan?

Me: And can't miss Cynthia Lynch Williams's MILES FROM ORDINARY and Gary Schmidt's OKAY FOR NOW and--yes! yes! yes!--Emily Bronte's WUTHERING HEIGHTS.

Mr. Romney: You mean Charlotte Bronte?

Me: No.

President Obama: No.

Mr. Romney: Oh.

Me: And by all means, you have got to read Jackson Katz's THE MACHO PARADOX. Got to, gentlemen, got to.

[The room ebbs with the flow of my wisdom. It pulses the air in semi-equal reverberations of beauty and joy and truth.]

[Truth.]

Me: And Natalie Diaz Lorenzi's FLYING THE DRAGON is a can't miss--as well as Johan Harstad's BUZZ ALDRIN, WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU IN ALL THE CONFUSION? and definitely Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich's EIGHTH GRADE SUPERZERO.

Mr. Romney: Who are you talking to right now?

Me: You.

President Obama: [Clears throat.] And me.

Me: Yes. And Diane Ravitch's THE DEATH AND LIFE OF THE GREAT AMERICAN SCHOOL.

Mr. Romney: Sounds a little dramatic.

President Obama: Is it about testing?

Me: Yes--specifically about standardized testing and the pressure it entails and the way it forces teachers, students, and schools to focus on memorization over skill, rote learning over creativity is kind of like, kind of like...throwing a dozen gnome-made chocolate Santas right onto the cold, hard floor.

President Obama: [Gasps.]

Mr. Romney: [Considers the canned worms. The man does have empathy, so I decide to forgive him on the spot for his parking meter references. we're all human, after all.]

Me: That's probably good for now. Until our next secret luncheon?

President Obama: [Winks at me.]

Mr. Romney: [Winks at President Obama, whom he thought was winking at him.]

President Obama: [Winks back to Mr. Romney.]

Me: [I wink as fast as I can at everyone, including the waiter who now comes to clear the dishes]

The Freedom That Awaits Us

(Note: Ammi-Joan Paquette is my literary agent. She's a fabulous agent AND she is a remarkable, fascinating, stunning writer.)

The odd thing about reading a book in which a teenage girl escapes the Thai prison where she was born and where she has lived her entire life: it’s you.

Even though she speaks Thai, gets stuck in the prison bars when she’s little, finds a gruff mentor in the Warden, and has a veritable treasure trove of secrets concealed from her like good counsel from George W.—it’s still you.

A.J. Paquette’s mesmerizing story of Luchi Ann—a blonde American girl born in Khon Mueang Women’s Prison—is a vivid novel that offers one journey towards an openness that is more real and more filling than all the certainty we’ve ever before known. Nowhere Girl speaks to us in powerful, profound ways. Once Paquette’s protagonist is released from prison at age 13, we read:

Emptiness, that’s all I can see right now. Roads that lead to the mountains, mountains that scrape the sky. It’s all strange and huge and wild. Of course, I have seen it all before, but that wasn’t me; that was a girl with my same name, some creature of mud and bone who had never felt the lick of true freedom on her skin.

When she shares that she has “seen it all before,” she refers to the television which she is allowed to watch in the prison—the dead colors of recorded life. But seeing life firsthand, along with the terrifying sense of freedom that accompanies Luchi Ann’s view, aptly defines our own existence, too. The bars behind which we often wait, thinking we are held beyond our own power, resemble a kind of pre-existence that we accept. The television occupies us and shows us any color we wish to find. Our lives can be full in prison: there is plenty to eat, stability, organization, clarity.

Once Luchi Ann is released—after her mother’s death—a new emptiness affords a different kind of food, however. So it is with us.

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave helps to make the case. Essentially, Plato (really Socrates talking through him) claims that we’re all in prison. We’re trapped there because we grow up seeing the world a certain way, and when some new person or perspective or event comes along to try and dissuade us of our loyalty to what we’ve always known, we freak out. Plato (Socrates) goes so far as to say we attempt to kill whoever’s is trying to break us out of the prison from which we’ve come to view the world, but I’m not sure I’d go that far—perhaps we just go to the mall and buy a latte and a new shirt to forget about the encounter?

Maybe Plato (Socrates) is on to something: the vision we learn to cling to desperately is often the same one that drags us blindly past any kind of authentic freedom. By walking outside and allowing the sky to lick us a bit, we find that a different kind of living waits. The kind that has loads of space, little certainty, but fills us nonetheless.

The kind of living that Paquette's gloriously courageous and admirable Luchi Ann learns to find.

When I was seven years old, I was terrified of vans. Any van came down Alcott Drive, and I would run, screaming wildly, back inside to my mom, claiming that the killers had come to get me. That year of my life, I watched the movie Cobra with my two older brothers. Cobra in brief: Sylvester Stallone plays a cop who must find a group of men who drive a van around town finding people, kidnapping them, then killing them up in the back of the van, then finding more people and killing them as well. In a sense, I had power as a seven year old—I had my fear. When I saw a van, I knew exactly what the people inside were going to do: kidnap me and kill me. So I ran from the vans. My running from the vans gave me a certain ability to order my life—the fear helped to provide some sense of safety.

When we cling to our fear, we feel safe. But this kind of safety is not much different than a kid who hasn’t turned in his homework claiming that the salmon took it upstream. As a thirty year old man, I am no longer afraid of vans. But I am terrified of leaving my three-year old son in the hands of a babysitter. New fears replace the old; new prisons replace the ones we’ve worn out; new visions to which we adhere loyalty rise up in the place of those we’ve outgrown.

What A.J. Paquette reveals so wonderfully in her lyrical novel, Nowhere Girl, is this: they don’t have to. Following the journey of Luchi Ann, we experience that cathartic passage from a familiarity of fear and organization to a foundation of emptiness and freedom. Safety exists, too, where colors are alive—where the sky reaches down to touch us, and we feel it fully for the very first time. Paquette’s remarkable novel shows us the freedom we long for ourselves, and which we too may find if we are willing to courageously leave the prisons we’ve so long inhabited.

Read this book, and be inspired to find your freedom as Luchi Ann finds hers.