President Obama Cried

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Do Real Men Cry?

Let's Watch Obama Cry And Then Talk About It

Michael McKenna
We all know, for instance, that it’s not OK to burst into heaving, tissue-requiring, first-date-ruining tears because you feel like your cat didn’t want you to go to work today.
The world that we want to exist and the world that the species needs to exist for the sake of its own continuance are two different things. I found this out pretty early.

Born in the late 1970s, I came of age in the early-to-mid 1990s when you basically weren’t allowed to say how anything actually was. This was the era of “consciousness-raising,” of consent forms and of learning heartfelt little lessons on how-to-live-in-civilization from pre-Stone Age tribes. However human beings actually acted and wanted each other to act in various situations, we were encouraged (compelled) to say and do the hopeful opposite. And so I cried in front of my girlfriend one time.

Is this so bad? Well, yes. Going by experience, yes – it’s the worst. Going by the singular metric of my own internal and entirely personal experience, never do it ever, not even once. But surely there’s a line? I mean, even President Obama cries sometimes. It’s on the news and everything. He won the election and got really overcome and thanked everyone and was all emotional and cried. You can watch it on YouTube. You can even freeze-frame it where his face sort of scrunches up right before the tears come. Leader of the Free World. Commander-in-Chief. Surely that’s OK, right?

The trouble with these conversations is that they always get phrased in terms of ridiculous extremes. That’s how we remember it from the early ‘90s. Women were all like “I want a man who can express his feelings! I don’t want a man who I never know what he’s thinking unless he is visibly punching something! I want a sensitive man with emotions and a big deep watery soul!” So we early ‘90s guys, you know, we listened. We took it in. We cried. And then we didn’t get laid for like a month.

I’d like to dispense with this approach. Let’s not talk about cavemen versus New Age Super-Men Of Feeling, and let’s not talk about insufferable little teardrop emos versus Ionic Pillars Of Stoic Manhood. It’s not useful. These sorts of extremes are tools of rhetoric, not fragments of experience. Let’s find the line.

We all know, for instance, that it’s not OK to burst into heaving, tissue-requiring, first-date-ruining tears because you feel like your cat didn’t want you to go to work today. Similarly, it’s probably OK, upon hearing the news that they just pulled the plug on your father, to collapse in tears of rage and exhaustion, two blocks from the hospital with your own hastily-excised kidney in a cooler.

So when is it OK? Is death required? Or betrayal? What about sheer fatigue, you know, like you’ve been talking about it for six hours and the bottle is empty and it’s four in the morning and it’s starting to seem like you just might be entirely different people in a deep-seated and irrevocable sense?

What about fear? Fear of loss, fear of absence, fear of how you might react in a circumstance that is entirely new to you, and that has been forced onto your already-burdened shoulders by flippant circumstance?

What about rage? What about disappointment? What about the fact that your own death is shambling toward you like a bull on broken legs and you are just trying to preserve some sense that you got a taste of something, that you grabbed at the ring, that you did one or two worthwhile things before the curtain fell? What about gratitude?

It’s hard out there. It’s hard when you fail and it’s hard when you succeed. When President Obama broke down, it was because, after all the tumult and the suspense and the horse-blindered back-and-forth of the campaign, his victory gave him a brief, placid space in which he was able to see all of the sacrifice, all of the belief, all of the passion that made it possible in the first place.

Is that OK? It’s hard to know. What is it OK to do? What do people say that it’s OK to do, and what do they want us to do? How different are these things? To what degree can we get away with minimizing, or attempting to minimize, this difference? Can we exclaim? Can we shout? Can we merely quiver? It’s hard out there. It’s really really hard to know what to do in certain situations.

I swear sometimes I could almost…

No I couldn’t.

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