A LESS PERFECT UNION, PART ONE
and a most cloying speech.
I've been promising it, at least some of you have
been waiting for it, and this damned thing's gonna be long enough already, so
let's get right to it. My thoughts, reactions, and (who could have seen this
coming?) criticisms of Senator Obama's A More Perfect Union
speech...
“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union."
Now there's some good writing.
(Though it would be even better if they'd removed in order, which serves no purpose except to goose the rhythm. But I digress.)
Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street,...
It's actually across three streets: Arch, Market, and Chestnut. But I nitpick.
...a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars, statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.
Though I'm usually a fan of Romantic excess and overstatement, this second sentence is a bit much for my tastes -- especially when you consider how loosely it play with its facts and its rhetoric. I'd suggest that the founding fathers' declaration of independence, and their Declaration of Independence, were sufficiently real long before the Constitutional Convention; it's not as if people in the states had merely been playing horseshoes and tiddlywinks since that fateful day in July of 1776. And I'd also suggest that the invocation of the farmers and scholars, statesmen and patriots who traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution is a bit of a cheat, since the key players and framers of the Constitution were born right here in the colonies. They'd fought and resisted tyranny, to be sure, but they hadn't fled across any oceans to escape it.
The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.
This is a strong passage -- nicely written and, for once, factually and historically accurate -- that sets the stage for much of his argument to come. Which is good rhetoric and politics, but a poor response to the realities at hand. This speech was billed as a direct reaction to the controversy sparked by the Rev. Wright and all his philosophical, oratorical silliness. To be fair, Senator Obama talks about Wright later. But first he wants to talk about the big wrong, the one that will set the stage for his (allegedly a-racial) candidacy, and that will establish a great, historically forgiving context for the (indisputably foolish) oratory of Reverend God Damn America.
This takes the notion of going back to the beginning to its absurd, but politically and rhetorically useful, extreme. This is set-up, pre-text, pre-fab guilt tripping, a way to make a whole heck of a lot of sons and daughters of farmers and scholars, tradesmen and millworkers who traveled across an ocean and came to this country long after the abolition of slavery feel the responsibility of a terrible shame for which they bear none at all.
Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution — a Constitution that had at its very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.
Sounds like a pretty great document to me. And, I imagine, to Senator Obama. As long as we're pointing out flaws and considering perfection over time, especially in response to such an in-depth, detailed document, you'd like to think that this speech will eventually come around, once it finishes deflecting (in all senses of the term) the Rev. Wright issue, to in-depth and detailed prescriptions for perfection. But unless you count eating mustard and relish sandwiches as one of those prescriptions, you would be wrong.
And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part — through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk — to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.
A lovely passage. The rhythms and parallel structures of the second sentence are especially strong. On the strengths of passages like this has Senator Obama built his reputation for eloquence and oratory. And justifiably so.
But they have also, to my ear, built his reputation for flowery, purple prose. A history lesson here is not what we want nor what we need. Anyone who cares and is paying attention knows all this and surely does not need to be reminded of it. It seems to me that what he's doing here is setting up the heavy weight of historical context (and its attendant burden of social injustice) to be placed upon the bent back of poor Reverend Wright, and of other charlatans like him who use very real historical, social, and economic grievances to justify very silly radical, fanatical, and paranoiac philosophies.
Which might be okay, were Senator Obama actually going to hit those sorts of reactions head-on, were he really going to openly, seriously, and directly confront what Reverend Wright -- and, by extension, people like him -- believes. But he doesn't. And so context becomes excuse, not explication.
This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign — to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America.
So his campaign is about race? It really is about overthrowing the last, lingering vestiges of the bondsman's shackles and marching for the once long-oppressed? If so, that's cool. But then why has he been denying it for so long?
This is another prime example of the Obama camp selectively choosing, on their own terms and no one else's, precisely when the senator's campaign can be about race. Even as they continue to protest that it's not.
I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history...
Thank God he resisted the urge once more to dip into the long-dry well of that fierce urgency of now phrase.
...because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together —
Notice how smoothly he segues from slavery and civil war to the challenges of our time? How neatly -- and, let's face it, disingenuously -- parallels, and perhaps even equates, the state of the country two hundred years ago to the state of the country now? Surely he does not believe this. Surely the pundits who praised this speech do not believe it either. And yet it works, and it resonates, because it's an awfully smooth and sure rhetorical sleight of hand.
By which I mean, of course: it's a trick.
...unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction — towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren.
Hard to argue with that. Just as it's hard to connect it with the rantings of the Reverend Wright of with Senator Obama's connection to him.
This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story.
Which we've all heard before. Over and over and over again these last two years. In interviews and newscasts and campaign speeches and tri-weekly Newsweek cover stories. But, hey, let's hear it all again. For no reason at all.
I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas.
Translation: I'm as American as you are.
To which any rational human being can only respond: no kidding.
These passages, repeated again in one of his campaign commercials, strike me as pandering or paranoia or both. Just stooping to the idiots who would discount him because he's (half-)black, or because his name sounds foreign and vaguely, frighteningly Muslim, or because he doesn't wear a flag pin on his lapel. Using your grandparents to build up your patriotic street cred seems weak and desperate and at least a little disingenuous for me. Unless, of course, you're running largely on your biography and your rhetoric.
And especially when, a few paragraphs later, you're gonna throw that same, bomber-assembly-line-working grandmother under the bus of lingering white racism.
I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations.
And now I'm running for President. So you can see how terribly my life has been tainted by all this.
I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners — an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters.
So, in other words, our two precious, beautiful little daughters are still stained by the original sin of slavery. Even though they're one hundred fifty-three years removed from it, their parents are wealthy, and their father is the Democratic frontrunner for President of the United States.
What a low, cheap little chip to try to cash on the heads of your own children.
I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.
A great line and a great point. It's too bad that he's ignored it before and will gloss over it again. And it's especially too bad that his family pastor and spiritual advisor and surrogate uncle seems hell-bent on forgetting it. Or failing even to acknowledge it.
It’s a story that hasn’t made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts — that out of many, we are truly one.
How the story of his life can sear anything into his genetic makeup, which already existed at the moment of his conception, he does not explain. Nor does anyone else seem to ask. (It sounds great, but it's the very definition of empty, amplified rhetoric.)
How he can reconcile the notion that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together with the notion that we are truly one, he does not suggest. Nor does anyone else seem to question. (Yes, we can. But we already are. So we can. But we still need to. Even though we already are...)
Throughout the first year of this campaign, against all predictions to the contrary, we saw how hungry the American people were for this message of unity.
Another rhetorical sleight of hand. How many predictions were there, exactly, that said these things? That suggested the American people would not respond to a message of unity?
What he's doing here, yet again, is casting himself as the victim. As the oppressed. As, at the very least, the suspect. Which fits well in this speech and the encompassing aura of collective guilt that it wants to evoke, but which hardly fits the realities of the past year, nor of his fawning, fallacious (or is that fellatious?) media coverage.
Despite the temptation to view my candidacy through a purely racial lens, we won commanding victories in states with some of the whitest populations in the country. In South Carolina, where the Confederate Flag still flies, we built a powerful coalition of African Americans and white Americans.
Who suffered that temptation, exactly? Care to name some names? After a while, all these vague and ominous portents get awfully tiresome.
This is not to say that race has not been an issue in the campaign.
That's good. Because it would be a foolish thing to say. Especially from the tongue of a man who, though born and reared in Hawaii, often sounds as if he's just stepped on stage at a performance of the Martin Luther King Jr. Show, and whose wife took great pains to tell a national 60 Minutes audience that Barack could be shot on his way to the gas station simply because of the color of his skin.
(Note to Lady McBama: so can I. So can everyoe.)
At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me either “too black” or “not black enough.”
The people who deemed him "not black enough" were almost all black themselves. That would seem, to me at least, to be a rather interesting -- by which I mean, disappointing -- bit of bigotry worth discussing. I mean, if we really wanted to confront all of these issues and all of these bigots equally and honestly. Which, apparently, we don't.
We saw racial tensions bubble to the surface during the week before the South Carolina primary. The press has scoured every exit poll for the latest evidence of racial polarization, not just in terms of white and black, but black and brown as well.
And yet, it has only been in the last couple of weeks that the discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn.
Yes. Because of the mad rantings and ravings of your "spiritual advisor." To whom we now, after 800 words of a speech we thought would be mostly about him and your relationship to him, finally come.
[to be continued...]
“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union."
Now there's some good writing.
(Though it would be even better if they'd removed in order, which serves no purpose except to goose the rhythm. But I digress.)
Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street,...
It's actually across three streets: Arch, Market, and Chestnut. But I nitpick.
...a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars, statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.
Though I'm usually a fan of Romantic excess and overstatement, this second sentence is a bit much for my tastes -- especially when you consider how loosely it play with its facts and its rhetoric. I'd suggest that the founding fathers' declaration of independence, and their Declaration of Independence, were sufficiently real long before the Constitutional Convention; it's not as if people in the states had merely been playing horseshoes and tiddlywinks since that fateful day in July of 1776. And I'd also suggest that the invocation of the farmers and scholars, statesmen and patriots who traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution is a bit of a cheat, since the key players and framers of the Constitution were born right here in the colonies. They'd fought and resisted tyranny, to be sure, but they hadn't fled across any oceans to escape it.
The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.
This is a strong passage -- nicely written and, for once, factually and historically accurate -- that sets the stage for much of his argument to come. Which is good rhetoric and politics, but a poor response to the realities at hand. This speech was billed as a direct reaction to the controversy sparked by the Rev. Wright and all his philosophical, oratorical silliness. To be fair, Senator Obama talks about Wright later. But first he wants to talk about the big wrong, the one that will set the stage for his (allegedly a-racial) candidacy, and that will establish a great, historically forgiving context for the (indisputably foolish) oratory of Reverend God Damn America.
This takes the notion of going back to the beginning to its absurd, but politically and rhetorically useful, extreme. This is set-up, pre-text, pre-fab guilt tripping, a way to make a whole heck of a lot of sons and daughters of farmers and scholars, tradesmen and millworkers who traveled across an ocean and came to this country long after the abolition of slavery feel the responsibility of a terrible shame for which they bear none at all.
Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution — a Constitution that had at its very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.
Sounds like a pretty great document to me. And, I imagine, to Senator Obama. As long as we're pointing out flaws and considering perfection over time, especially in response to such an in-depth, detailed document, you'd like to think that this speech will eventually come around, once it finishes deflecting (in all senses of the term) the Rev. Wright issue, to in-depth and detailed prescriptions for perfection. But unless you count eating mustard and relish sandwiches as one of those prescriptions, you would be wrong.
And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part — through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk — to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.
A lovely passage. The rhythms and parallel structures of the second sentence are especially strong. On the strengths of passages like this has Senator Obama built his reputation for eloquence and oratory. And justifiably so.
But they have also, to my ear, built his reputation for flowery, purple prose. A history lesson here is not what we want nor what we need. Anyone who cares and is paying attention knows all this and surely does not need to be reminded of it. It seems to me that what he's doing here is setting up the heavy weight of historical context (and its attendant burden of social injustice) to be placed upon the bent back of poor Reverend Wright, and of other charlatans like him who use very real historical, social, and economic grievances to justify very silly radical, fanatical, and paranoiac philosophies.
Which might be okay, were Senator Obama actually going to hit those sorts of reactions head-on, were he really going to openly, seriously, and directly confront what Reverend Wright -- and, by extension, people like him -- believes. But he doesn't. And so context becomes excuse, not explication.
This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign — to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America.
So his campaign is about race? It really is about overthrowing the last, lingering vestiges of the bondsman's shackles and marching for the once long-oppressed? If so, that's cool. But then why has he been denying it for so long?
This is another prime example of the Obama camp selectively choosing, on their own terms and no one else's, precisely when the senator's campaign can be about race. Even as they continue to protest that it's not.
I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history...
Thank God he resisted the urge once more to dip into the long-dry well of that fierce urgency of now phrase.
...because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together —
Notice how smoothly he segues from slavery and civil war to the challenges of our time? How neatly -- and, let's face it, disingenuously -- parallels, and perhaps even equates, the state of the country two hundred years ago to the state of the country now? Surely he does not believe this. Surely the pundits who praised this speech do not believe it either. And yet it works, and it resonates, because it's an awfully smooth and sure rhetorical sleight of hand.
By which I mean, of course: it's a trick.
...unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction — towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren.
Hard to argue with that. Just as it's hard to connect it with the rantings of the Reverend Wright of with Senator Obama's connection to him.
This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story.
Which we've all heard before. Over and over and over again these last two years. In interviews and newscasts and campaign speeches and tri-weekly Newsweek cover stories. But, hey, let's hear it all again. For no reason at all.
I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas.
Translation: I'm as American as you are.
To which any rational human being can only respond: no kidding.
These passages, repeated again in one of his campaign commercials, strike me as pandering or paranoia or both. Just stooping to the idiots who would discount him because he's (half-)black, or because his name sounds foreign and vaguely, frighteningly Muslim, or because he doesn't wear a flag pin on his lapel. Using your grandparents to build up your patriotic street cred seems weak and desperate and at least a little disingenuous for me. Unless, of course, you're running largely on your biography and your rhetoric.
And especially when, a few paragraphs later, you're gonna throw that same, bomber-assembly-line-working grandmother under the bus of lingering white racism.
I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations.
And now I'm running for President. So you can see how terribly my life has been tainted by all this.
I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners — an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters.
So, in other words, our two precious, beautiful little daughters are still stained by the original sin of slavery. Even though they're one hundred fifty-three years removed from it, their parents are wealthy, and their father is the Democratic frontrunner for President of the United States.
What a low, cheap little chip to try to cash on the heads of your own children.
I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.
A great line and a great point. It's too bad that he's ignored it before and will gloss over it again. And it's especially too bad that his family pastor and spiritual advisor and surrogate uncle seems hell-bent on forgetting it. Or failing even to acknowledge it.
It’s a story that hasn’t made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts — that out of many, we are truly one.
How the story of his life can sear anything into his genetic makeup, which already existed at the moment of his conception, he does not explain. Nor does anyone else seem to ask. (It sounds great, but it's the very definition of empty, amplified rhetoric.)
How he can reconcile the notion that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together with the notion that we are truly one, he does not suggest. Nor does anyone else seem to question. (Yes, we can. But we already are. So we can. But we still need to. Even though we already are...)
Throughout the first year of this campaign, against all predictions to the contrary, we saw how hungry the American people were for this message of unity.
Another rhetorical sleight of hand. How many predictions were there, exactly, that said these things? That suggested the American people would not respond to a message of unity?
What he's doing here, yet again, is casting himself as the victim. As the oppressed. As, at the very least, the suspect. Which fits well in this speech and the encompassing aura of collective guilt that it wants to evoke, but which hardly fits the realities of the past year, nor of his fawning, fallacious (or is that fellatious?) media coverage.
Despite the temptation to view my candidacy through a purely racial lens, we won commanding victories in states with some of the whitest populations in the country. In South Carolina, where the Confederate Flag still flies, we built a powerful coalition of African Americans and white Americans.
Who suffered that temptation, exactly? Care to name some names? After a while, all these vague and ominous portents get awfully tiresome.
This is not to say that race has not been an issue in the campaign.
That's good. Because it would be a foolish thing to say. Especially from the tongue of a man who, though born and reared in Hawaii, often sounds as if he's just stepped on stage at a performance of the Martin Luther King Jr. Show, and whose wife took great pains to tell a national 60 Minutes audience that Barack could be shot on his way to the gas station simply because of the color of his skin.
(Note to Lady McBama: so can I. So can everyoe.)
At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me either “too black” or “not black enough.”
The people who deemed him "not black enough" were almost all black themselves. That would seem, to me at least, to be a rather interesting -- by which I mean, disappointing -- bit of bigotry worth discussing. I mean, if we really wanted to confront all of these issues and all of these bigots equally and honestly. Which, apparently, we don't.
We saw racial tensions bubble to the surface during the week before the South Carolina primary. The press has scoured every exit poll for the latest evidence of racial polarization, not just in terms of white and black, but black and brown as well.
And yet, it has only been in the last couple of weeks that the discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn.
Yes. Because of the mad rantings and ravings of your "spiritual advisor." To whom we now, after 800 words of a speech we thought would be mostly about him and your relationship to him, finally come.
[to be continued...]
Posted: Thu - March 27, 2008 at 11:34 AM
Quick Links
Calendar
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
Categories
Archives
Terror Alert
Brilliant Satire
Required Reading
Traffic Count
Official Muse
Syndication
Carbolic Wear
Y Chromosomes
Some Perspective
On Tour
XML/RSS Feed
Statistics
Total entries in this blog:
Total entries in this category:
Published On: Jul 28, 2008 01:39 PM
Total entries in this category:
Published On: Jul 28, 2008 01:39 PM