Guardian UK: In its severity and fury, this was Obama at his most powerful and moving

[marmar]

In its severity and fury, this was Obama at his most powerful and moving
This was a stunning gamble: he dared to show his belief in the enduring power of words to reform American life

Simon Schama at Mile High Stadium
The Guardian, Saturday August 30 2008



Oh how the McCain campaign must have chuckled when they got an inkling of what the Obama strategists had in mind as the backdrop for his acceptance speech in the stadium of the Denver Broncos, surmounted by an apparently neutered plaster stallion. Architrave alert! Fluted columns! Cecil B DeMille Doric! What a gift to satirists who could lampoon Obama as a wannabe Demosthenes, so self-monumentalised that he seemed to be presumptuously rehearsing the inaugural oath on the Capitol steps. It's possible that, even after one of the most memorably dramatic speeches in modern American history, they may still be betting on what they think is an eloquence aversion out there in the heartland; the ingrained suspicion that fancy phrase-making is a fig leaf for lack of substance. Early in the primary season Hillary Clinton made much of the difference between words and deeds, as if high rhetoric was a tip-off to political inadequacy. Beware fine words, that unsubtle message ran, for they are gossamer, the pretty fabric you spin when you can't hack the hard stuff of power. By this reasoning, McCain is a shoo-in, not in spite of his shortcomings in the eloquence department, but because of it. The Hanoi Hilton, after all, was a place of terrifying silence, and aw shucks will beat silver tongue every time with the regular Joes and Janes.

But this year, the year of primal national scream in the US, is this smart politics? In the end the Republican posture of laconic authenticity, of Quiet Americans, may backfire. For what Obama delivered on Thursday night deliberately left pyrotechnics to the literal fireworks that brought the convention to an end. Instead he delivered severity; combative polemic over the hurting body of the republic; a gripping sense of the magnitude of the moment, without ever dropping his audience into resignation or pessimism. It was the least showy and, by some distance I think, the most moving and powerful of all his remarkable speeches, for its eschewal of rhetorical flamboyance was done in the service of a higher goal: the rebirth of what he called in his stirring peroration "common purpose", meaning the reassertion of mutuality without the compromise of individuality.

It is this insistence of being one's brother's and sister's keeper as a pure American ideal, the questioning of what an "ownership society" means, that was so heartening. What Obama seems to be after is not just the reawakening of national community, but altering what an election campaign actually is. "You can make a big election small," he said, witheringly, of the decades of Lee Atwater, Roger Ailes and Karl Rove. The time is too serious, the stakes too high, to tolerate that kind of politics. After cataloguing the Bush administration's manifold failures, something happened to his voice that, in the months that I have followed him since the Iowa caucuses, I have never heard: a ferocious roar of fury bellowed into the microphone. And the word that formed in the fire of his indignation was, simply: "ENOUGH!" It was a Shakespearean moment that shook the eighty thousand rigid, and ought to have disabused any Republicans of the idle assumption that they are taking on a remote, effete intellectual who doesn't have the wherewithal for bloody political combat.

So Obama is betting on the word's enduring power as a reformer of American life. Historically he has good reason for, from the beginning, words and texts have constructed American realities, not the other way round. The spell cast on Americans by the mantle of words goes all the way back to the first Great Awakening in the 1740s when flocks thrilled to Methodist preachers such as George Whitefield. Evangelical passion remains a brilliant strand in the weave of American discourse, but when it made way for the reasoning of the enlightenment deists and unitarians who made the revolution, another element of American speech-power sounded loud and clear: the reverence for classical oratory. .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/30/barackobama.democrats20081

[C_U_L8R]

1. it's more than words... it's ideas

but the words are amazing too : - ))))

[jaxx]

2. ...the year of primal national scream

Excellent review. And I liked the closing....

<snip> But the Republicans had better practice an unaccustomed economy of derision, for after Obama's severe magnificence, an attack on his style carries the risk of churlishness: the grim snicker of the crabbed.

[sarge43]

3. The words have been our ensigns, our banners

They defined the moment; they inspired us; they showed us where we must be and what we must do --

"When in the course of human events ...."

"We the People ...."

"Four score and seven years ago ...."

"We have nothing to fear but fear itself ...."

"Ask not what your country can do for you ...."

"I have a dream ...."

"ENOUGH!"

[Kansas Wyatt]

4. "ENOUGH"

A simple word, when spoken in the right tone, speaks volumes about every hardship the American people have suffered through for the past thirty years of Republican ownership oppression.

"ENOUGH" becomes a declaration and battle cry for Americans to join ranks to dominate those who have oppressed them.

On edit: I was stunned that a Democrat finally stood up and said it. I thought, and I'm sure many others thought the same, that it was about damn time a Democrat did.

[sarge43]

5. Yes. That was the Democrat I remember. The truth with no bark on it.

The great rhetoricians of the English language have always understood that the simple words are the best ones; the ones that get to us at a fundamental, basic level. They draw from the ancient vocabulary, the words that have lived a thousand years and more.

Consider Churchill's "We shall fight .... We shall never surrender." With the exception of surrender, every word in that riff is from the Old English. Alfred the Great could have spoken them.

The past speaks to the present and future. We too had a dream; we too overcame.

Enough by the way is Old English - genog. Our nominee knew exactly what to do.

(typo)