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Embattled Obama
I’ve now read Obama’s inaugural address. The merging-of-all-humanity paragraph that I analyzed in the previous entry is not at all characteristic of the speech as a whole, which is also completely unlike his campaign speeches. Far from messianic and filled with promises to meet people’s every material need, it is almost unrelievedly grim, embattled, shoulder to the wheel. We’re in the midst of storms, crises, and we must harness all our will to pull our way through. Lines such as, “We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense,” obviously contradict his messianic call for all tribal-national divisions in the world to be dissolved, as does this:
To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society’s ills on the West, know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy.Oddly, the two passages I’ve just quoted appear immediately before and immediately after the merging-of-humanity paragraph. I guess this is what is known as trying to appeal to liberals and conservatives. There’s also his trademark grandiosity, in which he speaks of this moment as “a moment that will define a generation.” At least it’s no longer a moment that will remake the universe. Bush’s 2001 inaugural struck similar embattled notes, describing the nation as though it were in the midst of a storm, and calling on imagery from the Civil War. But the only war at that time was the Florida post-election contest and the hatred of Bush that it engendered. Obama’s storm-and-crisis imagery—he even quotes Thomas Paine’s The American Crisis, written at the most desperate moment of the War of Independence—is also overblown, though, given our severe economic troubles, somewhat less inappropriate than Bush’s. Bottom line. We still don’t know where Obama is heading, except that it will be a mixture of different things meant to cover different bases. However, I think that Ken (“Brotherhood of Man”) Hechtman is going to be disappointed. The globalist paragraph aside, this is not the speech of a man who is looking for ways to merge America with the world. If McCain had been elected, half his inaugural speech would have been about white guilt, particularly his own guilt for having beaten Obama.
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