Obama's eloquence reflects end of the age of the rant
tennessean.com
By JOEL RICE
Tennessee Voices
January 17, 2008
Whether presidential hopeful Barack Obama prevails in the nominating process, he has already done something historic. He has ended, at least for now, the age of the rant.
George W. Bush, not given to rhetorical flight, set the tone for the now receding era of screed. However one feels about the 43rd president, few would ever accuse him of eloquence.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, a senator, on national television, called for our citizens to drag Osama bin Laden's body through the street as other national political figures called not just unabashedly, but proudly, for torture.
This was the age of the rant. In the age of the rant, we heard mainstream political talk-show hosts, from CNN to Fox, drop all pretenses of sobriety and objectivity. Like Howard Beale in the movie Network, the more they ranted the more their ratings climbed. On Valencia Street in San Francisco, a sign read: Bush is a Mad Cow.
The age of the rant reached its nadir for me in the winter of 2004 when, during the pitched Bush vs. Kerry battle, a mass e-mail found its way into my inbox. The electronic epistle's author was the novelist E.L. Doctorow. Reading Doctorow's group e-mail, one heard not the modulated tones of the man of letters but the coarse screaming of feverish desperation, a cascade of invective directed at the president of the United States.
Doctorow's e-mail was the kind of violent speechifying that another era would have properly confined to a bar, or scrawled on a bathroom wall. One of our nation's most lauded writers reduced to Internet diatribe. Blame the author, or his times, or both.
This was the age of the rant.
Of course, the semi-anonymity of the World Wide Web inspired millions of private citizens to discover and share their inner polemicist, typing into the computer screen, instead of yelling out the window, that they were "mad as hell."
Enter Barack Obama with his soaring rhetoric, his exhilarating turns of phrase, his wide vistas of hope and pure American possibility. Where many other politicians and NGOs, such as MoveOn.org, use language as a blunt object, Mr. Obama seems to float on language as though it were ether. In the realm of national discourse he has managed to set, in President Bush's immortal phrase, "the pie higher."
Last week, the Clinton campaign sought to cast suspicion on the senator from Illinois' resonant language. Hillary Clinton, in the New Hampshire debate, warned of "false hopes." "You campaign in poetry," she said, "but you govern in prose." In essence: He talks. I will do.
Maybe.
But speaking is also a form of doing. In articulating his high argument of hope, Obama has shown us that — even after years of rant — the country of Walt Whitman, of Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. will always yearn for eloquence and its power to summon the better angels of our nature.
*Joel Rice is a Nashville free-lance writer. |
