n a t b s

For all those people out there who keep saying Obama is just words, and who keep asking what is this ambiguous “change” he keeps talking about, I point to his speech yesterday as the perfect example of that change. The change that he’s really been talking about is raising the discourse in this country. I don’t know if anyone noticed but our national media is on the level of 7th graders gossiping. He’s trying to rectify that. I think that to a certain extent that speech was directed straight at the media. For one thing, he gave it to a room full of reporters.

For days now the national press has been obsessing over the Wright comments. They’ve been insisting Obama throw him under the bus. They’ve been judging the Reverend on about 3 seconds of video. And Obama refused to get sucked in by it. He refused to disown his dear friend, but he still denounced his words. And then he challenged us to look at the bigger picture; how this really all relates to the stagnant and dysfunctional race relations in this country. And he did it without being patronizing.

Will it work politically? I don’t know, but in scanning the morning news the reactions seem generally positive. On the other hand I can just hear the attack ad now: Barack saying “He was like family to me” put together with Wright saying “GOD DAMN AMERICA!!” over and over. Will that sink him? We’ll have to wait and see. But if it does than that means we’re not ready for Barack Obama. He can’t make the change himself, all he can do is challenge us to change and hope that we follow. I’m with you Barack. I know a lot of other people who are too. I just hope it’s enough. I’m sick of being in 7th grade.

I just read the full text of Barack Obama’s “special speech on race.” I had to read it, not listen, because I’m at work. I’ll listen to it later just to hear his most-likely great delivery but the words themselves are very good. This kind of speech is exactly what he needs to be doing more of. Instead of attacking Hillary Clinton, this speech really demonstrates his ability to be a uniter. It’s intelligent, thoughtful, and right-on. Instead of denouncing one of his mentors and throwing him under the bus, he tries to clearly explain the racial divide in this country that has lead to this whole situation. It’s not the smartest political move by conventional wisdom, but it may work in today’s world. In today’s world people can go on youtube and watch the whole speech instead of just having it distilled to sound bites. Of course it will be distilled to sound bites. To wit: CNN’s headline, “Obama: Constitution ‘stained by sin of slavery’.” This is why I hate old media, especially CNN. I mean he did say that, and it’s true by the way, but distilling his entire speech into that one sentence is very misrepresentative of his remarks. It makes him seem like an angry black man, much like the Rev. Wright the media’s been criticizing all week.

Anyway, let me now do my own blog version of sound-biting the speech. Let’s start at the top, with the constitution remark:

“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.”

Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, 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.

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.

Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution – a Constitution that had at is 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.

So CNN took that and got one sentence out of it. I read that a see a lot of sense. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery (of course he’s forgetting the other original sin of this nation: genocide. But I’ll let that one slide). Yet the document itself held all the answers; that we are all equal, and have rights to freedom and liberty. It’s just that at first “people” or “men” were categorized as “white men.” If you weren’t white, or a man, in those days you weren’t really a person as far as the government was concerned. So yes, the constitution was stained by this hypocrisy and sin. Fortunately over the years we’ve come closer to the ideals laid out in our founding documents. I’d stress the word “closer” in that sentence because we’re still a long way off, and unfortunately at the moment I’d say we’re regressing. But I digress, back to the speech:

Sometimes a story comes along that’s such a perfect metaphor it’s almost hard to believe. 50 people go blind because they were looking for a virgin mary in the sun!? Seriously? It’s too good. My interpretation would be that looking for god in the wrong places leads to blindness. Which may, ironically, lead to sight. Do you think some of those people will learn the error of their ways? I hope so. Or maybe the sun-staring gave them some kind of religious experience that they now credit to their Christian God. Either way I now know how to defeat religious people. Just tell them you saw Mary on a military test range. Tell them you saw Mary in Iraq! No, we’ve done enough to the Iraqis. Anyway, who knew religious people were so stupid and gullible? I guess I should have realized, the signs have been around for a while.