As I write this I have not yet seen
an estimate of the size of the television and radio audiences for President
Obama’s Farewell Address, delivered last night in Chicago. I hope that it was very large. Apparently eighty million people viewed at
least part of the first of the campaign “debates” between Hillary Clinton and
Donald Trump, so that I suppose one might legitimately hope for something like
a tenth of that. Though it may not be
saying much it is still worth saying that there was a great deal more of
substance in the President’s speech. One
had the general impression of vast throngs from the twenty thousand enthusiasts
in the live audience at the McCormick Place Convention Center, many
of them young people who had waited in long lines in the freezing pre-dawn.
The event,
beautifully staged as so many major political events must be these days,
suffered from the cultural indeterminacy typical of a hybridity that conjoins
the rock concert with the Roman forum.
The President’s speech was prefaced by a pop rendition of the “Star-Spangled
Banner.” Now the “Star-Spangled Banner”
is our national anthem. That means, or
should mean, that it is communal and corporate, not individual and
expressive. The first-person pronouns of
its lyrics are first-person plural. It is not an operatic aria. It would be a solecism
to have the massed voices of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir go off on Che gelida manina from La Bohème. No less of a solecism is it to invite pop
stars to indulge in tremolo riffs on
“home of the braaaaaaaave.” Of course
that it merely my opinion, and I have no illusion that it will ever cut much
ice with the impressarios of the National Football League who, along with the
organizers of various self-promotion events in Hollywood, seem to have
determined the forms of national secular liturgies.
Such grumpy old fudy-dudyism is,
however, about the worst thing I have to say about the speech. Its genre demanded certain things. The speaker had to present a rosy view of the
accomplishments of his two Administrations.
He had to express his gratitude to those who had elected and aided him
while in office. And he had to claim
some unique significance for actions carried out under the specific
circumstances of recent history. But one
can do those things more or less well, and I thought that all in all he did
them very well, and in a fashion that exhibited articulateness, intelligence,
forcefulness, amiability, civility, and that old-fashioned decency that is
rapidly absenting itself from our brutal politics.
President
Obama’s farewell address had a definite theme: democracy, more particularly American democracy. This is not an original theme—far from
it. It could be described indeed as the
classic theme of American presidential oratory.
The theme is usually approached
in terms of the novelty, the delicacy, the peculiarity, or the vulnerabily of
an institution constantly to be tested.
Such suggestion is powerfully present in Washington’s own Farewell
Address. According to Lincoln at
Gettysburg the enormous upheaval of the Civil War was a test of whether so
unlikely a proposition as American democracy “could long endure”. Franklin Roosevelt returned to it time and
again. President Obama was by no means
blind to serious challenges to our American democratic consensus, but he was
finally decisively optimistic. His
optimism is founded his assessment of the finest cohorts of American
youth. Having spent my own life working
among such young people, I am happy to associate myself with his view.
There is a difference
between a reflective optimist and a Pollyanna.
Our outgoing President inspired me to consult the first presidential
farewell address—Washington’s, in 1796, to which I have already alluded. There I find a good deal that is relevant to
our own age of political bubbles, media wars, coastal elites, flyover country,
and thirty-second attack ads. “In
contemplating the causes which may disturb our Union,” said President
Washington, “it occurs as matter of serious concern that any ground should have
been furnished for characterizing parties by geographical discriminations,
Northern and Southern, Atlantic and Western; whence designing men may endeavor
to excite a belief that there is a real difference of local interests and
views. One of the expedients of party to acquire influence within particular
districts is to misrepresent the opinions and aims of other districts. You
cannot shield yourselves too much against the jealousies and heartburnings
which spring from these misrepresentations; they tend to render alien to each
other those who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection.”
