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A Moment Like This Used to Get a Black Man Killed
A few words about progress. And grace. And American cool.[image]
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BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
JUL 28, 2016
I play it cool/I dig all jive/That's the reason I stay alive.
—Langston Hughes
PHILADELPHIA—On the crowded convention floor on Wednesday night, as the President of the United States gave his heart and his soul to the campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton to succeed him, I found a spot to stand with the delegation from Louisiana, which has been the center of so much heartbreak and redemption over the past 10 years, and which also is the place where the American concept of cool was born, the one that captured the world through a million silver trumpets.
If he has done nothing else, and he has done a great deal, Barack Obama has developed an aesthetic of cool that is his alone. It expands and extends from the way he does his job; the video prior to his appearance emphasized how he always was the calm presence in the middle of heated policy debates. It also includes the way he has carried himself in office, and the way he has carried the office itself—lightly, in its ceremonial aspects, but carefully and reverently in those parts of the job that belong most importantly to the rest of us.
He remains a graceful, cosmopolitan democrat, not unlike Thomas Jefferson, not unlike Langston Hughes, not unlike Albert Murray. His patriotism is wide and generous. It has no definite frontiers. And that's what was born in Louisiana, in the streets and the clubs and the brothels. It came from there and it fought racism to at least a draw. It came from there and it conquered the world. And that was the place he went to when he threw the jab that stung the deepest.
And that's why we can take the food and music and holidays and styles of other countries, and blend it into something uniquely our own.
That got the Louisiana folks out of their chairs.
That's why we can attract strivers and entrepreneurs from around the globe to build new factories and create new industries here. That's why our military can look the way it does—every shade of humanity, forged into common service. That's why anyone who threatens our values, whether fascists or communists or jihadists or homegrown demagogues, will always fail in the end.
He almost swallowed the words "homegrown demagogues." Compared to the rest of the passage, you had to seek it out, to find the way he linked the Republican nominee to fascists and communists and (gulp) jihadists. But the meaning was clear and the shot was clean. It was Ali, coming off the ropes in the eighth round in Zaire. There was an elegance to the way he threw it. There was an elegance and a purity to the way it landed. The boldness of the charge was the least part of its sting.
more
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a47143/obama-speech-democratic-convention/
