So much commentary out there on Obama's inaugural speech - and some brilliant stuff: Micheal Eric Dyson on his rhetorical debt to the preachers of the black Church, John Nichols on his subtle citations of Tom Paine (the radical who wanted to abolish slavery but was rejected by the 'founding fathers'), Slate.com's glossary on the key phrases, or the New York Times' corralling of previous inaugural speechwriters. And doubtless scores more to come.
But there are a few policy messages that are worth sifting critically through the agenda of this blog. Emotionally and culturally (see my previous post) I'm very much a supporter of the Obama presidency. Yet I can't help but confess to a few tense thoughts as the words sink in.
Straight away, it must be said that one of the dominant overtones of the speech was the familiar, dour and duteous call of the Puritan/Protestant work ethic (in passing, Jonathan Freedland notes that only Protestant pastors occupied the inaugural stage). But to my ears this often incoherently struggled with a different discourse entirely - one that holds that America is an improvisation, an evolving process, indeed an 'imperfect union'.
Take this early section, after Obama has neatly laid out the environmental, geopolitical, social and economic challenges of his presidency:
We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.
In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted - for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things - some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labour, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.
I'm certainly not the first to point out that the American national aim of the "pursuit of happiness", in full measure or not, requires a certain irrepressible optimism about the future - which is, if not a 'childish thing', then at least 'child-like', in the sense of retaining an indefatigable hopefulness (that key Obama buzz-word) in the possibility of personal and social progress.
Obama is right to transcendentalise the impulse behind this will-to-happiness (which I, and quite a few others, would say was the continuing legacy of our playful early selves). It is indeed "precious", a "noble gift", a "God-given promise" (and given the legitimacy that "non-believers" were given in a later part of the speech, a 'nature-given' promise too). If humans are basically "equal" and "free", then they are empowered to shape their lives as they will - and yes, if they like, to choose a "better history".
But there is an existential openness about the American pursuit of happiness - a strong possibility that things may be messy and vibrantly emergent, rather than normative and easily consensual. "Common purpose" may come from the innovation of the commons, but it isn't guaranteed or scriptable. Isn't this what being a "liberal" really means? You could further argue that this experimental approach is what defines the very youthfulness of a still "young" nation. So if Americans really did entirely put "childish things behind them", might they not also risk extinguishing one of the core energies behind the national renewal that Obama yearns for? (The websites Boing Boing and World-Changing come to mind here - exemplars of how light-heartedness, experiment and commitment can be easily combined).
The next paragraph hardly resolves the incoherence. American greatness, for Obama, seems to inhere in the choice of those who reject "leisure" and "the pleasures of riches and fame", in favour of a non-faint-hearted commitment to "work". But can these narcissistic, egoistic, greedy, hedonist pursuits really be excluded from the "full measure" of happiness? \
I love the art of hip-hop; I don't always love the message of hip-hop. There are times where even with the artists I love, you know, there's a message that is not only sometimes degrading to women; not only uses the n-word a little too frequently; but - also something I'm really concerned about - it's always talking about material things.
As I noted in the previous post, Obama's heart is with soul rather than hip-hop culture - organic, communual joy, rather than braggadocio and the historical uniqueness of black men and women being "paid in full" (and displaying the bling to prove it). Obama is implicitly distancing himself from these "playas", and later on in the speech, explicitly distances himself from other self-described "players" - those big swinging dicks of Wall Street who have gamed the rules of market capitalism almost to self-destruction. (We should remind ourselves at this point that one of Obama's strongest constituencies of support has been among the younger cadres of hedge-fund managers in the big financial institutions. Were they quite aware of his Puritan scepticism about 'material things' and greed?)
One of the developing insights of a "play ethic", in an age where play has become (for better or ill) our essential social logic, is that we have to start making evaulative choices among the forms of human experiment that we call "play". Or to realise that some forms, under some circumstances, should temper others. To me it jumps out that Obama in this speech, and Gordon Brown in many others, include the term "fair play" in the list of qualities that define their respective nations: the idea that the game of economic citizenship (like any game) operates under clear and transparent rules, which - if properly refereed - should give players a "free and equal" opportunity to participate in it.
To do a "play audit" on Obama's vision for America (not that he's asking, but here we go anyway...), he is asking for more "social play" (asking us all to "seize gladly" the prospect of "giving our all to a difficult task" - the "pleasures" of service and cooperation, as it were), more "developmental play" (the primacy of education and parenting), and more "imaginative" play (appealing to the inventiveness of science and business). But he's also asking for less "contestive" play (his constant pleas to move beyond political partisanship, his critique of untrammelled markets), and certainly, as mentioned already, less "egoistic" and sheerly "antic" play (America, grow up! Rappers, shape up!).
Thinking of Obama in this way - as an ethical orchestrator of the general and profound play of American society, rather than a work-vs-leisure Puritan - gets me out of a bit of a problem I had with the Great Day itself. Might there something a bit suspicious (whisper it: hypocritical) about a man who gives a "down-with-laziness-fame-and-riches" speech at lunchtime, and then clearly enjoys the sheer sensual sumputousness of his "first dances" deep into that evening - his coutured wife in his arms, and Beyonce silkily serenading both of them from the audience?
Not necessarily. But whatever this is, it's a same-day image of a man who loves his "leisure" just as much as his "work".
In general, I have my doubts that any "spirit of service" lurking within a networked, entertainment-drenched, way-beyond-scarcity American populace will be raised by the kind of dour counterpositions of behaviour and character that Obama occasionally made in his speech. And which he clearly doesn't believe in himself.
I think this is Gordon Brown's fatal mistake, incidentally, in his peddling of a similar injuction to collective moral agency in the UK. He asks us to feel the very opposite of the easy, credit-driven gratification that we are used to as consumer-citizens. And hair-shirts don't sit well with the pampered bodies and souls of the culture of contentment, no matter how much you scare them with systemic collapse.
We're not as bad as the bulbous adult-babies that float around on the Axiom in the Wall-E movie - but we're not disconnected from that either. And aren't we ever-more aware (as the mind sciences develop) how tricky it is to get people to act against their conditioning and wiring? (Unfortunately, in Wall-E, the "leisure" classes regain their "courage" and "common purpose" by rising up against a totalitarian and inhuman network... And only then do they "remake America". Uh-oh.)
A politics for this comfortable age (and it is historically comfortable, as I wrote a week or two ago) needs a vision of collective joy, as much (if not more) than one of collective sacrifice, to get the populace active. My guess is that Obama will get this balance right: let's put it this way, he's clearly too much of a sensualist not to.
And it's easy to pick out in his Inaugural speech a much more interesting, pluralist, innovation-oriented lexicon of American purpose: "imagination", "curiosity", "tolerance", "risk-taking", "remaking", "makers of things". These terms seem to me like little seeds of a possible American future - a more relaxed, more fruitful, more equilibrial future - that could lie beyond the current crisis.
But what I don't think any of us know is just how bad things are going to get: just how overwhelming the combination of financial self-destruction, a climate heading for the tipping point, and a dangerously radicalised Middle-East street will be for any American project, let alone this one.
I think this explains what some commentators have called the "hodge-podge" nature of his speech (and which might also presage the hodge-podge nature of his government). Certainly, the relaxed, Blackberry-thumbing, engagement-friendly Obama - multiple in origins, dialogical in behaviour, 'soft-powered' at his core - does not sit well with the zero-sum warrior who will "defend our way of life" and triumphantly "defeat" those who reject, oppose or threaten it.
There's an Obama who clearly perceives the need for a new American sustainability - not just new green jobs and industries, but a new green society and lifestyle too, a post-consumerism hinted at when he talks of "hard choices" and "putting off unpleasant decisions". But that sits uncomfortably with the Obama who knows that he has to find, at least in the short term, a conventional demand-led answer to the coming increase in basic unemployment, and the imminent collapse of large parts of industrial America. Not forgetting, of course, that it's this crisis he was voted in to prevent. Here is the cat's-cradle of Obama's electoral landscape, and the historical moment he inherits: it's truly hard to know how it will pan out.
One couldn't deny the sheer enormity of the challenge facing Obama and his team, facing the wreckage left by the Bush years. As a punky and brilliant essay by David Micheal Green says, Obama aims to initially re-centre American politics, away from the dangerous eccentricites of the Bushites: Whodathunkit, eh? Mixed economy, guaranteed freedoms, good relations abroad. What a concept, huh? Back in the hazy, distant past of 2000, we thought we had learned these lessons for the rest of time. But what we've learned instead from Bush and Cheney is just how tenuous those principles really are. It was therefore right and proper that Obama devoted a portion of his inaugural speech to reacquainting us with our better angels, so long on holiday of late.
I also can't believe that the Obama who, during the election, understood precisely the relationship between relative economic deprivation, and an intolerant militarism, doesn't also want his diplomacy-led geopolitics to bear domestic as well as international fruit. By that, I mean a roll-back of the creeping militarisation of American society itself. When Obama invokes the armed forces, alive and dead, in these lines -
We honour them not only because they are guardians of our liberty, but because they embody the spirit of service; a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves. And yet, at this moment - a moment that will define a generation - it is precisely this spirit that must inhabit us all.
- listen to his voice on the very last phrase (14.04 - 14.28) There's a slight desperation there, a professorial instruction in his throat. To me, it says: can we release this new 'spirit of service', a new "pleasure" and "willingness" to be active and creative citizens, from the bloodied uniform of neo-imperial control that it currently wears? I might be projecting wildly, but I'm sure I can hear something idealistic pulsing there.
Yet how can Obama - America's Community-Organiser-In-Chief, as some wags have already put it - raise (or perhaps recover) what Barbara Ehrenriech called in her recent book a "language of collective joy" to take this agenda forward? (Actually, the book was called Dancing In The Streets, which seems to fit the booty-bumping Obama a bit better).
Another welcome voice returning to the fray, Benjamin Barber, writer of Jihad Vs. McWorld, states it starkly for Obama in this week's The Nation. Does an economic recovery plan measure its success by the sight of a nation returning to heedless, debt-driven consumerism? There are epic moments in history, often catalyzed by catastrophe, that permit fundamental cultural change. The Civil War not only brought an end to slavery but knit together a wounded country, opened the West and spurred capitalist investment in ways that created the modern American nation. The Great Depression legitimized a radical expansion of democratic interventionism; but more important, it made Americans aware of how crucial equality and social justice (buried in capitalism's first century) were to America's survival as a democracy.
Today we find ourselves in another such seminal moment. Will we use it to rethink the meaning of capitalism and the relationship between our material bodies and the spirited psyches they are meant to serve? Between the commodity fetishism and single-minded commercialism that we have allowed to dominate us, and the pluralism, heterogeneity and spiritedness that constitute our professed national character?
Beautifully put. But for a final dose of political hard-ball, let me finally quote from David Micheal Green again: What we heard on Tuesday was fine, if less than Lincolnesque in its eloquence. But I'm far more troubled by what we didn't hear. Like about the obscene polarization of wealth bequeathed us by Reaganism-Bushism. Like about the impending doom of our little blue spaceship if we don't get serious about global warming, starting yester-decade. We did not hear about how it is morally and fiscally unsustainable to maintain a military machine that costs more than every other country's on the planet, combined. We did not hear that our healthcare system is a crime masquerading as national policy. We did not hear plain talk about the lethal bankruptcy of our foreign policy.
These are gigantic challenges necessitating gigantic responses. Even accounting for the possible benefits of incrementalism and perhaps even certain amounts of benign subterfuge, there is no way imaginable to me that we can get close to the required remedies for these problems without a leadership busy at framing these crises as such, articulating grand solutions, cajoling us to do better, and cheering along our progress.
There will be other speeches, in response to other crises. But it's been good to try and get the measure of what might be an inspiring political term of office. Hope it's been interesting: back to the ground of play next week.
