A Transcendent Address-Obama's Speech Mar 18, 2008

“Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case, the available means of persuasion.” So says Aristotle in his famous treatise on Rhetoric, which he equated to the traditional dialectic of his day, and which we must not equate with the additional modern meaning of ‘Rhetoric’ as insincere or empty ‘bull’ type of discourse. Aristotle goes on to emphasize three very important attributes of ‘good rhetoric.’ One is “the personal character of the speaker,” two is “putting the audience into a certain frame of mind,” and three is “on the proof, or apparent proof, provided by the words of the speech itself:” that is, the substance or persuasive dynamics of the oration.

Senator Obama has presented and demonstrated his ‘personal character’ and has offered considerable ‘persuasive proof’ in his moving speech. The mood of his audiences is another matter.

I have entitled this message, ‘A Transcendent Address’ because Obama’s words have an extraordinary way of going beyond the politics of his quest and going beyond the words themselves. He has the capability of presenting the core of whatever is problematic, in a universal sense and in an appealing vein. Moreover, this particular apologetic for Reverend Wright presents, especially to the non-black community, a rare insight into the condition and perspective of African Americans today. I, as a non-black, am able to see, a bit, into the life of things for the black community. Upon initially reading or hearing the speech, I must, of course, put aside, or bracket, the obscene and inflammatory remarks of what Reverend Wright has said. I do not condone it by doing this. I simply must suspend my judgment until I finish and understand the speech. This includes casting aside the obnoxious handling of this matter by most media, especially in the way they have presented only the inflammatory remarks of the Reverend. The media has presented only the hate images of the Reverend. The media obviously has not suspended their judgment and thus all of which they present to the public is pure bias and rotten journalism.

What has Oabam’s Lincoln like speech presented about blacks and whites in America today and how has Obama gone far beyond the politics of the election and presented some insights into the black community?

“That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.”

Those who are non-black can not possibly empathize with the black community. They can not grasp the solidarity and spirit of the experience of those who carry with them the years of degradation, inherited sense of slavery, servitude, and hatred. But Obama’s words manage to place us within the domain of a thriving dynamic ‘Sunday-go-to-meeting’ moment of joy and fellowship, which elevate the congregation to levels of both ‘shocking ignorance’ and ‘sense of struggles and successes, bitterness and bias.’ We can, for a moment, capture the mood of the tragic sense of life in their past history, and with Obama’s descriptions , the joyous sense of this brave notion of hope.

“This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What’s remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.”

Senator Obama has offered a pathway for all who must uplift themselves today. If the people of Wright’s generation while still firmly in entrenched segregation were able to improve themselves, then the road to improvement is quite viable, and of course, more so today.

“For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.”

Again, we gain some insight into the sense of humiliation and anger. African Americans are more comfortable venting their discontent and anger within their own mileau, just as well as we non-blacks feel free to say what’s on our minds about other ethnic groups when we are within our own ethnic social settings. How many of us can recall off color things said about other ethnic groups? How many of us can recall a bit of the Reverend Wright type rantings? How many of us can remember saying such things, or perhaps just thinking such things? How can we hold Obama responsible for the obscene harangue of such a speaker? Excuse the pun, but he is not his brother’s keeper.

“The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know — what we have seen – is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.”

The above is the most transcendent feature of the Senator’s speech. There is no cunning and deception nor any political mendacity in what he says. It is a simple fact that Obama is close to getting the nomination and he is an African American. What other country is this possible in? Our society is not static. It is a dynamic living entity of our living Constitution, and it is a society filled with the promises and statements of the Declaration of Independence, of which Obama himself mentions; that its theme of unalienable rights did not come to immediate fruition. This is Obama’s sense of change; he is the living proof of the change, as well as, of course, Senator Clinton’s role, as the first female in all this to do.

The senator’s speech is in the Aristotelian sense well put, but it is a speech that must be read or listened to in its entirety. We can not take any part of it out of its context. It is filled with an immense sense of what we may call the ‘archeology of hidden meanings beyond the words themselves.’ That is an archeology of cultural artifacts which contain the abstract human constructs of meaning and values so embedded in our country’s ethnic groups, and so much a part of the whole of what makes America what it is. Senator Obama has given us a splendid oration.