Friday, September 7, 2012

Brooks, who has tried to be moderate all along, and not betray his own views (conservative, deeply), or, for that matter, betray his disappointment with the views he is sympathetic to:  did not get it.  (and called the speeches of the individual candidates themselves a tie!)

Beschloss, the guy from Williams, had only to remark that the President's tack was sermon-like, as in FDR style.  I don't think he got it (though later on he betrayed a certain engagement.)

The other Presidential scholar, Richard Norton Smith, really didn't get it either, not prepared to acknowledge anything out of the ordinary had just happened.

Mark Shields did a plucky job of being 'non partisan.'  Did he get it, even as he was, if anything, too professional?

But, but, but...  It was the crowd, the crowd in the hall, the crowd on television sitting as individuals like me, even those sitting alone, who GOT IT.

And perhaps, to their credit, the news people restrained themselves, if they did get it.  Though really, one wishes otherwise.  And I am surprised that such a great moment was not so 'wow,' seized upon for what it was.  In fact, I think it really odd.  We've been waiting for such a moment, really, for a long time, as the moment was not just in passing, but fulfilled and full, a speech not in a few lines, but in full, perhaps in a form new to the art.  Edward R. Murrow, what would he have done?

But of course, journalists seem obliged to be cynical in modern times, impartial, not betraying their own personal feelings or their humanity.

The President did an absolutely excellent job on top of a real rise to the occasion of all in a convention of superb speakers and performances.  Bill Clinton, Michelle Obama, Joe Biden, Mayor Castro...

And you have waded through the conventions.  You too have seen in Tampa the great insincerity, the lack of authenticity, the agenda related mistruths of the great cynic destructive Scott Walker (whose aim to undermine a progressive liberal mindset) and his friend Paul Ryan, of the Republican National Convention this year in Tampa, the blankness of Gov. Romney with conspicuously little to say.

How proud humanity can be, that the Democrats followed in this time of great national crisis.

Mr. President, you are so right.  "You did that," you said.  "You did that," you said, meaning that it was all of us, all of us Americans, normal rank and file everyday middle class un-rich doing-it-in-the-trenches people, who finally put our foots down and said that we all need fairness as far as health insurance coverage. That's what the National health care act is about, that you can't get denied because of pre existing condition, etc.  It was and is the great national moral conscience that has stood up to keep Americans do what they do best.

"Four years ago...  you made that possible... You are the reason...why selfless soldiers won't be kicked out of the military for who they love..."

Obama offers a quote of Lincoln:  "I have been driven to my knees many times by the overwhelming conviction that was the only place to go."  And it is altogether fitting and proper that we should have that tall and folksy original almost hick American voice coming to us now from the wings of history.  For as a young man, Lincoln once fell into such a state of melancholia, so be-gloomed that his friends, so worried about him, worried that he might do something awful to himself, took him in and nursed and fretted over him, as far as to attempt the crude and awful practices of the day to try and fix his body, through bleedings, etc.  Along with taking care of him, of course.  For weeks.  Until, eventually, he got up, whether or not he had completely recovered.

Yes, things are hard.  The news we find just isn't that good, so rosy.  We must be realistic, realistic almost to the point of comprehending what the Buddha tells us about life in general, that it will indeed appear to us that there is a lot about life that will cause us malaise, that will strike us as suffering and a kind of nakedness where before we thought we had power and control over everything.  Yes, America is after all growing up as a nation, and at a certain point must realize what the nature of reality is.

And the good news is, is that perhaps we've been good, or open to this, all along.  We've been open to the facts of life being suffering for the lot of us, and so we've provided the decent things to each other, freedom, equality of creation, decency itself, education.  We've been good about things like the New Deal when the real nature of existence was before us, close in front of our eyes with hunger and want.  We've been good about setting things up like PBS where the potential of a medium is turned to the good, toward expanding our brain cells' stimulation with art and educational programs on science and history and the humanities, thus giving jobs to people who can provide that sort of educated content (rather than letting them go to waste.)

Yes, Lincoln was brought to his knees more than once in his life, through who he was, and through the horrible circumstances in which he was fated to preside over.  And the sense we are left, appropriately, of him is one of "binding up the nation's wounds..." the great line of the Second Inaugural whose opening line, "there is less occasion then there was at the first," President Obama may have had in his own head.  Indeed, belief seems to make Obama very strong, and therefore positive, seeing the good, where someone else might not be so optimistic.  "Binding up the nation's wounds," one could argue, was the act of saving the auto industry, and of the health care act, and of the beginnings of restraining the deregulations of Wall Street excesses, "playing by the rules," as the President put it.

Yes, Lincoln is the Republican we should be holding before us now, instead of the current ranks, the obstructionists McConnell, Boehner, Cantor, Ryan, the Tea Partiers, whose smug insincerities are enough to make your skin crawl.  And as in his times, we too are at war, of a sort, a war to improve the lives of rank and file Americans who find themselves no longer able to afford housing, health care, education and a secure retirement, and whose numbers are vast.  And tax cuts for the rich, just isn't going to amount to anything but outsource life as we know it, for the sake of the one percent.

One knows a beautiful thing when he/she sees it.  And in politics, in life, in all that follows, economically, nationally, beauty is, through its inspirations, truth.

I have heard the cynics singing, telling us any number of things, that national health care is a bad idea, wrong for business, that we Americans are too selfish to be 'in this together,' that 'job creators' aren't happy and will look elsewhere, that we'll never get out from under our piles of national debt under the current administration's path, etc., etc., etc.  And they are wrong.

Perhaps Michael Beschloss is not off the mark after all, if we were to consider the possibilities of the Obama and the Presidency today, to remember FDR, about what we need to provide the people of our nation.


"I propose to create a civilian conservation corps to be used in simple work...
More important, however, than the material gains will be the moral and spiritual value of such work." 


"No country, however rich, can afford the waste of its human resources.
Demoralization caused by vast unemployment is our greatest extravagance. Morally, it is the greatest menace to our social order." 



And so, does it matter that the jobs we provide are particularly defined, that 'community college' education we speak of as far as gearing up the American worker toward very specific and very competitive ends, high tech stuff, as a politician must propose.  Maybe to keep everyone up and working we don't necessarily have to look at either the education or the aims of it in such a narrow fashion.  What is so terrible about the continuing general education?

Does it all have to be high tech?  Or might we realize the hub of culture, the wine, the local produce, music, local transportation and character, art, the proposition of traditions as far as importance to the human world, as important and an integral part of the job providing economy.  The argument might be made that the economy of a country like Ireland was not well-served attempting to conform to something outside its own strengths.

A new New Deal... it doesn't sound like the worst idea at the moment.



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