SOTU
Thursday, January 28th, 2010I watched the SOTU speech last night and have to admit that the preacherly aroma wafting off the TV even got to cynical old me. Maybe it was the hungry for sustenance, pre-dinner timing of the speech, or the lack of less appetizing words like “foreclosure”, not mentioned once – or the fact that the more enticing word “jobs” was mentioned about every other sentence. At any rate, you gotta admit the guy is a rhetorical master chef, dishing out the hope like fish and loaves to the starving and squalid. All of which I suppose makes perfect sense, coming as it does from our own Dickensian version of the “man of the ages”. Who all the while underwrites this aromatic hope in the language of American exceptionalism.
It should come as no surprise then, that in a culture of winner-take-all exceptionalism, that there would be both an appetite and an over abundance of excess “hope”, seeing that there are so few winners compared to the ocean of loosers. So like George Bush before him, Obama is using American exceptionalism to destroy America’s egalitarian dream – what Bush did with brutish force, Obama now does with hope.
And I suppose, we will continue to remain hungry, only this time with the aroma of dinner in the air.