More to Say

Everyone seemed a little bit smarter this past Tuesday.  Usually ruthless in my assessment of newscaster-types (whose articulate and enunciated speech often seems most directly tied to a desire to assert their own relevance), I was embarrassed to find myself smiling at the MSNBC inauguration-commentators, impressed by their analyses.  Suddenly it seemed as if there were more to say, and that a shadow discourse about the history and potential of the United States moved swiftly from private, academic and background locations and into the forefront of public view.

It strikes me that Obama’s take-over marks, among many other things, a movement to un-repress language from the many dusty hideaways (bunkers?) where it’s been stowed for the past eight years.  Every utterance by George W. Bush was a reminder that he had not yet formed an independent, adult relationship to language: his speech, rhetoric and policy were marked by painfully primitive and highly polarized conceptions of democracy, freedom, and the very value of human life. The spontaneous production of a single sentence was, for him, a tension-filled act.  Obama, on the other hand, appears to thrive in quite the opposite linguistic terrain, one marked by fluency, curiosity, multiplicity, and maturity–not to mention ongoing reading and writing.  We can’t yet predict the ramifications of this dramatic shift–I’m not suggesting that a cure for all the nation’s ills is imminent–but at the very least it’s worth pausing to note, and make use of, the expanded space for words.

Elizabeth Alexander had clearly channeled this return to language-as-the-key in her inauguration poem: “any thing can be made, any sentence begun,” she read.  “We encounter each other in words.”