Can't stop the music

Charles Pierce:

People told me it was there. People told me it sang to them. People told me that its chords touched them deeply in their hearts. I watched as it make them weep and cheer. I watched as it moved them while I stood there, an unbeliever at the grotto, seeing only rocks and weeds where everyone around me saw and heard and joined in something altogether transformative. I was there in Boston when the president gave the speech that first sent him rocketing up the charts, and I didn’t hear it. Since then, I have seen him give an acceptance speech, an inaugural address, a Nobel oration, and three State of the Unions, and the only thing I remember about any of the latter is that he got heckled by some peckerwood from South Carolina, and that he called out the corporate meat-puppets of the Supreme Court in what I still believe is the finest — and certainly, the most prescient — moment of his presidency.

But I never found the poetry in it all. I thought he was a good, smart orator with some uniquely gifted writers and a talent for creating a warm and comfortable context in which people could take what they believed were all their best instincts out for a walk. I still believe that. He still reaches people at depths that I cannot fathom. He still reaches them in frequencies beyond my poor ability to hear. I do not hear the music, so I do not understand the man…

There’s more, including a moving exegesis of a line I didn’t catch on Thursday. Let me concentrate on what I posted. I did hear the poetry several times after 2004: the speech after the amazing victory in Iowa in January 2008, the speech on race two months later. Those words and his oratory, combined with an overlong but piercing memoir published a year after the American public put Congress in safe GOP hands for the first time since the Eisenhower administration, made me woozy a few weeks. I still respect his penchant for speaking to the public as if we were adults, as if we were citizens. Adulthood is hard, though, and like a lot of parents I know — without extraordinary powers to wage war, covert and otherwise — he won’t explain why his administration punishes whistleblowers or pursues leaks with such aggression; a parent trusts that another won’t question why he beats his kid (“Maybe he knows something I don’t”).

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