Metaphorgasmic

Of the millions who celebrated Barack Obama’s win last Tuesday, perhaps no group was more excited – nay, more rapturously elated – than the English majors. A bookish voting bloc that punctuates this great nation, America’s bibliophiles and grammarians had at long last elected a president who writes, and talks, real good.

To lover’s of Tolstoy and Dickens, Trollope and Twain, the last eight years have grated like the unnecessary posessive at the beginning of this sentence. For President Bush, in defiance of his Yale and Harvard pedigrees, has waged a global war on eloquence and locution since day one of his administration.

His main weapon in this struggle has been the Bushism, the linguistic equivalent to waterboarding. The Bushism is much like the Yogi Berra-ism, but minus the great Yankee’s paradoxical koans of Zen wisdom.

Some of the more memorable Bushisms of the past two terms have included: “Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream;” “I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family;” and, of course, the classic “They misunderestimated me” from way, way back in the year 2000. We would have been lucky to get a “Déjà vu all over again” from Bush.

Other recent presidents haven’t expressed themselves any better. Bill Clinton certainly had charisma, but his eloquence was seated in the libido rather than the intellect. President H.W. Bush was only marginally less tongue-tied than his son; and Ronald Reagan, of course, was an actor. It was his job to sound good and look great doing it. The only question is, who wrote the script?

Obama is different. The man once served as the editor of the Harvard Law Review, by Zeus! Here is a man who can think, write, and speak. When he spoke during his victory address of inspiring people “to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day,” I experienced my very first political metaphor-gasm.

If you want to know why the ‘mainstream media’ is in bed with Obama, look no further than his use of language. Many of us journalists were once English majors, and we’ve chosen to earn our living through the written – and spoken – word. When a politician talks about ‘bending the arc of history,’ some of us get a bit giddy. Remember during the primaries when MSNBC’s Chris Matthews said he felt a shiver run down his leg when he heard Obama speak? Metaphorgasm.

Abraham Lincoln was perhaps the first president to use metaphor to reach rhetorical climax. Just consider his first inaugural address, when he produced what is arguably the most complicated, but perhaps the most satisfying political metaphor ever. He said, “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” I barely know what that all means, but it certainly puts me in a tizzy! If Lincoln was as sensuous a lover as he was a writer, Mary Todd must have been a lucky woman indeed.

An Illinoisan like Lincoln, Obama stands ready to inherit the Great Emancipator’s rhetorical potency. And as the first African-American President-elect, there is a poetic deliciousness, a certain sense of craftsmanship to his political destiny. English majors live for this kind of narrative symmetry, and so do most people who like to tell or listen to stories. Just ask Hillary Clinton or John McCain.

Throughout the campaign, Clinton and McCain had derided Obama’s ‘eloquence’ as just so much style masquarading as substance. But after eight years of Bush’s ham-handed “Axis of Evil” rhetoric, the people wanted more. In the end they chose to elect a man who inspired them - a man who tugged at their hear-strings instead of the falconer’s hawkish reins.

When Obama’s opponents tried to paint him as a silver-tongued intellectual elitist, they misunderestimated the American people. Not only did they misunderestimate their intelligence, but they misunderestimated their common desire to be touched - not by fear - but by the better angels of their nature.  

Greg Kwasnik