<snip>
But when Michelle Obama -- who, as an African American, has even more to be angry about than even the Jews of my generation -- uttered this truth by saying that her husband’s candidacy and its reception were the first time she had ever been proud of America, she caught hell in the media and elsewhere. Giving her hell in the media, among the pols, in the right wing talk show/TV machine is another triumph of the effing Yahoos who are everywhere in this country.
Michelle Obama is a native Chicagoan. In the Chicago style remarked by Mamet’s biographer, she spoke in a way that “does not tolerate evasion,” in a way that is “on the level,” so the audience would “hear things straight.” And for that, for telling the truth straight, she caught her lunch.
Well, to put it in the traditional Chicago style, fuck that.
This is not and for decades has never been a country that, to repeat Nadel, wants “honest expression of the text,” that “does not tolerate evasion,” that “want(s) things to be on the level, to hear things straight.” Those traits are Chicagoisms. They are not Americanisms. Americanisms are the lie, the bull shit, the expression of falsehoods that sound good. Michelle Obama’s problem is that she told it straight, told it as she feels about it, as she feels about it with much justification. America’s problem is that it does not want to discuss whether there is truth in what someone says, but instead wants to hear only bullshit that makes people thoughtlessly think well of what we do. Well, I say good for Michelle Obama.
To be sure, it is perhaps unseemly for Obama to say her own husband’s candidacy and its reception is the first time she’s been proud of America. That is surely inconsistent with the modesty taught in the Chicago of my youth, a trait which apparently reflected, at least in part, the Swedish influence in the Midwest. (And a trait which, like all Washingtonian political, media and legal types, Bob Woodward, originally from the Chicago area, has managed to extensively overcome, shall we say, if he ever had it to begin with.) But even if it were unseemly for her to say it in the context where she did say it, Mrs. Obama had vast truth as justification, and by rights people ought to debate the truth of her remark, instead of crucifying it for merely being said.
I gather, moreover, that lots of African Americans hold feelings similar to hers, which they express privately among themselves. And so do a lot of whites have similar feelings, although we almost never express them, even among ourselves, because we live too much in the all pervasive white yahoo world or its offshoots.
As for her husband’s views on her view, one cannot really know for sure at this point. I gather he has made much of his career as a “bringer together” of people, perhaps even as far back as Harvard Law Review days, if memory serves. (I believe I first heard about him at that time of his life, when he was written up in some publication or other because his achievement of being a black President of the Harvard Law Review was so rare, unique in fact.) He is still presenting himself as a bringer together.
What is more, I have to say that, unlike the derision with which I regard most political speeches, even all other political speeches, I think his recent speech on race was tremendous. It was the best political speech of my adult lifetime. True, it was way too long. True, though on the one hand he defended Reverend Wright -- many, though not all, of whose views are, like Michelle Obama’s one gathers, widely shared in the black community and among lots of us whites -- on the other hand he threw Wright under the bus overmuch, threw him under the bus many more times than he had to in what I took to be pandering to widely prevalent yahooism, pandering to people whose votes he wants and who are determined to loathe Wright.
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http://velvelonnationalaffairs.blogspot.com/2008/03/of-mamet-and-chicago-of-obamas-and.html
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