The College Fix

President Obama’s speech tonight had so much build-up — particularly for those who waited in line for more than a day to see it — it seemed nearly impossible that it could live up to anyone’s reasonable expectations. Nor did it seem very plausible that any speech could wipe away the rhetorical grime that has already accumulated around the attack on Congresswoman Giffords and her staff and constituents, already begun to dim its horror and brutality, and make us see it clearly again — particularly at an event where the excitement of the president’s arrival had almost threatened to eclipse its true purpose. (Already newscasters are beginning to refer to the assassination attempt as a “tragedy,” instinctively flinching from words like “massacre” because they say too much, mean more than we are willing to be reminded of.)

And yet, somehow, it did. The president spoke of “a good dose of humility,” and the humility was there in the way he emptied his face of any drama, any pretension, any sense of grandiosity. His words matched his demeanor. There was a harshness and a bluntness to his tone that we hadn’t heard from him before — a sense that he was struggling to understand something that was new to him, and express the inexpressible. He made flat, almost brutal statements again and again: “There is nothing I can say that will fill the sudden hole torn in your hearts.” And: “For the truth is that none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack.  None of us can know with any certainty what might have stopped those shots from being fired, or what thoughts lurked in the inner recesses of a violent man’s mind.” Here was a president speaking with the freedom and easy eloquence of a really good op-ed columnist, not the boilerplate-speak of a career politician. Somehow he was the intellectual we haven’t heard from since the campaign trail two years ago; the buzzwords and excuses were gone, replaced by real thought:

But what we can’t do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on one another.  As we discuss these issues, let each of us do so with a good dose of humility.  Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let us use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together.

It’s hard to imagine another president in this situation responding by calling on his listeners “to expand our moral imaginations.” For one thing, that’s an extremely ambiguous phrase — but not ambiguous in the weasel-word sense we’re accustomed to hearing in presidential speeches, where the speaker is generally eager to avoid being pinned down. It’s ambiguous because it has an expansive meaning; it’s the sort of phrase that reverberates because it does not come with an automatic, familiar, rote meaning. It rolls around in the listener’s head, waiting for whatever he or she brings to it. To expand your “moral imagination” can mean a thousand things: it suggests a task to be taken up; it suggests that our sense of decency and our desire to express ourselves are impossible to separate; it suggests that our lives, even at their most mundane, are informed by a grandeur and an urgency that can make themselves known even in the quietest day. It also suggests that we don’t entirely understand what it is to be decent human beings — even the best of us, and that all of us could stand to learn something new about it once in a while. That idea, so casually and almost subliminally expressed in the speech, is not the sort of thing Americans are accustomed to hearing from their elected officials. In an unintentional way, Obama’s philosophical thoughtfulness stands as a stern, scathing riposte to the nihilistic pretensions of the poorly educated madman whose suspicion that “words have no meaning” won him no friends and no allies until he decided to back up his lunacy with bullets. “Moral imagination” is difficult to define until you run across someone who utterly lacks it.

Relevant? Not just in the light of Sarah Palin’s self-pitying video today, filled with Agnewish condemnations of the press, but in the light of so many self-righteous columnists’ and pundits’ blathering certainty that they have the one and only true interpretation of the event, in the rage and half-coherent bile that one can find in anonymous comments virtually anywhere on the Internet — the nightmarish underside of the democratic utopia Obama spoke of. Listening to the interpretations and accusations fly this week, it was hard not to think of Bob Dylan’s words, in “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” his greatest protest song:

But you who philosophize disgrace,

And criticize all fears,

Bury the rag deep in your face,

Now is the time for your tears.

All too many of us were eager to philosophize and criticize away the tears. Even that moment of silence near the end of the event didn’t go on quite long enough; the tension in the room, the eagerness to stand up and cheer and dispell the somber mood that had taken hold of the night, was palpable even on television. But that was OK. The event was as much about cheering ourselves up as anything else; after the saddest day our republic has experienced in years, we surely deserved it. For before this was a media event, before this was a “tragedy” that required the entire media to act as kibitzer, and before this was a political event with political repercussions, it was a human catastrophe that ended several lives and threatened several others. The applause for Obama’s speech was not that of an adoring crowd but that of a relieved one; somehow, with every distraction at his elbow, he had said exactly what needed to be said, and said it better than anyone else could have.