Leon Wieseltier: Is Barack Obama Really The Savior Of Words?

.... again and again I observe an aesthetic reverence for a politician. The subject of the trance is, of course, Barack Obama, and it was plentifully on display in The New Yorker's election issue. It reached its ceiling, you might say, when the genius who some months ago drew the Obamas as terrorists in the White House now made amends by drawing Obama as Michelangelo's Adam--but tastefully cropped!--fist-bumping God, who was still a white man. But mainly the swoon was literary-critical, or more precisely, literary-uncritical. Thus we were taught that Dreams from My Father is "now assured of a place in the American literary canon." Why now--because its author won? That is not how the American literary canon is made. And we were told that Obama's "Democratic and Republican opponents were right: he ran largely on language," and that this is unobjectionable. And we were treated to a little professorial paean to Obama's victory speech. "Last Tuesday night was a very good night for the English language": given all that was at stake, this seems like rather a narrow focus, but still we were called to celebrate "echo, allusion, and counterpoint." The "ghost" of Lincoln was behind the speech, and Martin Luther King Jr. was its other "founder." These buttery hermeneutics strike me as mechanical and, worse, as gullible: Obama's speech was no more haunted by Lincoln's ghost than the announcement of his candidacy in Springfield was haunted by the Old State Capitol. Those associations were props; they were put there as part of the increasingly successful attempt by Obama to Lincolnize himself. It took longer for Lincoln to become Lincoln! But perhaps the adoring portrait of Obama as a savior of language is owed to a feeling of relief that in this election language narrowly escaped death: last month The New Yorker warned gravely of "the Republican war on words," ritually deploying Orwell against Sarah Palin's nasty (and rather obvious) incoherence. We are all Orwell now.

Truly I am not against art. But strong and lovely language is not always a vessel of strong and lovely thought. There is no simple correlation between verbal coherence and intellectual coherence. Bad writers may be good thinkers. And good writers may be liars and demagogues. We know this from philosophy--did Kant ever use the same term to mean the same thing in the same fifty pages?--and from history. Leon Trotsky was an extraordinary writer, and so was Whittaker Chambers. In his day President Eisenhower was renowned for the ugliness of his language--in 1957 this magazine published a parody by Oliver Jensen, whom we identified only as "someone in Washington," of the Gettysburg Address as Eisenhower would have delivered it: "I haven't checked these figures but 87 years ago, I think it was, a number of individuals organized a governmental set-up here in this country ..."--but now we know that there was cunning in his inelegance. The demystification of political language that Orwell inaugurated in his magnificent essay was designed to tear down, not to build up, to challenge power, not to congratulate it; but there is something precious, and therefore apolitical, in the breathless parsing of the new president's sentences. A not unsmitten journal is chasing a not unwilling hero across a not unfawning field....