davethegrinch.net

Dave says:

I suspect that I will not be the lone voice in the blogsphere this week. Tomorrow stands as a great test of many people, one person and approximately the whole internet. As the great empowerer (I literally reference the internet and figuratively the president-elect), thousands of people will flood its being with the thoughtful and the thoughtless. I write this on Monday January 19th 2009 for no other reason than should tomorrow the internet crumble under the weight of the inane, insane and inspired, my ramblings will have made it out there as a monument to nothing but my own musings.

My daily observation, (a resolution I made at the beginning of the year along with my desire to decrease my dogged overuse of parenthesizes to communicate a side thought) was marshaled from two segments of seemingly unconnected radio both over employing either the preposition or the concept of the word “like”. The first radio report was an interesting, if not slightly over patriotic piece on NPR: a compilation of inaugural speech snippets from President Coolidge to President G.W. Bush. Each president was telling the expectant masses they are great but could be greater and each, even the last, sounded inspiring and confident. However, the hidden subtext to these sermons from the political pulpit was the desire of each new president to be ‘like’ a predecessor. Quote: as Jefferson said, as Lincoln said, as Roosevelt said, as Kennedy said and, surprisingly, as Reagan said are all really to be interpreted as ‘As I Said’.  It is fair to say we all wish Obama to be ‘like’ these presidents also. If you take a bushel of American presidents and thrash out the chaff, you are left with a great man. It is not that we wish Obama to be ‘like’ this great man, we insist he actually become it. Nothing less will suffice and nothing more can be achieved. Obama is about to become America, a metamorphosis that even the most of American of presidents, George Washington, could not achieve. Washington was elected by the small self-appointed American Congress before there was even a government to speak of, to lead a population of mostly illiterate peasants – the unwashed masses. His greatness of office was mainly defined by just being George Washington. Obama’s greatness of office has already occurred: he is the first African American president. He must do more than be ‘like’ his heroes, he must be a hero if he is to eclipse that greatness already achieved.

Obama’s success under the burden of this crushing expectation is overwhelmingly dependent on us, the now washed but not much more literate masses. Whether we, as a nation and as individuals can live up to the challenge Obama will lay down before us tomorrow is the question at hand. If Obama is about to become America, can we become Obama? Currently, patriotic fervor is gently smoothing our collective hair, soothingly reassuring us that great leaders, therefore a great nation and subsequent great wealth have historically risen from the ashes of civil war, civil rights and civil bread lines. There exists a danger of complacency that we need do no more than wave a flag and remember a sound bite of tomorrow’s historical rhetoric to make the bogyman go away and leave our dreams once again fluffy and wholly (or perhaps holy) American. What are the tools required to make America great? They used to be, literally tools: hammers, dynamite, pickaxes of the pioneering west,  rivet guns skillfully wielded by Rosie and the auto-giants of Detroit. But now there is a new world order. Now manual labor is going to tomorrow’s Americas, the pioneers of the East, and they are hungry and desperate for what we have. What a wonderful job this nation of illiterate sharecroppers, slaves and economic refugees has done to empower itself but, I fear,  it may only have become a nation of illiterate ex-sharecroppers, ex-slaves and ex-economic refugees. Our tool is our educated intelligence and our application of it.

And so, ‘like’, what was I ‘like’ saying when ‘like’ I started this whole thing? It was, indeed the overpowering and underwhelming use of the word ‘like’. Shortly following the Inaugural Greatest Hits, my local NPR affiliate ran a regional magazine program written by and for the people. Not ‘we the people’ but ‘them the people’: the young, the teens, the future leaders of this great nation. I am generally a supporter of the youth. I teach them for free, I have faith in them and I try not to pass judgement on the pants that are hanging to the point of their embarrassment or the skirts that are short to the point of mine. Yet, young people have razor sharp minds, never forget that. And this show, for the first ten minutes was a testament to that. The presenter’s drive and ambition to one day follow the soothing yet informative formula of National Public Radio was wonderful. She was undoubtedly white, she explained she was a product of affluent home-schooling and she will, in my mind at least, move on to great things, a natural leader among (wo)men.

In contrast, her feature story was reported by a fellow teen from California and was an account of how he, not only an economically deprived teenager but a graffiti artist and a black one to boot, would interview Newt Gingrich at Newt’s house during an evening of caviar and silver plated ginger beer service (he is underage, remember). It is not, however, the almost farcical nature of this meeting of the minds that makes me cringe but, during the interview segment with Gingrich, the absolute and terrible way in which he represented the ‘youth of America’. Now, Newt is hardly the most liberal and progressive of extremely wealthy, late aged white male Republicans who once was the third most powerful man in America, but, quite frankly, his prescription of draconian discipline and the abandonment of adolescence as a word, social demographic and even age group, seemed quite reasonable when faced with the uneducated representation of our future that sat before him. Most objectionable was the constant use of the word ‘like’ as verb, noun, pronoun, conjunction, and adverb. Dialects and colloquialisms I am, as they say, “down with” but there must be more than just MTV thought backing them and more than one word illustrating them. We are ready to blame our education system but first we should blame ourselves. If we don’t, like, educate them that they need their educating, like, by setting super cool examples then we ain’t got nuffin’ but, like, well, kinda this to, like, look forward to and that would, like, be super-bad, know what I’m sayin’? I’m not sure where the buck stops but if it didn’t occur to either the boys’ parents, the anchor of the show or the NPR executives that he needed to be a little sharper both mentally and linguistically then we are all headed for the twitters of the world.

We should take a moment to ask ourselves what kind of president we want in the future because these teens on NPR may well be the microcosm of our choice.  Obama not only raises the bar higher but sets an entirely new level of achievement. His oratory skills are masterful and his ability to sound presidential long predated even the primaries. Excepting any of those skills, our young black reporter has much in common with our young black president, namely poverty, race and a desire to be heard. He should be presidential material. This is the dichotomy moving forward. Do we wish our future leaders to be ‘like’ Obama from poor, humble beginnings filled with spirit, ethnicity, intelligence and inspiration or should we continue to pluck our leaders from the safe, measured, over-achieving homogeneous establishment illustrated by the poor teenage female presenter on NPR? (To whom I apologize for having just turned into a pant-suited, pearl sporting WASP for exaggerated purposes of contrast and comparison.) President Obama is asking us to help ourselves so I respectfully suggest we start by increasing the vocabulary of tomorrow’s potential leaders beyond a single preposition. Let us all strive to be a little more ‘like’ President Obama’s ideal and a little less like, well, know you, like totally awesome!

This entry was posted on Monday, January 19th, 2009 at 10:46 pm and is filed under Random Delights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.