Date: Sat, Aug 2, 2008 at 8:48 AM
Subject: Reflecting on the Past Week
To: perry.gregg@post.harvard.edu
Perry,
Once upon a time academic excellence was honorable and we taught our
children to do well in school for the acquisition of knowledge,
educational advancement, and the betterment of the human race. In
seems that, in 2008, this philosophy has been sullied or reversed.
The McCain campaign seems to suggest that Barack Obama's magna cum
laude degree from Harvard Law School and his presidency of the Harvard
Law Review (in and of themselves) make him arrogant and out of touch
with "the people." Mind you, this is an African American male whose
divorced mother was once on welfare during his childhood.
Further, the McCain campaign asserts that his celebrity or popularity
somehow renders him comparable to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. If
we can put these unfair comparisons aside for a moment, clear-thinking
Americans might ask: Is there something wrong with popularity for a
politician? The word popularity is related to the Latin word,
populus, meaning "the people." At Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln
enshrined the role of the people in our democracy with his famous
declaration:
"…and that government of the people, by the people, for the people,
shall not perish from the earth."
Obama's excellent oratory has been criticized as rhetorical and
vacuous. I'm sure that the loyalists among the American colonists
held similar views of the declaration set forth by Thomas Jefferson
and that small band of men who gathered in Philadelphia on that hot
summer day of 1776. Lincoln's "brief remarks" at Gettysburg in 1863
were rhetorical and lacked the historic luster and power they would
acquire over the subsequent 145 years and the beautiful oratory of
Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963 was not nearly as
popular and universally acclaimed as it is today.
Let's hope that these historic examples teach us that idealism and the
commanding oratory sometimes necessary to contextualize it, are as old
as our country and are vital components of our ever-changing
democracy.
Best regards,
David