My friend Summer, in her Facebook status, pointed out the immediate point of interest to a literature person about Barack Obama’s speech: He messed up the Faulkner quote.
In Requiem for a Nun, Faulkner writes, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Obama embellished the quote, saying:
As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.
His embellishment is rather interesting, though, as it expands to describe the unsolved inconsistency in his campaign. Because as much as Obama’s words seem to move toward a radical change in American life, there’s something frozen about his perspective.
1. Why “buried”?
Mark Antony’s words (by Shakespeare) at the funeral of Julius Cæsar are almost a cliché. “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears,” he begins, “I come to bury Cæasar, not to praise him.” Consider Antony’s later words in comparison to the general thrust of Obama’s speech, understood in the mainstream media as a speech about the “controversy surrounding” Obama’s “former minister,” who has made “racially charged comments” that Obama has had to “reject.”
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then to mourn for him?
O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Cæsar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.
Obama pitches the commentators as Brutus and Cassius, eagerly riding one term—“ambition” or “anti-American”—to try to destroy the image of a person—Cæsar, Jeremiah Wright. But he turns to the public and asks them to not be like Brutus, saying merely that Cæsar was ambitious:
I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube [sic], or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way [as the commentators have].
[...]
But the truth is, that isn’t all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor...
Obama’s heart is still in the coffin with Wright. He refuses to repudiate the man, content to disagree with him in the strongest way possible while not veering into ad hominem attacks. His condemnation, however, as I discuss later, undoes his entire speech, but for now, it is important how he, like Antony, tries to use the public to turn on Brutus and Cassius, on the narrative surrounding the story in the process of construction.
The problem, Obama insists, is that race has not been adequately discussed in this American society. Without such a discussion, we cannot make that “more perfect union” that fills Obama’s hopeful dreams. And it is here that the Faulkner quote arises. Antony is slyly following Brutus’s orders when he says he will only bury—and not praise Cæsar. Is Obama doing the same with his speech? The condemnation is there, but so is the twist turning the public into seeing the value in Wright’s comments (though not those specific comments about racial divides or September 11th).
Obama uses the Faulkner quote to show that racial injustice is not even past. In the same way, Antony demonstrates that Cæsar is not dead and buried, but that he remains among us. Antony produces Cæsar’s will and explains to the listeners:
Here is the will, and under Cæsar’s seal.
To every Roman citizen he gives,
To every several man, seventy-five drachmas.
Moreover, he hath left you all his walks,
His private arbours, and new-planted orchards,
On this side Tiber; he hath left them you,
And to your heirs for ever; common pleasures,
To walk abroad, and recreate yourselves.
Here was a Cæsar! when comes such another?
And this is precisely the dream of the legacy of the Obama campaign (and subsequent presidency): a state where “every” citizen can feel a part of the union, where “every several man” can benefit, equally, from the kindness of the state. Antony, like Obama, uses the lure of populism and equality to mobilize a political strength. “This nation is more than the sum of its parts,” explains Obama. “Out of many, we are truly one.”
2. Why “In fact”?
But I have asserted a firm conviction – a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people – that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice is [sic] we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.
Obama, in his “post-x” self, embraces a certain level of conservative approach to governance. This is perhaps clearest when he talks about race. This paragraph above does not mention the state at all until the final word, when it is almost an afterthought. He here describes the role of the individual in society. Individuals must adopt a certain level of responsibility over their actions, finding grievances not only without, but also within. “Ironically,” he adds, “this quintessentially American – and yes, conservative – notion of self-help found frequent expression in Reverend Wright’s sermons.”
But for Obama, the problem is that Wright was unable to strike this balance of internal and external when it came to the issue of race:
The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made;
This invocation of stasis was hinted at earlier in the speech, when Obama criticized Wright for having “a view that sees white racism as endemic.”
But these terms need some further work to understand. What is a fact, if not a static object? What is a fact without a contextual hook to a larger structure? Can facts just facts, floating about? To what, then, is Obama making reference when he adds the “In fact” to his misquote, “In fact, it isn’t even past”?
Obama has depended on a certain postivism in his campaign, though perhaps so have all campaigns, including reelection efforts. The narrative force of Obama’s story is that things will be better in the future if he is elected. They may not be better by the time he leaves office, but the wheels will be in motion. The train will have left the station. And so on.
“But what we know -- what we have seen – is that America can change,” he explains, moving toward a climax of sorts. This ability to change, to progress, is the “true genius of this nation.” On top of the successes of the past, we can rest our own audacity to hope for an even better tomorrow.
So consider his invocations of the past with the nation’s genius. In this speech, they take two forms: the history of racial injustice that he joins Wright in denouncing, and his own, personal history. “I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible,” he says. But that history is dependent (and emblematic of) the very goodness of America that predates his own campaign. One way of seeing this is: America is an amazing place, full of amazing people that have done amazing things. Now if only those amazing individuals got together and worked harder, we could form a more perfect union.
In this version of the story, it is simply up to the populace to realize the potential within them to overcome their own prejudices (racial and economic). This is the “content of their character” view of our United States. But note that King used that phrase while in Washington, DC, agitating not for, just, individuals to change their minds, but for, rather, a state to realign the structure by which it had institutionalized racism through the adoption of civil rights legislation. The fight had to be won both within and without.
As such, the second version of Obama’s invocation of history is also important: America has a structure underneath it that guides its history in a certain direction. With a certain amount of finesse, great things can come, but they are limited to the preexisting structure. This is, after all, the genius of the Constitution: its endless amendability surrounding a few core principles, including, most importantly, perhaps, Equal Opportunity.
But in its mutability, the Constitution maintains a structure of its own, like in the statement “the only thing we agree on is that we always disagree.” Obama relies on the relative structure and relative stasis provided by the Constitution to make his run for the White House even possible (there is, after all, nothing else compelling the current Resident to leave after his term ends than the Constitution).
Progress, then, is not just about change all the time. Change is important, but there are limits to the range of possible changes, and that range is dictated by the Constitution itself. But also by history. Racism cannot be simply hoped away by constantly reasserting that America can change. In fact, the task is more difficult now than it was 45 years ago. King could measure success, to a degree, with legislation. Yet no one seriously contemplating racism would argue that legislation is enough. The legal truth of no more institutional racism does not guarantee the historical truth of no more institutional racism.
And here is where Obama’s condemnation falls short. What is important about the history of racism is that racism is, still, built into American society. As such, it remains a static feature of daily life for millions of Americans. It has changed in its form of expression over the past few decades, but the underlying issue—an inability to handle alterity, to live, in Paul Gilroy’s term, in conviviality—remains as much a problem as it was in 1787.
Obama, let’s remember, crucially, is not a revolutionary. He’s working within the system to effect a change. And in so doing, he embraces certain local constants. What Wright calls for, however, in criticizing America as a “country and a culture that is controlled by rich white people,” is a smashing of the structures of inequality that underpin the American society. It’s not that the rich white people need to learn to accept African-Americans, so we can all progress down the road with the bricks that are yellow, it’s that we need radical change in this country.
In fact, then, Obama’s reliance on the local “facts” and structures of his Constitutional Americanism limit the flexibility of his own campaign. He has no luxury of being a revolutionary or prophet (unlike his former pastor). He is welded tightshut to the very static objects he claims that Wright misuses. Obama is a product of the history of racism in the US, as is his wife, children, parish, and, even, we find out, his casually racist grandmother.
If it is a “fact” that the past is “not even past,” then that means it cannot change. Facts are made. They cannot be unmade. Obama can cling to hope as much as he likes, riding a sentimental (and sometimes self-congratulating) wave to the White House. In fact, I hope he does; he is built from the ground up to be the best President of my lifetime. But the change he dreams of, the change he hopes for, that requires an ambition that is, in Mark Antony’s words, “made of sterner stuff.” The ambition of a revolutionary. The audacity to destroy.
[crossposted at donkey hottie]