THE NEW IS OFTEN OLD

I am not an authority on Greek history, so I apologize in advance for taking innapropriate liberties.

Am I correct in recalling that the downfall of the great Athenian Pericles came, not as a result of things he did wrong, but of things he did right? He was so good at what he did that people began to tear him down. Today's parallel is often that we most detest the ones we should most revere. Or that once someone becones successful there are legions of people waiting to tear him/her down. It is a kind of "schadefreude." There is nothing people are more drawn to than a fallen idol.

The pundits have absolutely massacred Obama's inaugural address.

"Trivial." "Boilerplate" "Old ideas wrapped up in rhetoric." "Totally unoriginal," "No comparison to Lincoln's, Roosevelt's, Kennedy's inaugural." The chattering masses of punditry are outraged thsat a giant of a man should give a pygmy speech.

What these guardians of the "truth" don't "get" is that Obama was not trying to endear himself to the media, nor was he trying to make a place for himself in the Pantheon of leaders who made great inaugural addresses. Yes it was cliched. Yes is was a speech suited to a pep rally. But he was talking to the Anerican people.
The hair-splitters will say he made no platform statements, he offered nothing concrete, he avoided issues and danced around reality. Blah, blah, and more blah.

What I heard was Shakespearean. It soared. It went to the heart of the new mindset. I evoked, in all its sometimes purple prose, memories of his campaign pledge for "change."

I hate the overuse of the expression "wake-up call" but it was just that. For those who have been sleeping through the turmoil of the past several months, it is time to take responsibility for the future.

Listen, if you want to quote stirring inaugural addresses, you might look at Nixon's
1960 rhetoric. It was stirring. It called for a return to the kind of civil order and concern for each other that made America great. At a time of the deep division over Viet Nam, revolution and anarchy on university campuses,riots and draft-card burning, he promised the dawning of a new America. The fact that there has been no more duplicitous president than Nixon does not matter.

Nor does the demand for a history-making inaugural address matter in the face of whatever awful reality America, and the rest of the world, will be facing.

It was, despite the babbling disquietude of the media, the right speech at the right time. He is above the barbs of the chatteroing classes.