In third grade, outfitted in my father's suit jacket and a paper mustache, I delivered the Gettysburg Address to a classroom of seven-year-olds.
(It was "Be a Historical Figure" day and my cross-dressing exertions were squashed in a Florida-esque voting fiasco that rewarded Gordon's middling General MacArthur.)
Now I harbor fantasies of a necessitating moment, a perfect cue, ready to bust out Ahab's "Hark ye yet again," Hamlet's "To be or not to be," V's "In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran."
Great rhetoric is the sociable sibling of poetry. Power over its linguistic instruments makes for mesmerizing music.
I am a rhetorical groupie swaying to the gospel of eloquence. I am a soon-to-be-poor-post-graduate come December. I am voting for Sen. Barack Obama, obviously.
Tear up the paper boys, it's another college liberal.
But know this: I come to you reeking of idealism and abstract hopes, as a student of English not public policy, as an archaic romantic with a soft spot for poetics, not politics.
I'm not going to chew the cud of party principles and the inherent wrongness or rightness of the raging liberals, the antediluvian conservatives. I'll leave the big-headed Keith Olbermanns and O'Reillys reveling in their own acidic wits.
I'm not going to be your malicious two minutes of divisive verbiage-we've reached a saturation point of irrelevant indictments.
I am going to pause and admire the phenomenon of words.
I, like a host of others, first heard whispers of Obama's rhetorical prowess after his 2004 keynote address to the Democratic National Convention. I read his first book, "Dreams of My Father" in a casual fit of curiosity some months later to see if he was the same man in print as he was in oration.
I scrutinized his explicit heroes and their words-Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, my old buddy Abraham Lincoln, and upon further investigation, FDR, LBJ-to learn the source of Obama's spoken magnetism.
What I discovered in the tones and tempos of presidential inaugural addresses, in "I Have a Dream," "I've Been to the Mountaintop," "We shall Overcome," was a familiar epic rhetoric hailing of a prophetic "something"-a something that has demanded human freedom, equal voting rights, and now, change.
Let there be no doubt that the rhetoric of important men has served as prologue to less than illustrious decisions. Is there danger in empty rhetoric? Yes. Is there potential for false promises? Most definitely.
But there is also bravery in expressed ideology. There is audacity in articulated hope.
For eight years, we have watched the words "freedom" and "liberty" be raped of meaning, as a president stumbled and stuttered and made a mockery of a greater tradition of American rhetoric. We have operated under a non-hero, and, in the absence of a model of action, we have retreated into satire and condescension in order to cope.
So when we, Generation Y, hear the rhythmic cadences of a presidential candidate who unapologetically speaks of "distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness," a candidate who boldly borrows from a history of great rhetoric and greater men, who learns and grows out of their example-when we hear this song, we stop to listen.
Some of the mature right claim Obama's rhetoric is seductive to youth audiences, that we value style over substance, charisma over hard facts, ideology over reality. Sen. John McCain quite literally sneered at Obama's eloquence, insinuating it not only concealed but misled. What McCain ought to know is that we the "young Americans" have the mental ability to synthesize both eloquence and the facts corresponding to that eloquence. We have the capacity not only to detect a new, potent presence, but the moral inclination to verify that he is more than just a presence.
We demand more than plain facts and an impressive resume because we the intellectual youth were bred to know that such is never enough-not for us, not for our president.
Presentation, exceptionality, that windfall spark-we demand these because they have been demanded of us.
Don't tell me that inspiration is meaningless and eloquence irrelevant. Any college student knows that a hard-wrought application is only as good as the character it represents, that there must be something more than careful credentials and an inventory of expertise.
You the cynics, you the hopeless, you the disdainful and distrustful and unchangeable-you tore apart the "fundamentals" of this nation while I, the "naive" young American, spent the past decade sculpting my character and cognition into something the alleged real world might value. Now I graduate to a social, economic and environmental climate of disastrous magnitude.
Can you blame me for singing the sweet song of change?
Janet Wu is a Trinity senior. Her column runs every other Friday.
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