Obama's speech on race: a clear, refreshing, distilled, icy glass of water

Some weeks ago I went and saw Helvetica, which is a documentary all about the history of the ubiquitous font, its significance in design, and its impact on culture. One of the people interviewed--graphic designer Michael Bierut--gives this memorable description of what it must have been like when the streamlined, modernist font came on the scene in the 1960s:

You go to a corporate identity consultant, circa 1965-1966 and they would take that and lay it here and say, "Here's your current stationary, and all it implies, and this is what we're proposing." And next to that, next to the belching smoke-stacks, and the nuptial script, and the ivory paper, they'd have a crisp bright white piece of paper, and instead of "Amalgamated Widget, founded 1857" it'd just say "WidgeCo" in Helvetica Medium.

Can you imagine how bracing and thrilling that was? It must have felt like you had crawled through a desert with your mouth just caked with filthy dust, and someone offered you a clear, refreshing, distilled, icy glass of water... It must have been just fantastic. (Hat tip: some guy Russell Beattie)

This quote is what came to mind when I read and watched Barack Obama's recent "major speech on race" (text; unnecessarily interactive Flash movie). For eight long years--and arguably, although to a more tolerable degree, the eight years before that as well--I've been fed nothing but the most intelligence-insulting, deliberately-repetitive, simplistic, lowest-common-denominator, platitude-laden, poll-tested, calculated, take-no-chances, sound-byte-friendly, made-for-TV, unnuanced, uninteresting, uninspired, unoriginal, committeed-to-death, unprincipled, unthoughtful, anti-intellectual, cynical, bromide-filled, conventional-wisdom-repeating, intellectually dishonest political rhetoric imaginable.

To be fair, Obama's speech is not entirely devoid of these trappings of TV-era American political rhetoric. For example, more than once he slides into the lazy populist habit of corporation-blaming ("...[T]he real problem is...that the corporation you work for will ship [your job] overseas for nothing more than a profit"). But despite this, the speech does succeed in grappling with lots of complexities and ambiguities in race--observing legitimate resentments felt by both blacks and whites, for example, and condemning but ultimately embracing the imperfect Reverend Wright. And this puts it head and shoulders above all others in terms of sheer level of discourse--in terms, in other words, of how it addresses its audience: as intelligent, discerning adults.

It is in this way that Obama's speech is, to me, "a clear, refreshing, distilled, icy glass of water".

Of course, I realize that I am commenting here more on the rhetoric of the speech than the actual substance of it. But I think this is appropriate. What makes the speech stand out isn't the novelty of its content, per se, but the circumstances in which it was uttered: by a candidate in the Democratic presidential primary, in a major, nationally televised address.

Complex, sober, and enlightening conversations on race and other issues have been out there for some time--in living rooms, between close friends, in academic circles--but they've been hard to find. One of the major projects of Obama's candidacy has been to bring them into the national discourse. This has not been easy. The 24-hour-news cycle, the news networks, the Clinton campaign, and the horse-race-obsessed punditry have made it difficult at times, even impossible to properly argue or explain anything in depth. Even now they are doing their best to reduce Obama's thoughtful and cohesive 40-minute argument into a meaningless media shrapnel of sound-bytes, "gaffes", and speculation as to whether he is "sending a message" to one demographic or another.

But internet--that vanquisher of the fascist, one-to-many fiend of the 20th century known by its sinister monogram "T.V."--is strong like ox. At nytimes.com, the full text of Obama's speech is the most emailed item. The video of the speech in its entirety is the number one video on You Tube. The force that propelled Obama's candidacy and financed his campaign is the same one that is presenting his case, unfiltered and unreconstructed, to the American electorate.

I wonder if they are as thirsty as I am.