The gray, forbidding, prison-like structure that is going up in Chicago to honor our sainted 44th president is now in its final stages of construction, and soon the Obama Presidential Center, “A Global Center for Change,” will become, as its website promises, “a lively community hub, economic anchor, and beacon of democracy right here on the South Side of Chicago.” Yeah, sure it will, and Danny DeVito is going to become an NBA star.
Whether or not the Obama center is really going to become the jewel of its neighborhood, the relentlessly ugly structure is being adorned with words of wisdom from the man himself, and so the area of Chicago that is unlucky enough to feature this monstrosity will become, if not a beacon of democracy, at very least a beacon of BS.
As president, Obama was famously windy and verbose, couching his socialism, race resentment, and radicalism in avalanches of verbiage that would hide the hard edges of his agenda. Lost and stuttering without a teleprompter, the anointed one relied on a battery of speechwriters to turn out reams of portentous-seeming nonsense that gave an immediate impression of profundity that dissolved with about five seconds’ thought. The Obama Presidential Center is going to feature a choice morsel of that pseudo-profundity on its outer façade, trumpeted in five-foot-high letters as if it were a nugget of actual wisdom, on the order of “BURMA SHAVE” or “HOLLYWOOD.”
Instead, what we’re getting at the Obama State Prison, er, that is, Presidential Center is this, which began to be installed on the building on Monday (it will take a couple of weeks for the whole long-winded thing to be there):
You are America. Unconstrained by habit and convention. Unencumbered by what is, ready to seize what ought to be. For everywhere in this country, there are first steps to be taken, there is new ground to cover, there are more bridges to be crossed. America is not the project of any one person. The single most powerful word in our democracy is the word “we.” “We The People.” “We Shall Overcome.” “Yes We Can.” That word is owned by no one. It belongs to everyone. Oh, what a glorious task we are given to continually try to improve this great nation of ours.
Really, that's what the building is going to say. If you think "This isn't exactly 'With malice toward none and charity for all' or 'All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," you're quite right. Pithier, punchier, and more apt as a summation of the Obama presidency would have been one that PJ’s Matt Margolis suggested: “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” Another fitting quote would have been “If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
The quote we actually are getting, however, calls to mind H. L. Mencken’s characterization of a Warren G. Harding speech:
He writes the worst English I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm (I was about to write abscess!) of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.
Old Warren, who was actually a fine president who rescued us from the worst authoritarian excesses of the Woodrow Wilson years, had nothing on Obama as a prose stylist. Obama’s wet sponges and tattered washing (“You are America”) in this case, however, is meant, like so many of his utterances, to get people nodding along with a radical socialist manifesto without realizing what they’re doing.
Obama’s America, you see, is “unconstrained by habit and convention,” such as the outmoded ideas that men can’t become women, countries should have borders, and people should be allowed to keep a bit of what they earn. Instead, we should be “unencumbered by what is, ready to seize what ought to be”: if reality doesn’t validate leftist delusions and fantasies, reality is what will have to go, not the delusions.
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America, meanwhile, is no good in Obama’s view, but it can be fixed if we reject the idea of individual rights and embrace socialism, for “America is not the project of any one person,” and “the single most powerful word in our democracy is the word ‘we.’” We should embrace three slogans: first from the Constitution (“We The People”), then from the anthem of the civil rights movement (“We Shall Overcome”), and finally from the 1970s Philadelphia Phillies (“Yes We Can”). (Yeah, that last one was also the name of an Obama campaign song in 2008.)
This is all supposed to be inspiring; the quote comes from a 2015 speech Obama delivered on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., in order to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the civil rights marches from Selma to Montgomery. But the quote is too long, too uninteresting, and ultimately far too ominous even to come close to being inspirational.
Like the forbidding building that will bear this quote, the Obama quote itself embodies a kind of warning. If you’re not careful, leftists are going to “seize what ought to be.” It’s a thinly veiled threat as ugly as the building it is going to adorn.
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