Roger Cohen wrote a column published in Thursday’s New York Times where he looks back to his time as a child spent in South Africa during the apartheid years and reasses his feelings in light of Obama’s speech. I really do like this bit from the column:
Honesty feels heady right now. For seven years, we have lived with the arid, us-against-them formulas of Bush’s menial mind, with the result that the nuanced exploration of America’s hardest subject is almost giddying. Can it be that a human being, like Wright, or like Obama’s grandmother, is actually inhabited by ambiguities? Can an inquiring mind actually explore the half-shades of truth?
Yes. It. Can.
The unimaginable South African transition that Nelson Mandela made possible is a reminder that leadership matters. Words matter. The clamoring now in the United States for a presidency that uplifts rather than demeans is a reflection of the intellectual desert of the Bush years.
One need only turn on one of the many 24-hour news channesl, Fox in particular, to see how Bush’s black-and-white world view has permeated the mainstream media. It’s gotten to the point where if you want to watch anything close to an intellectual discussion on T.V., you’ve got to watch “comedy” shows like The Daily Show and Real Time with Bill Maher.
So has discussion of Obama’s speech lifted the intellectual level of cable news to a higher plane? Apparently not.
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