Writing the Wild: Nature, Culture, and American Literature

Hi bloggers / students -

Well, if you were like me, despite rushing out of the seminar early to get to a television that would be broadcasting Obama’s inauguration, I nonetheless missed a large chunk of the speech. Although there is no way to connect to the elecricity of that particular historical moment again, we can easily and readily watch the speech again below (so thank goodness for such “gadgets” like youtube, to think back on what we said about technology in Aldo Leopold’s essay). It’s a rather short speech, and I found it’s emphases surprising and a bit different than I was expecting. Instead of a feel-good, kind of self-acknowledgement about the historicity of a black American becoming president and this bearing out the pragmatic idealism of the American multicultural dream–proving it in essence works–the speech had darker, even plangent tones here and there. The New York Times writes how:

what Mr. Obama did say in his speech must have come as a bit of a shock to Mr. Bush. No stranger to criticism, over the past eight years he had rarely been forced to sit in silence listening to a speech about how America had gone off the rails on his watch.

Mr. Obama’s recitation of how much had gone wrong was particularly striking to anyone who had followed Mr. Bush around the country, especially during the re-election campaign of 2004, when he said it was his job “to confront problems, not to pass them on to future presidents and future generations.”

Yet Mr. Obama blamed America’s economic peril on an era “of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some,” and talked of how “the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.” It was an explicit critique of an administration that went to war in the Middle East but rejected the shared sacrifice of conservation, and reluctantly embraced the scientific evidence around global warming.

So, in fact, there was a slight nod towards the environment in Obama’s speech, perhaps a first in the history of inaugural addresses. It is interesting to note that if Obama had said “globe” instead of “planet,” this sentence would lose its environmental edge: for whatever reason, in English, “planet” has acquired a certain environmental valence in a way that globe has not (except, of course, when you specifically say “global warming”). It remains to be seen if this lofty and often vague rhetoric is met by practical policy changes in the new administration. But, to have these words present at the start is very promising.