Barack Obama Begins The Healing By Putting VaTech Massacre In Context With "Verbal Violence" of Don Imus

Magical Negro.

[The audio clip, available at the link] captures what moves a lot of people about Obama, and bothers others: His instinct for abstraction and large themes, and his sense that America's problems have at their root solutions that have as much to do with hope and process as with any specific course of action.

Other politicians would -- and will -- stay with the concrete. They'll talk about this tragedy, and, soon, gun control.

But while Obama mourns the slain students, he takes the massacre more as a theme than as a point of discussion.

"Maybe nothing could have been done to prevent it," he says toward the end.

So he moves quickly to the abstract: Violence, and the general place of violence in American life.

"There's also another kind of violence that we're going to have to think about. It's not necessarily the physical violence, but the violence that we perpetrate on each other in other ways," he said, and goes on to catalogue other forms of "violence."

There's the "verbal violence" of Imus.

Then there's the "violence" of conscience of a shameless politician attempting to score points on the still-cooling bodies of the dead, and the "violence" perpetrated against the English language by a near-retard who can't comprehend the subtle distinction between a slight and a slaughter.

posted by Ace at 08:05 PM

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