Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Roger Cohen fails to find a quotable line in Obama's Cairo speech

The charm and majesty of Obama is in his delivery before his captive mesmerized audience that laps it up as he goes along, word by word, phrase by phrase, line by line.

It is like a symphony performance that lingers in the inner recesses of the listeners' soul, long before it has ended.

Roger Cohen is a prejudiced commentator. He is Jewish and for all it may take, a Zionist too and since for the first time in last 8 years of Bush years, Israel is getting it right and left, all Jewish lobbyists and media moguls are enraged. Cohen's comments should be hardly a surprise, given his loyalties with Israel. Naturally, not only he personally would like to forget all Obama speeches, after Cairo speech, in a retrospectively castigation, Cohen would wish the entire world to forget that Obama had ever addressed the Islamic World, when in the same breath Obama not only patronised Israel but exhorted Israel to change course. In fact, if Cohen is fishing for a memorable and quotable line in Obama speech, Obama could have added: Israel, get off while the going is good.

Cohen's advice to Obama to resort to 'cunning and maneuver' is a throw back to typical Jewish traits that better not despoil Obama's straight talk and straight walk. As it is, he has just come out of the dark shadows of American Jewish Neo-cons cunning and maneuvering record of manipulating Bush and Cohen's counsel could hardly be other than poison in the garb of a literary/political critique.

This reminds me of an Indian folk story, where a village verse writer had a gift of ridiculing his village friends in matching rhymes. He saw a Jaat, a farmer sitting on a cot – Khaat and called out to him: Jaat re Jaat, tere sar be Khaat. (Jaat, may this Khaat hit your head).

Now it so happened that this 'poet' was a Teli, a 'lowly' caste that crushes oil seeds to extract oil. They use the heavy oil grinder that is driven by bullocks.

The Jaat instantly replied: Teli re Teli, tere sar be kulooh (grinder).

Teli, in the same vein as our NYT columnist Roger Cohen, came out with the retort: but this does not rhyme.

Jaat said, rhyme or no rhyme, when the grinder hits your head, you will know, who hit the hardest.

Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai

ghulammuhammed3@gmail.com

www.ghulammuhammed.wordpress.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/08/opinion/08iht-edcohen.html?_r=1

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Ask Not for a Great Line

By ROGER COHEN

Published: June 7, 2009

NEW YORK — Lorrie Moore once observed of John Updike that he was "arguably our greatest writer without a single great novel." Few would argue with the greatness of the Rabbit quartet — but it's a quartet. I like "Roger's Version," but then I would. The fact is Moore is on to something, which should not have prevented the Swedish Academy honoring Updike with the Nobel Prize for literature.

Roger Cohen

But don't get me started on the academy, whose prejudice against the United States and failure to recognize Philip Roth is beyond scandalous. "American Pastoral" alone merits the Nobel several times over. A further prize, for proving the creative fecundity of late life, should be accorded Roth.

This, however is a political, not a literary column. What got me thinking about Updike was President Barack Obama's speech to the Muslim world in Cairo. To paraphrase Moore, Obama is arguably our greatest speechmaker without a single memorable line.

How so? How is it possible to make speeches of such majesty while leaving people blank when asked to recall a solitary phrase?

I've gone back over the 2008 race speech in Philadelphia, the Inaugural, Obama's recent address to the Turkish Parliament, and the 55-minute Cairo discourse — great speeches all — and I'm still searching for a heart-stopping moment.

There's an Obama formula. It's best resumed in a favored Latin phrase — deployed from the Democratic National Convention of 2004 to Cairo 2009 — "E pluribus, unum" — "Out of many, one."

That's Obama's shorthand for his own biracial and multi-continental story, for the essence of America, and for a spirit he hopes to spread across a globalized world.

The formula goes like this. You guys over there — read Afro-Americans, Muslims, Iranians, Palestinians — have your history, your suffering, your grievances, your hopes. And you guys over here — read whites, Christians, Americans, Israelis — have another past and pain, other resentments and aspirations.

So let us view these differences honestly, air them, recognize our common humanity, overcome mistrust, build coalitions through seeing our shared interests, and rise above hurt by valuing the future's promise over the past's scourge.

What saves this message from the tawdry is Obama's own embodiment of these values in his unlikely life story, his tremendous intellectual courage, and his gift for empathy. The Cairo speech was a brave idea executed with sensitivity.

It furthered the strategy of an American rapprochement with Islam to isolate "extremists" (terrorists no longer). It restored balance to U.S. diplomacy on Israel-Palestine by speaking of the "intolerable" situation of Palestinians.

It acknowledged the realities of the Middle East by opening the door a crack to Hamas, urging it to unify Palestinians and recognize Israel. It re-branded America as a power that listens rather than imposes. It beckoned Iran and it summoned the region's repressed youth to educational opportunity.

That's a lot. There's a laundry-list quality sometimes to Obama's perorations, reflecting a professorial urge to cover every argument and angle. This bent impresses; it can also feed a thirst for a one-liner that cuts through the parsing.

Theodore Sorensen, John Kennedy's speechwriter, told me he found Obama's expression of "memorable and powerful principles" remarkable. The Cairo speech "masterfully picked its way through a number of minefields."

But, Sorensen added, "Some of his sentences and paragraphs are a little complicated for the average listener. It sounds as though he thinks he's speaking to the M.I.T. faculty or the New York Times editorial board."

Great presidential lines are big on short words. JFK's "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." FDR's "When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on." Reagan's "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." Clinton's "There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America."

Obama's not there yet. I can think of a couple of reasons. The very fact of being from everywhere — his strength on the global stage — leaves him without a punchy vernacular. His chief foreign policy speechwriter, Ben Rhodes, is all of 31: Youth loves the soaring principle but is short on experience that cuts to the quick.

Does all this matter? YouTube means the sound bite rules political messaging less than before. Wordiness can work. But this much is clear: What Obama's speechifying lacks in short, blunt declarative sentences must now be made up for by its diplomatic equivalent. By which I mean ruthless, deft, hard-nosed punch.

All the rhetorical groundwork the president has now laid — on Iran, Israel-Palestine, the Muslim world — will come to nothing if high principle is not matched by street-smart cunning and maneuver. Obama's got to get off the podium and down into the bazaar if he's going to come home with the goods.

For his beloved middle ground is elusive, nowhere more so than in the Middle East. As Updike noted in 1966, "It is in middles that extremes clash." Or, as he wrote 40 years later in "Terrorist," "History is a machine perpetually grinding mankind to dust." Our hopes, not least.

Readers are invited to comment at global.nytimes.com/opinion

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