Yeah, yeah, Michelle Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention last
night was potent, powerful, and amazingly well-delivered (really - she blew past "articulate" and went right to "inspirational"), and the kids were adorable, and, oh, sweet Jesus, the whole thing just gave one the same feeling as a warm, wet mouth on one's balls.
But let's be clear here: the purpose of the speech was to say, "Don't fear the black people." And it was directed at Idiot America, that demographic comprised of rednecks, racists, and/or retards who still think that blacks want to rape their white women while shooting them or stabbing them or beating them to death with a comically large bone, all the while receiving welfare checks and getting hired ahead of them. Really, she was addressing the teetering RRRs, the one who have an inkling that maybe those rich conservative whites who purport to share their "values" don't actually give a fuck about them. The rest of the RRRs, they're too fucking stupid to even come up with a
decent assassination plot.
Everything Obama said was calculated to announce, "No, no, really, we're just like you." Which is, of course, true, and it's a pathetic statement on just how driven into racial backwardness we've been that it needed to be said at all. From her brother's mention of little sister Michelle memorizing episodes of that whitest of white shows,
The Brady Bunch, to Obama's shout-outs to the working class, "People who work the day shift, kiss their kids goodnight, and head out for the night shift," the speech was a big, open-armed gesture to the stupid, telling them, "C'mere, you dumb motherfuckers, it's okay. Barack Obama won't boil you in a pot or give your devalued houses to black people. And, by the way, I don't hate America."
The way Obama made these reassurances was rather brilliant. Indeed, the
speech and the video before it centered a distinctly American story within the black community and did so without every mentioning the word "black." Or "white" (except, of course, for "White House"). The very presence of a black woman on that stage carried a potent enough force, an embodiment of the very things she celebrated, and race, though unspoken, was very much there, even if the speech's purpose was to say, as Obama did repeatedly, that their experience was very much like "you" or "all" or "everyone." Her and her husband's working class roots are just so darn average, she was saying.
However, by bleaching their story, Michelle Obama was forced to leave out those intrinsic things that form her and her husband's identity. Yes, she did occasionally drop a racial code word or phrase ("south side of Chicago"). But one of the triumphs of the Obamas is in overcoming the very racism, the very idiocy, that she led her to make this address. To erase that part of the story is as conspicuous as painting over the Mona Lisa's eyes. Sure, everyone talks about the smile, but it wouldn't mean as much without her eyes. Obama placed their story in a larger context of the nation, but consciously took it out of its other contexts.
Still, that's okay. Because the speech wasn't for the Rude Pundit. Or most of you. It was for Idiot America. And Idiot America needed to see that Michelle Obama and the whole Obama family were non-threatening. With Obama's impassioned, urgent delivery and the daughters about as cute as central casting could do, it was a success.
Of course, somewhere in some shitty West Virginia bungalow or in some tiny Brooklyn apartment or in some New Mexico trailer or in some middle class ranch house in a Mississippi suburb, there's whites thinking how that coon ain't gonna put anything over on them.
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