Leon Wieseltier: Let The Just Times Roll! A Pause To Appreciate The Marvelousness Of A Black Presidential Nominee
Whether or not this is the Lord's doing, it is certainly marvelous in our eyes. An African American is the Democratic candidate for president of the United States. The United States! If ever there was an occasion for soaring language, this is it; but the man of the hour has somewhat ruined soaring language. One is left mainly with a gulp, and a tear, and an unfamiliar sensation of the sweetness of history. When is history sweet? Truly this is an American benediction. So hyperbole may be forgiven--as when John Hope Franklin declared to The Washington Post that Obama's candidacy is "the most radical, far-reaching, significant [undertaking] by any individual or group in our history." Perhaps not, but the historian has earned his hour of ecstasy. The great American counterfactual is now a fact. By the standard of where we are, Obama's victory may not be surprising; but by the standard of where we were, it is shocking.
Complacence about this turn of events is a form of forgetting. So for a moment I will not care who Barack Obama is. I will care only what he is. The complexities will soon rush in--as they must, because the office that Obama seeks is too powerful to be regarded only sentimentally, or as a symbol--but for now I will pause to savor the simplicity of a fact. Even more, to savor the color of the man's skin: to enjoy (shame on me!) a fleeting racialist thrill. I do not give daps, but when he dapped her on the stage in St. Paul the other night I was happy for them in their particularity. Let the just times roll!
In a conference room at the Supreme Court there hangs a portrait of John Marshall. It was painted by Rembrandt Peale in 1834, as a pendant to his famous portrait of George Washington that now hangs in the Senate. Both pictures set their heroes within a stonework oval, rather in the manner of contemporary prints of great men. Jupiter appears in the keystone above Washington, and Solon, the giver of laws, above Marshall. Each is inscribed with a large Latin motto. Washington says Patriae Pater, or "Father of [His] Country," and Marshall says Fiat Justitia, or "Let Justice Be Done." When I first saw the picture years ago, I gasped: this was the bluntest expression of American optimism I had ever seen. For the motto beneath the Chief Justice's wise head is an abridgment of a longer Latin statement. The statement comes in two forms--fiat justitia pereat mundus, let justice be done and the world perish (Kant was fond of this version), and fiat justitia ruat coelum, let justice be done and the heavens fall (this version was cited by the judge who valiantly commuted the death sentence of one of the Scottsboro boys, as he reflected on the consequences of his decision for his career). Both these formulations are admonitions about the consequences of utopianism--of what we would call, in our dreary vocabulary of efficiency, over-reaching. These mottoes do not call for perfect justice, they warn against it. So do you see it now? When the portraitist in the young republic lopped off the concluding words of the phrase, he reversed its meaning, and thoroughly Americanized it. It is one of the axioms of America that justice can be done without the world perishing or the heavens falling. For this reason, Americans are always a little surprised by failure, by disaster, by war, by tragedy. Such calamities, many of them the result of human actions, do not cohere with the American notion of shadowless possibility. The entire career of idealism in this country, of the oscillations in our politics between enchantment and disenchantment, is limned at the bottom of Peale's painting....
Read entire article at New Republic
Complacence about this turn of events is a form of forgetting. So for a moment I will not care who Barack Obama is. I will care only what he is. The complexities will soon rush in--as they must, because the office that Obama seeks is too powerful to be regarded only sentimentally, or as a symbol--but for now I will pause to savor the simplicity of a fact. Even more, to savor the color of the man's skin: to enjoy (shame on me!) a fleeting racialist thrill. I do not give daps, but when he dapped her on the stage in St. Paul the other night I was happy for them in their particularity. Let the just times roll!
In a conference room at the Supreme Court there hangs a portrait of John Marshall. It was painted by Rembrandt Peale in 1834, as a pendant to his famous portrait of George Washington that now hangs in the Senate. Both pictures set their heroes within a stonework oval, rather in the manner of contemporary prints of great men. Jupiter appears in the keystone above Washington, and Solon, the giver of laws, above Marshall. Each is inscribed with a large Latin motto. Washington says Patriae Pater, or "Father of [His] Country," and Marshall says Fiat Justitia, or "Let Justice Be Done." When I first saw the picture years ago, I gasped: this was the bluntest expression of American optimism I had ever seen. For the motto beneath the Chief Justice's wise head is an abridgment of a longer Latin statement. The statement comes in two forms--fiat justitia pereat mundus, let justice be done and the world perish (Kant was fond of this version), and fiat justitia ruat coelum, let justice be done and the heavens fall (this version was cited by the judge who valiantly commuted the death sentence of one of the Scottsboro boys, as he reflected on the consequences of his decision for his career). Both these formulations are admonitions about the consequences of utopianism--of what we would call, in our dreary vocabulary of efficiency, over-reaching. These mottoes do not call for perfect justice, they warn against it. So do you see it now? When the portraitist in the young republic lopped off the concluding words of the phrase, he reversed its meaning, and thoroughly Americanized it. It is one of the axioms of America that justice can be done without the world perishing or the heavens falling. For this reason, Americans are always a little surprised by failure, by disaster, by war, by tragedy. Such calamities, many of them the result of human actions, do not cohere with the American notion of shadowless possibility. The entire career of idealism in this country, of the oscillations in our politics between enchantment and disenchantment, is limned at the bottom of Peale's painting....