Thursday January 5, 2023; 7:27 AM EST
- In his powerful speech to the Ukrainian people on New year's Eve, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also spoke of a labyrinth, a labyrinth of illusions that have been disintegrated in the last year. Zelenskyy uses this 17-minute speech to name for his people what he believes has replaced the illusions. It's a sense of self for individuals, communities, and nation, composed of terms given meaning by the specificity of the year's events. The speech grounds a set of ideals in the particulars of that history, and it invites the Ukrainian people to organize their thoughts and emotions around those ideals as they are defined and illustrated in recent events. Like Baldwin, Zelenskyy sees the risk of illusion all around us, a people fooling itself with an inadequate understanding of its circumstances and its character. And like Baldwin, he sees the chance, perhaps every day, to replace the illusions and attitudes with something they've named and chosen for themselves. To rename themselves for themselves, and in the world's eyes, with thoughtful, clear-headed intention.#
- See the overview of the speech by James Fallows. (Free subscription might be required, not sure.)#
- It's not something we see very often in the political speech of our country. Lyndon Johnson gave a speech in the 1960s about the way poverty grinds a person down, acknowledging a reality that we tended to look away from. He gave another speech before Congress in which he accepted the language of the Civil Rights Movement and brought it into the center of American life, rejecting our complacency about racism and poverty and committing the country to change, saying from the podium in Congress, "We shall overcome." The activists were doing the work of changing the language about race in America, and he helped speed up that change by acknowledging and amplifying their words. He said, in effect, that their words and their understanding was now the central understanding for our society. It was a moment of acknowledgement and renewal at the fountain of our shared reality.#
- A people can name themselves or be named by others or by the inherited rote formulations of an imperfect and even cruel past. One reason why the Breitbart & Bannon power-play method of intentionally filling the media space with mistrust, falsehood, and garbage is so dangerous, is that it puts off, perhaps forever, the moment when we choose to look and think clearly, puts off the chance for a moment of renewal.#
- Old words, old formulations are what got us into the trouble we're in today.#