Dang. This does make me want to gamble! (and maybe get a baby pig or puppy with that $1 million)

I’m not sure I really know what to say here…

—–

—–

Would there be a risk of using this so much there’d be an Intervention called?

Or would it just be more like President Scroob sucking down some Perri-Air?

I listened to President Obama’s inaugural address on NPR yesterday.    The tone certainly galvanized me.  It sounded like a jeremiad — “We’re going to do a 180, and it’s not going to be easy.”   Hear, hear!

At one line, though, I just cheered:

“What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them, that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long, no longer apply.”

Let me begin to enumerate the verbal jiujitsu of this line.  I love in particular the metaphor of the ground shifting beneath people.   This image is not at a distance and cannot, in fact, be distanced from the hearer, the way an image appealing to the senses of sight or hearing could be distanced.  People can imagine a visual image at any distance they choose, up to miles away from them, a tiny speck on the horizon.  People can be deaf, willfully or through a deficiency in their senses, to a sound image.  They can be deaf to bells of freedom ringing or imagine the promised land as seen from a mountaintop, far, far away.

The ground shifting beneath somebody, however, is immediate and palpable.  The ground beneath your feet is touching you.  To understand what the speaker is saying here, you have to imagine feeling it in your body.

Obama could have ssaid it so many different ways.  He doesn’t say, “The landscape [around us] has changed.”  He doesn’t say, “Change is coming.”  Either of those are visual and imaginable from a huge distance away.

Not only are you touching the ground, but you also depend on it for support, of your body and by extension any political argument you make.  People say metaphorically, “He [his argument] doesn’t have a leg to stand on,” but those legs are supported by the ground.

If the ground itself has shifted — well, the bases of our arguments and reasoning have changed.

Pennsylbama.   Floribama.  Virginiabama.  Coloradobama.  New Mexicobama.  Iowabama.

Thanks to the 12apostophes contingent, Minnesotabama.

Thanks to Kam and me, Ohiobama. We’ll tell you how we did it when we recover from pounding the pavement.  We’re going to recover by some intensive interval-type shopping.
Looks like there might also be a North Carolinabama and Indianabama.

I’ve decided to rename a red state, too.  In honor of its achievements in the preservation of openly expressed racism against blacks — here’s the results of a survey of Kentuckians conducted by my local newspaper:

http://www.kentucky.com/news/state/story/568306.html

Excerpt: A survey of 600 likely Kentucky voters, which was taken Oct. 19 to 21 and has a margin of error of 4 percentage points, . . .  asked respondents to react to two statements about race in general.

More than three out of every five respondents also agreed with a statement that said “if blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites.” One fifth of people polled said they disagreed with the statement while 19 percent said they weren’t sure.

The 61 percent of Kentucky respondents who said they agreed with that statement is well above the 35 percent who agreed when asked the same question in a national Associated Press-Yahoo poll taken in September.

– and because I live there, I’ve decided to rename Kentucky.  From now on, it will be referred to as “Hussein.” Former Kentuckians, now known as Husseinites, need to just get the hell over it.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.