My favorite part of the inaugural address
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 . . .
