Democrats, day 4
Jul. 28th, 2016 10:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimac(I'll have to get back to day 3 later.) We did watch some of this while cooking and eating dinner, and on the couch afterwards. Missed various critical moments because the cable kept going out briefly.
But when the Woman in the White Suit stepped out, that was a historic event. I've often before heard the words "I accept your nomination for President of the United States," but it did sound different spoken in a female voice.
The best speakers of the convention, however, were a couple men unknown to me who appeared a little earlier. One was Khizr Khan, who was there, with his wife, in their capacity as parents of a US soldier killed in Iraq. This man looked entirely ordinary - middle-aged, bald, heavy-framed glasses, dark suit - but his speaking was extraordinary. The slowness of his words and the thickness of his accent only emphasized the poignancy and sincerity with which he spoke of his son's sacrifice, and - even more powerfully - of his deep-felt patriotism and love for the US, the country that gave him freedom and his children opportunity.
And these are the kind of people Trump would bar from the country just to be "safe". The killer moment came when Mr Khan angrily asked if Trump had ever read the Constitution, upon which he reached into his breast pocket, pulled out a copy, and offered to lend it to him.
Then there was the Rev. Dr. William Barber II, one of those evangelical preachers who starts low and builds into a tower of passion. A big, bear-like man, he walked slowly to the podium (he has a severe form of arthritis, I read) and then loomed over it. His firm application of evangelical creed to liberal moral principles, the way he quoted from the Constitution with the same spiritual emphasis he used when quoting from the Bible, and his call for his audience to restore the democratic heart of America from those who would stop that heart, all delivered in that increasingly powerful blast, made this altogether the most extraordinary such sermon I'd ever heard. And the cap came with the amazing closing metaphor in which he called on his audience to be the moral defibrillator that would restart that heart.
This was great speechmaking I heard tonight.
But when the Woman in the White Suit stepped out, that was a historic event. I've often before heard the words "I accept your nomination for President of the United States," but it did sound different spoken in a female voice.
The best speakers of the convention, however, were a couple men unknown to me who appeared a little earlier. One was Khizr Khan, who was there, with his wife, in their capacity as parents of a US soldier killed in Iraq. This man looked entirely ordinary - middle-aged, bald, heavy-framed glasses, dark suit - but his speaking was extraordinary. The slowness of his words and the thickness of his accent only emphasized the poignancy and sincerity with which he spoke of his son's sacrifice, and - even more powerfully - of his deep-felt patriotism and love for the US, the country that gave him freedom and his children opportunity.
And these are the kind of people Trump would bar from the country just to be "safe". The killer moment came when Mr Khan angrily asked if Trump had ever read the Constitution, upon which he reached into his breast pocket, pulled out a copy, and offered to lend it to him.
Then there was the Rev. Dr. William Barber II, one of those evangelical preachers who starts low and builds into a tower of passion. A big, bear-like man, he walked slowly to the podium (he has a severe form of arthritis, I read) and then loomed over it. His firm application of evangelical creed to liberal moral principles, the way he quoted from the Constitution with the same spiritual emphasis he used when quoting from the Bible, and his call for his audience to restore the democratic heart of America from those who would stop that heart, all delivered in that increasingly powerful blast, made this altogether the most extraordinary such sermon I'd ever heard. And the cap came with the amazing closing metaphor in which he called on his audience to be the moral defibrillator that would restart that heart.
This was great speechmaking I heard tonight.
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Date: 2016-07-31 03:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-07-31 04:10 pm (UTC)