A too brief reminder of how words can comfort
Let us give thanks for sane politicians. Former U.S. president Barack Obama delivered a remarkable eulogy at civil rights icon John Lewis’s funeral on Thursday. His theme was Lewis’s finest quality, the perseverance that kept him fighting for racial justice.
“He knew from his own life that progress is fragile; that we have to be vigilant against the darker currents of this country’s history, of our own history, with their whirlpools of violence and hatred and despair that can always rise again. Bull Connor may be gone, but today we witness with our own eyes police officers kneeling on the necks of Black Americans. George Wallace may be gone, but we can witness our federal government sending agents to use tear gas and batons against peaceful demonstrators.”
The eulogy was balm for the soul if only because people around the world heard from a sane if former American president. That voice. That calmness. Pauses that signalled thoughtfulness rather than confusion. The ability to gracefully ascend the steps to a lectern, to pronounce words correctly. A man had walked into a funeral wearing a suit that fit him and an appropriate tie. What a strange sight that was.
President Donald Trump had called a news conference at about the time Obama was speaking in an attempt not just to distract but to block his base from watching Obama. Someone must have told him it was a terrible move so he loosed his daily stream of ramble later in the afternoon.
I was sitting outside under a maple thinking about Obama’s eulogy and if perseverance would indeed be enough to save a collapsing nation. My mister opened the back door to tell me that Trump was speaking. Did I want to come back in and take notes as usual?
No, I said flatly. I was recalling a remark I had read. It had been made in another summer, in 1939.
The novelist Virginia Woolf and her political theorist husband, Leonard, used to listen to Hitler’s “ranting, raving” radio speeches. On this afternoon, Leonard wrote, “I was planting in the orchard under an apple tree iris reticulata, those lovely violet flowers … Suddenly I heard Virginia’s voice calling to me from the sitting-room window: ‘Hitler is making a speech.’
“I shouted back: ‘I shan’t come. I’m planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.’ ”
Leonard Woolf wrote that in his memoirs in 1966, 21 years after Hitler’s suicide, adding, “A few of those violet flowers still flowered under the apple tree in the orchard.”
I’m not claiming to resemble Leonard. For one thing, I wasn’t planting long-term bulbs, I was drinking local apple cider and watching a CBC livestream while the little boy next door shot arrows at me. But I had time to think. I’m not comparing Trump to Hitler; they have almost no similarities beyond the unquestioning worship they both enjoyed until reality (Red Army/Democrats) began to close in. What I am saying is that Trump’s words are worthless, that life goes on whatever political catastrophes humans bring on themselves, and that Americans need a John Lewis level of perseverance to elect Joe Biden and begin restoring and then improving the nation they lost over four years of political carnage.
As for what Canadians need to understand the wider world, it was superhuman patience while fretful Ottawans made hay out of this WE Charity bubble thing. Conservative MPs with ill-chosen backdrops made fools of themselves at a virtual finance committee meeting that ended up with MPs shouting at each other. It was question period but in separate houses.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was answering questions, I think in his home office, when the committee chair, Wayne Easter, had a power outage at his place, and the vice-chair, that notorious hardboiled egg Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre, seized his 45 seconds of glory. I’m the chair now, he said in front of a gloomy bookcase, so I get to ask the PM about his mother over and over again.
Trudeau kept his calm. Poilievre, a red-lipped human potato with rimless glasses and a mean expression, was stroking a virtual white cat furiously when suddenly Easter’s power returned — I guess the Hydro people were digging up the road again — and everything went back to normal with a Bloc Québécois MP getting irate.
Poilievre questioned Trudeau’s unflappable chief of staff, Katie Telford, repeatedly interrupting her and cackling like a cartoon villain. “Yes or no. Yes or no. Yes or no.” He’d make a terrible lawyer, having lost the sympathy of the sandbox jury with his voice, which was basically quacking, and his sneaky theft of Easter’s bucket and spade.
Elizabeth May spoke in front of a quilt I had on my wall in university.
The day was over. I had seen presidents Obama (stately), Bill Clinton (likely quaking over imminent Ghislaine Maxwell revelations) and George W. Bush (the waterboarder). I saw Trump mumbling. I saw Canadian MPs put on show from their moms’ basements and even their moms thought it was bad. And how was your day?