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8/6/2019 Citing the Promised Land_crystal Am Nelson
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F r o m J e r e m i a h t o O b a m a :R h e t o r i c , t h e I m a g e a n d t h e P h e n o m e n o l o g y o fP o l i t i c a l C i t a t i o n
c r y s t a l a m n e l s o n
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Thank you to Siegfried Kracauer, Roland Barthes, Vicky Goldberg, David HowardPitney, Jeremiah and his progeny, without whom this project would not, could not havebeen possible.
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1I will come to you and fulfill my gracious promise to bring you back to this place. For I
know the plans I have for youplans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call upon me
and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I
will be found by you and will bring you back from captivity...
Jeremiah 29:10-14
----
There is a great day ahead. The future is on its side. Its going now through the
wilderness, but the Promised Land is ahead.
Martin Luther King Jr., The Birth of a New Nation, April 7, 1957----
let me ask you, as I close, to lift your eyes beyond the dangers of today to the hopes
of tomorrow, beyond the freedom merely of this cityto the advance of freedom everywhere,
beyond the wall, to the day of peace with justice, beyond yourselves and ourselves to all
mankind.
Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, no man is free. When all are free,
then we look forward to that day when this city will be joined as one, and this country and this
great continentin a peaceful and hopeful globe. When that day finally comes, as it will, the
peoplecan take sober satisfaction in the fact that they were in the front lines...
All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin And therefore, as a free man,
I take pride in the wordsIch bin ein Berliner!
John F. Kennedy Jr., West Berlin, June 26, 1963
----
I come here today because wherever I go, whatever I do: Ich hab noch einen Koffer inBerlinFor I join you, as I join your fellow countrymen in the West, in this firm, this unalterablebelief:Es gibt nur ein Berlinevery man is a GermanEvery man is a BerlinerI find in Berlina message of hope, even in the shadow of this wall, a message of triumphthis wall cannot
withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.
Ronald Reagan, West Berlin, June 12, 1987
----
People of Berlinpeople of the world - this is our moment. This is our timePeople of
Berlinand people of the worldthe scale of our challenge is great. The road ahead will be
long. But I come before you to say that we are heirs to a struggle for freedom. We are a people of
improbable hope. With an eye toward the future, with resolve in our hearts, let us remember thishistory, and answer our destiny, and remake the world once again.
-Barack Obama, West Berlin, July 24, 2008
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2 This is what the presumptive candidate looks like. He is forty-seven years old,
featured on the home page of an online newspaper, standing in front of Victory
Monument in Berlin. The date is Julyor maybe June. If one were to enlarge the image
on the screen, one could make out the pixels, the millions of tiny squares that constitute
the candidate, the column and the some quarter million fans standing in front of him. The
screen, however, does not refer to the grid of picture elements but to the living candidate
in Berlin. Time: now. Captions call him the Superstar, exclaiming that it is like 1963,
our Superstar President. Though he does lack a certain look. His dark skin, broad nose
and bright-white smileall these details discretely recorded by the camera, seem to be in
their improper place, a questionablecontestedappearance. But everyone recognizes
him with wild excitement since everyone has seen the original on YouTube. It is such a
good likeness that he cannot be confused with anyone else, even if he is perhaps only one
twenty-three millionth of a perceived monolith. Proud he stands in front of the Victory
Monument, which basks in his charisma, a being of flesh and blood, our presumptive
candidate, forty-seven years old, in Berlin. The date is July.
Is that what The President looked like? The photograph, forty-five years old and
now a memorial in the modern sense, depicts him as a promising, stylish man of forty-
six, perhaps forty-seven. Since photographs are performances, this one must have been a
performance as well. A photopportunist carefully staged it at the gate marking the end of
Freedom in The West. Even with the oral tradition, the image alone suffices to
reconstitute him and this Moment. His devotees know that he lived like a prince, with a
key to all the gates of the world, and yet so hoped to throw open those gates to the world;
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they also know a few nasty stories about his life and no confirmed statements, which with
each passing generation are uttered through pictorial incriminations. One has to believe
the House staffwho assigned the photographer to this storythat this photograph
depicts the very same man at the very same Moment about which one has retained these
details that have over time become permanently adhered to the image of the President.
Yet, such testimonies are inconsistent. It may turn out that the photograph does not depict
this leader at all but rather one of his brothers who resembled him. Few of his
contemporaries are alive with the willingness to recalland the question of resemblance?
The ur-image has long since decayed. But the now-darkened appearance has so little in
common with the Character embedded in their memories that believers urgently accept
this as the fragmentarily remembered leader whom they encounter in the photograph.
All right, so it is ThePresident, but in reality, it is any charismatic leader at the
brink of a newfrontier. The leader grimaces continuously, always the same grimace, the
sternly turned-down lip is arrested yet no longer refers to the life from which it has been
taken. Similitude has ceased to be any help. The grimaces of figureheads are just as
tightly drawn and perpetual. This figurehead does not belong to our time; it could be
hanging with others of its kind in a hall of Great Leaders of All Time. There the
figureheads are displayed solely for the sake of posterity, and the man in the photograph
is also a figurehead that serves to illustrate a nations future possibilities in politics, style
and decorum. So that is how one conducts himself in public: The President has dissolved
into a pop icon, a trendsetter before the believers very eyes. A finely tailored Brooks
Brothers suit with skinny tie and pocket square, and the promise of youth coupled with
the power of sermonic words. They are awestruck by his presence, which remains even in
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his absence, for through the icon from which the promising young man has disappeared,
they glimpse a moment passed. While time is not part of the photograph like the grimace
or suit, it seems to them to be a representation of a moment they can recapture. If it is
only the photograph that endows these details with event-status, it is not at all the
believers who constitute the event, but rather it is the event that makes images of itself
out of them.
3From the early days of electoral politics, the candidates image was doubly
constituted by his physical appearance and his rhetorical prowess. One could say that
voters were unable toseetheir favorite candidate until they heard him. In fact, his words
became his dopplegaenger, his aura emitted. Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth president of the
United States, and described as a politician who most unwarrantably abused the
privilege of being ugly, transmuted his likeness with the apparent ease of a push of the
button and a discretely epiphanic turn of phrase. On a fateful February evening in 1860,
Lincoln performed two acts that made him desirably presidential. He allowed, at the
behest of his campaign staff, a studio photographer to record and, later, to reproduce his
image; and then, at the Cooper Institute (Cooper Union) he delivered a speech of
politically, socially and culturally epic proportions that called for a freeze on the
expansion of slavery into the nations western territories. With a litigious, erudite tone,
Lincoln proved his Jerusalem roots by imploring his fellow Republicans to abide by their
moral dutyhonor their forefathers intentionality as outlined in the Constitution
otherwise the stability of the federal government and future of the country would suffer
from the threat of secession posed by the Confederacys slave economy. He closes his
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speech with an image of solidarity, asingularstrength made mightier by singularfaith in
their collective self-image as those on the right side of morality: Neither let us be
slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by
menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. LET US HAVE
FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE
END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT. In appealing to his
fellow Republicans self-perceptions and their certitude of having the Nations properly
framedmoral majority, Lincoln (re)presented himself, postmortem, as the handsomest
man [one] ever listened to in a speech. The next day, his photograph had been widely
distributed in a variety of forms, rather accessible to the voting public, citing that
moment. It was said that the newspapers hadhis likeness, which wasseenon everything
and everywhere. The caption, the meta-image, of course, being his electrifyingspeech.
4As is true with the [African] American Jeremiad, a nationally specific charismatic
form of political sermon, when one has cited the promise, the presumption is that the
Promise is within sight, or at least has been sighted. Along with the first is the second
presumption that The Promise is destiny or fated, and its inevitable attainment will follow
the correction of present conditions which are antithetical to [the fulfillment of] The
Promise. Everyone remembers or has in their memory the eerily prophetic Mountaintop
speech Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the night before his assassination. At
the end he cites Gods will for people to go to the mountaintop, for them to rise above
what wasand remainsthe inequitable state of the world. He cites this necessity to go
to the mountaintop as the only way to see The Promise[d Land], which is on the other
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side, distant but clearly within reach if within sight and made visible by God. But in the
same closing he cites his impending death, while still iterating the absolute inevitability
that they allwill reach The Promise: I may not get there with you. But I want you to
know tonight, that we, as a(emphasis mine, camn) people will get to the promised land!
So one must wonder what and where this promised land is. The following assassination
of King recasts his citation of The Promised Land as a publicly [read also as singularly]
heldmemento mori, reaffirming it as something always possible to reach in life and
certain to reach in death.
This is the nature of the neo-political sermon or neo-American jeremiad. Much
like a photograph, this rhetorical mode is always already a referent to death, whether it be
the death of a previous moment, jeremiah or perhaps even the orator himself. The
jeremiad is an aggregate, each jeremiad is unique and singular, its singularity founded on
the ever-increasing multiplicity of its lineage. If one returns to the fall of the Kingdom of
Judah, then one can trace the oratorical bloodline from Jeremiah to more recent jeremiahs
like King or Barack Obama, who similarly speechify the dual tone of lamentation and
celebration as a means of inducing revolutionary social upheaval. Those who invoke
the jeremiac ritual themselves become aggregates precisely because at the momentat
the eventthe speech [sermon] is (re)iterated, proposed as an initiation of discourse
about The Present and future moments, they are simultaneously performing a past
moment with a passed voice. There is no mistake in reading this appropriative act as
purposeful citation, or rather as citation with a purpose.
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5 Why the sixties? What is it about that moment of time that leads to total recall and
a total re-call of indefatigable hope for today? Why is that our visual and historical
referent for all the bestthat can happen tomorrow? What makes us continue to reach
back to the sixties for a map to our future? There are the obvious answers: the Civil
Rights Movement-turned-Black Power Movement, Poor Peoples Movement, the Non-
Violence Movement, May Day, the co-existence of several American charismatic
leaders/public figures (MLK Jr., JFK, Robert Kennedy, Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X) all
seemingly working toward the mutual goal of freedom and equity for all mankind. Not
since the era of American Reconstruction, nearly a century earlier, had the nation
experienced such a massive movement toward drastic social change. Perhaps it is the
publics high level of participation that distinguishes the sixties and gives it event-status
as well as iconic status. Perhaps that is the only reason. The Public has a self-portrait of
all the good it possesses but neitherseesnor knows, of all its potential to act or perform
its goodness and, thus, fulfill its destiny. The Publicseesin this self-portrait The
Promise it has yet to realize. But it is a catch-22 in that this self-portrait, this memento
mori, cites that which immobilizes it, because while inferring a life The Public could
have [of had], it is also a reminder of their mortality and the life they are always already
losing with each passing moment it awaits the return of Jeremiah.
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6 There stands our presumptive candidate, our Superstar amidst some two hundred
thousand screaming fans. Many of them are seeing him in simulcast, some on the LCD
panel of their digital point-and-shoots or MiniDV cameras, zooming in so they can get a
closer look at him. He poses a striking figure of youth and charisma, style like 1963. He
is the likeness of the perfect American President: modest, debonair, holding an olive
branch while also keeping at the ready a quiver of arrows. But there is also an air of the
late eighties with the Hollywood backdrop of a Gothic Modern European city under the
warm glow of sunset and the strategically placed cameras around the strategically
placed stage to ensure each moment of The Moment is captured. Of course, there is a
soundtrack of popular music by pop stars eager to improve their own images. Our
Superstar has carefully selected characteristics from several of his predecessors, giving
two more weight than the others in the staging of his appearance and in the (re)packaging
of an aura not seen in over forty years. If nothing else, he knows most of the work is
complete like a ready-made, but full resolution is only available through the carefully
crafted caption he pairs with this image, equally crafted with care for him.
He invokes the tripartite rhetorical ritual, the jeremiad with the promise of the
Westthe promise of the kind of freedom only The West can offer. But that promise is
marred by the new dangers of terror, global warming, proliferation of nuclear weapons,
rogue nations, poverty, genocide and drugs; all of which mark the twenty-first century,
and also the twentieth century if one can rightly recall. In spite of the wilderness that
obstructs the path to The Promised Land, neither America nor Europe can forget their
shared destiny if they are to succeed in their mission to bring peace and freedom to the
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rest of the world: Ours is a partnership that truly began sixty years ago this
summerthis is where the two sides metNo one nation, no matter how large or
powerful, can defeat such challenges alone[but] we know that sometimeswe
haveforgotten our shared destiny. Our Superstar reinforces this call for partnership by
channeling his jeremiac forefathers call for nay-sayers to see the failure of communism
with their own eyes. He repeats the phrase Look(emphasis mine, camn) at Berlin
which, perhaps, is a more palpable command then Let them come to Berlin, for today,
in the advanced age of technological reproducibility, global citizens can actually lookat
and experience Berlin, and in real time, no less. He then directs sights on the future
from the vantage point of history because it reminds [shows] us that walls can be torn
down with [t]rue partnershipand sustained sacrifice[the] sharing of the burdens of
development and diplomacy which willlead to a reward of progress and peace.
In the latter part of his speech, he once again uses repetition, this time prompting
his fans to see him at The Mountaintop where he insists, This is the moment for
renewal, hope and camaraderie, but not stopping there. Inherent in his insistent push for
effecting change now, in Our Moment is also his push for both honoring the pasts
causal relationship to the present moment as well as for disavowing its potential to
cannibalize the singularity of the now. Our Superstar embraces his infinite origins, the
residual aura of which has adhered to him as he has developed, but he also stakes claim to
the singularity of the moment he can and wants to represent. He understands that when all
else has long since decayed, what will remain is the memory-image of This Moment
like that of the sixtiesbut with a contextually unique caption, which is embedded in the
closing text of his speech: People of Berlinand people of the worldthe scale of our
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challenge is great. The road ahead will be long. But I come before you to say that we are
heirs to a struggle for freedom. We are a people of improbable hope. With an eye toward
the future, with resolve in our hearts, let us remember this history, and answer our
destiny, and remake the world once again. Ones self is always singular and multiple
and always in relation to others. Ones self is always dying, always changingalways
the other. There is no other mode of existence, and understanding that is where the core
of the possibility for changepersonal and politicalcan be found. The question of
whether this is change one can simply believeremains a perennial one.
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John F. Kennedy, West Berlin, June 26, 1963
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Ronald Reagan, West Berlin, June 12, 1987
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Barack Obama, Berlin, July 24, 2008