From Jeremiah to Obama:

Rhetoric, the Image and the Phenomenology of

Political Citation

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 Thank you to Siegfried Kracauer, Roland Barthes, Vicky Goldberg, David Howard
Pitney, Jeremiah and his progeny, without whom this project would not, could not have
been possible.

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1
“I will come to you and fulfill my gracious promise to bring you back to this place. For I
know the plans I have for you…plans 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
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“There is a great day ahead. The future is on its side. It’s going now through the
wilderness, but the Promised Land is ahead.”

—Martin Luther King Jr., The Birth of a New Nation, April 7, 1957
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“…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 city…to 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 continent…in a peaceful and hopeful globe. When that day finally comes, as it will, the
people…can 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 words Ich bin ein Berliner!”

—John F. Kennedy Jr., West Berlin, June 26, 1963

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“I come here today because wherever I go, whatever I do: Ich hab noch einen Koffer in
Berlin…For I join you, as I join your fellow countrymen in the West, in this firm, this unalterable
belief: Es gibt nur ein Berlin…every man is a German…Every man is a Berliner…I find in Berlin
a message of hope, even in the shadow of this wall, a message of triumph…this wall cannot
withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.”

—Ronald Reagan, West Berlin, June 12, 1987

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“People of Berlin—people of the world - this is our moment. This is our time…People of
Berlin—and people of the world—the 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 this
history, and answer our destiny, and remake the world once again.”

-Barack Obama, West Berlin, July 24, 2008

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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 July—or 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 smile—all these details discretely recorded by the camera, seem to be in

their improper place, a questionable—contested—appearance. 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 staff—who assigned the photographer to this story—that 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 recall—and 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 The President, but in reality, it is any charismatic leader at the

brink of a new frontier. 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 nation’s 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.

From the early days of electoral politics, the candidate’s image was doubly

constituted by his physical appearance and his rhetorical prowess. One could say that

voters were unable to see their 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 nation’s western territories. With a litigious, erudite tone,

Lincoln proved his Jerusalem roots by imploring his fellow Republicans to abide by their

“moral” duty—honor 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 Confederacy’s slave economy. He closes his

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speech with an image of solidarity, a singular strength made mightier by singular faith 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 Nation’s properly

framed moral 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 had his likeness, which was seen on everything

and everywhere. The caption, the meta-image, of course, being his “electrifying speech.”

As 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 God’s will for people to go to the mountaintop, for them to rise above

what was—and remains—the 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 all will 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]

held memento 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 moment—at

the event—the 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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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 best that 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 People’s 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

public’s 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 neither sees nor knows, of all its potential to act or perform

its goodness and, thus, fulfill its destiny. The Public sees in 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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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

West—the 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

summer…this is where the two sides met…No one nation, no matter how large or

powerful, can defeat such challenges alone…[but] we know that sometimes…we

have…forgotten our shared destiny.” Our Superstar reinforces this call for partnership by

channeling his jeremiac forefather’s 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 look at

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 partnership…and sustained sacrifice…[the] sharing of the burdens of

development and diplomacy” which will lead 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 past’s

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 sixties—but with a contextually unique caption, which is embedded in the

closing text of his speech: “People of Berlin—and people of the world—the 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.” One’s self is always singular and multiple

and always in relation to others. One’s self is always dying, always changing—always

the other. There is no other mode of existence, and understanding that is where the core

of the possibility for change—personal and political—can be found. The question of

whether this is change one can simply believe remains 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

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