The weight of words

Looking ahead to the possibility of a general election campaign against Barack Obama, John McCain tried out some attack lines last night. They need work.

Referring to Obama’s mantra of “hope,” McCain said this:

“Hope, my friends, is a powerful thing. I can attest to that better than many, for I have seen men’s hopes tested in hard and cruel ways that few will ever experience.”

So far, so good. The reference there is to the long years McCain spent as a prisoner of war, held captive by the North Vietnamese. For enduring that ordeal, McCain deserves, and has, my respect.

But then McCain takes a dumb, offensive turn. He tries to contrast his experience with what he characterizes as Obama’s empty rhetoric:

“To encourage a country with only rhetoric … is not a promise of hope. It is a platitude.”

The rhetoric he is dismissing there as a mere collection of platitudes is a language with a lineage. Obama’s rhetoric of hope is the language of the civil rights movement. No matter what he has been through, it is foolish for McCain to suggest that this is cheap rhetoric unacquainted with struggle or lacking in real substance. Yes, from 1967 until 1973, John McCain went through enormous hardship. He is, as Obama said last night, “an American hero.” But that doesn’t give McCain the right to downplay, disregard or dismiss the hardship of other American heroes. He comes across as suggesting that he alone has earned the right to sing “stony the road we trod / bitter the chastening rod.” This is unbecoming.

It’s also evidence that McCain doesn’t understand the rhetoric he’s dismissing. He doesn’t understand that words with a history are words with substance. He fails to grasp the history of those words, so he pretends they have no substance.

It’s February, senator, a fitting time to brush up on the history of your fellow Americans who have also seen “hopes tested in hard and cruel ways” that far too many have experienced. Invoking the hope and the struggle embodied by Louis Allen, Willie Brewster, Benjamin Brown, James Earl Chaney, Addie Mae Collins, Vernon Dahmer, Jonathan Daniels, Henry H. Dee, Cpl Roman Ducksworth Jr., Willie Edwards Jr., Medgar Evers, Andrew Goodman, Paul Guihard, Samuel Hammond Jr., Jimmie Lee Jackson, Wharlest Jackson, the Rev. Bruce Klunder, the Rev. George Lee, Herbert Lee, Viola Gregg Liuzzo, Denise McNair, Delano H. Middleton, Charles E. Moore, Oneal Moore, William Moore, Mack Charles Parker, Lt. Col. Lemuel Penn, the Rev. James Reeb, John Earl Reese, Carole Robertson, Michael Schwener, Henry E. Smith, Lamar Smith, Emmett Louis Till, Clarence Triggs, Virgil Ware, Cynthia Wesley and Samuel Younge Jr. is not a mere “platitude.”

None of those people lived to see 1967. Their names, too, are engraved in black granite and their struggle also counts. The rhetoric of that struggle has meaning and substance, even if the senator from Arizona chooses not to understand it.