What if They Held a Memorial and a Pep Rally Broke Out?

You'd pretty much have what happened last night in Tucson.  Up to the point of Obama's speech most reactions I was reading ranged from appalled to mortified.  The crowd and early speakers seemed to have no real idea why they were there.  John Podhoretz gives his reaction:

Never before in the annals of national moments of mourning have the words spoken been so wildly mismatched by the spirit in which they were received.

The sentences and paragraphs of President Obama's speech last night were beautiful and moving and powerful. But for the most part they didn't quite transcend the wildly inappropriate setting in which he delivered them.

There was something about the choice of place, a college arena with the appropriate name of the McKale Memorial Center, that made the event turn literally sophomoric.

If there is one thing we expect from occasions of national mourning, it is, at the very least, a modicum of gravity. That gravity was present in the president's speech from first to last -- especially in the pitch-perfect response to the disgusting national political debate over the past couple of days.

"What we can't do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on one another," he said. "Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let us use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy."

Exactly right, as so much else in his text was -- a moment that truly deserves to be called "healing."

But the president's stunning speech was marred by the feeling of the evening that surrounded it and the appalling behavior of the crowd in Tucson listening to it.

It was as though no one in the arena but the immediate mourners and sufferers had the least notion of displaying respectful solemnity in the face of breathtaking loss and terrifying evil.

Thankfully, Obama's speech stuck to the reason they were there and didn't wander into Wellstone Memorial land, where a 2002 memorial service dissolved into a highly partisan political rally and became a national embarrassment. Obama did well, but whoever put this together needs a new job. The inclusion of t-shirts and cutesy slogans set the stage for a pep rally instead of a memorial. The audience failed as did the people who did the planning and didn't at least do a little audience education before it all started.

And for contrast, take a look at this post on the memorial following the Virginia Tech shootings.