Charlie Pierce: As he enters his final term, with the elegiac music pl...

Optimism....is neither weak nor naive. It can be tough and pure and earned just as clearly as any brooding existential despair.

Charlie Pierce

optimism despair optimistic

We create our own government. We are responsible for its beauty and for its ugliness. We are responsible for its glories and for its failures and, most important, we are responsible for amending those failures no matter who are their most immediate architects.

Charlie Pierce

government important matter

It is the doctrine of the oligarchy that there is nothing that we hold in common, that the commonwealth is a myth, that it is even a sign of softheadedness and weakness. The oligarchical power feeds on the sense that we are all individuals, struggling on our own, and ennobled by the effort.

Charlie Pierce

effort weakness struggle

I think, over the last couple of years, the written word has made a comeback on the Internet. For example, I'm seeing more long-form narrative experiments there. The overall noise level, however, continues to increase. Do we really need TV screens to watch when we pump gas? Really?

Charlie Pierce

comeback couple thinking

Ronald Reagan was a dim hack who did horrible damage to almost everything he touched.

Charlie Pierce

touched horrible damage

It's better to be black than gay because when you're black you don't have to tell your mother.

Charlie Pierce

gay sarcastic mother

We, The People is more than a statement of purpose. It is an acknowledgement of an obligation to each other.

Charlie Pierce

acknowledgement purpose people

You know, what genuinely makes me uneasy with the way things are going are not - is not really that Trump is going to do everything he said he was going to do, it`s that he has no idea of his job as president. Plus, the people who have been up close and realized that he has no idea how to do this job are leaking like sieves.

Charlie Pierce

uneasy president people

We have a revolutionary history to honor and uphold. Which was what Nelson Mandela did. He reminded us of that which we need to be reminded, over and over again, about our own best selves.

Charlie Pierce

honor self needs

There is a reason why conservatives talk about 'government' and not 'self-government,' because to refer to the latter is to concede that 'the government' is really the most basic product of our political commonwealth, that it is what we produce among ourselves so as to order the production of everything else that we do together.

Charlie Pierce

government self order

The idea that America elected a black man to be its president forty years after it declined to allow Martin Luther King Jr. to stand on a balcony without getting shot still maintains its power to awe and inspire.

Charlie Pierce

kings men years

Every president learns on the job because nobody`s really prepared for the kind of decisions that cross your desk every day. No one`s prepared for that. No vice president who has scended to the presidency has ever truly been ready for that. Certainly, no vice president who`s assumed the presidency in extremis, like Harry Truman, has been ready for that. But this Trump guy doesn`t seem to be ready for a career in government.

Charlie Pierce

guy decision president

There is a barbarism in the American soul, and we must protect some of it by law. To root it out is to endanger our lives on the one hand, and our liberty on the other.

Charlie Pierce

roots law hands

Bill Clinton was not a symbol. People did not invest in him their idea of what America should be or, worse, their pride in what they thought America had become. There was no great moral self-congratulation in having elected a president from Arkansas.

Charlie Pierce

congratulations pride self

The man is the Piltdown Man of modern politics.

Charlie Pierce

modern he-man men

Campaigns are no longer high-minded exchanges of ideas, even though God knows we need more good ones - ideas, that is.

Charlie Pierce

campaigns ideas needs

The institutions of college athletics exist primarily as unreality fueled by deceit. The unreality is that universities should be in the business of providing large spectacles of mass entertainment. The fundamental absurdity of that notion requires the promulgation of the various deceits necessary to carry it out.

Charlie Pierce

deceit college fundamentals

One of the great changes wrought by the increased public awareness of Alzheimers - and thank you, Nancy Reagan, you wonderful tough old dame, you - is that people in the early stages of the disease are now speaking out while they still have the capacity to do so.

Charlie Pierce

dames disease people

For all the huffing and blowing we get about rugged individualism, the American spirit and the American experiment always have had at their heart the notion that the government is all of us and that, therefore, the government may keep things in trust for all of us.

Charlie Pierce

government heart may

There is a lot in American politics (and in American life) that is angry, greedy, reckless and violent.

Charlie Pierce

reckless greedy violent

As he enters his final term, with the elegiac music playing out there in the distance, Barack Obama will use the history that he has come to embody and, perhaps, even to fulfill, as part of a larger project that never will be completed but only finished, over and over again.