![]() His speech on the 50th anniversary of the march on Selma. One of President Obama’s most defining achievements is helping get the Paris Agreement on climate change over the line, with Obama working hard to secure a future that our children and grandchildren can thrive in.īut it was a long road with lots of obstacles, something Obama speaks… passionately… about here.Ĥ. When he went in on climate change, out-angering his anger translator. That is what makes us the United States of America.”ģ. Here, in this country, we shape our own destiny. “We are a nation that faces its challenges and accepts its responsibilities. That’s not how we got here,” Obama said on the day the bill he battled so hard for was signed into law. We are not a nation that does what’s easy. We are not a nation that falls prey to doubt or mistrust. “We are not a nation that scales back its aspirations. One of many mic-drop moments in that speech.Ģ. If there’s an Arab-American family being rounded up, without benefit of an attorney, or due process, that threatens my civil liberties!” he said. If there’s a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for their prescription drugs and is having to choose between medicine and the rent – that makes my life poorer even if it’s not my grandparent. “If there is a child on the south side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me even if it’s not my child. There are too many quotables from the 18 minutes he spent on stage, but his ability to unite Americans quickly became apparent. ![]() But in truth, his first mic drop moment came way back in 2004 – in a speech that would foreshadow the work he’d start as president.Īt the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Obama spoke in support of John Kerry and managed to bring the crowd alive. He’s been commanding microphones everywhere since 2008.ġ. The former senator for Illinois is famed for his command of the English language – and even since before his time as president, has been making many people feel things they don’t usually feel about politics. It is only acceptable, now, when you are almost asleep, which puts it somewhere near laughing for no reason or forgetting your own name.During Barack Obama’s eight years as president, he’s managed to capture more imaginations than the average politician. You don’t need the details: his started off as a joke – wouldn’t it be funny if he did it? – and then he really did it, and then it was a meme and, pretty soon, its rich history as a complicated parody, indeed, the fact that it had a history at all, had completely vanished.Ĭricketers mimed it – India’s captain Virat Kohli bated Joe Root last week, and, recontextualised by Edgbaston, all it meant was: “I’m better than you.” Is there anything less charming? Geraint Thomas, winning the Tour de France, made a very sweet speech that was mainly about how tired he was. It is, as you can infer, quite a male mode of self-expression: female mic drops have occurred, but so rarely that they are filed by the internet under “mic-drop girl”, as in, “cat who can talk”.īy the 90s, it was no more than a phrase, an unoriginal quirk or a bugbear for sound engineers, but, then, along came Barack Obama in 2016. The whole joke of the mic drop was that it is inherently absurd for a comedian to appropriate the raw sexual energy of the musician, since humour is self-aware and energy is un-self-aware. These destructive acts are not interchangeable – when Alex Turner of Arctic Monkeys, who would have been fine setting fire to a drum, say, dropped his mic at the Brit awards in 2014, it was embarrassing from every angle, partly because he offered to pay for it beforehand.Įddie Murphy or Chris Rock could argue – were they minded to engage – that their own mic drops were making quite a subtle and self-deprecating point about machismo, triumph and humour. It is fun to watch musicians break stuff. This was a natural evolution from smashing your guitar or throwing a TV through a hotel window. Associated with 1980s comedy, it was actually borrowed from rap, where it had a subtly different meaning: I have such a lot of raw human energy, plus such natural dominance over all I survey, that I simply have to break something.
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