I thought it was a magnificent speech, not so much somber as sober — but radical all the same. The pundits are gradually parsing it–I’m listening to MSNBC as I write–and commenting on its challenge to a new assumption of responsibility for our public affairs by all Americans. Even Pat Buchanan seems to have been inspired. Of course Fox News has already panned the speech, so it must have been even better than I thought. Too bad about Michael Gerson–somebody should ask him to dance.

Then after all the flap about who was going to pray, Joseph Lowery stole the show, quoting James Weldon Johnson in the beginning and concluding with a riff that closed with a call and response. I watched in a room full of students and faculty at SLU who had gathered in the headquarters of the African American Studies Program. There were maybe a hundred of us, people drifting in and out listening to a panel at the beginning that included my beloved and some other faculty, eating snacks and lunch, some of them weeping, some laughing. Nobody was unhappy.

So — there it is. My guy is now the 44th President of the United States of America. I’m recalling the bicentennial celebration in the nineteen seventies when, for a while, it felt good to be a patriot. One thing that happens in such times is that the great clichés return from banishment and sometimes even comfort us. President Obama today evoked words of George Washington before the Delaware crossing: “Let it be told to the future world…that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive…that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it].” For my ear the following passage was the heart of the speech:

Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends – hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism – these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility – a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

The event started for me when Aretha Franklin sang “America,” channeling Mahalia Jackson. I thought Professor Alexander’s poem was surprisingly good and loved the piano quartet (Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, Gabriela Montero, and Anthony McGill) that played an arrangement of a couple of hymn tunes by John Williams. It was a fine morning, and it made me think again that not the least accomplishment of the former junior Senator from Illinois is that he has begun to rehabilitate love of country for many of us who have felt that we were abandoned as Americans by the reactionary politics of the past almost forty years since the beginning of the Reagan era. He is telling us again and again that love of country is at one with our better angels, not the corporate egotism and jingoism of the recent past.

Perhaps patriotism doesn’t have to be the last refuge of a scoundrel. Perhaps it can again become a call to practice those habits of the heart that Tocqueville found among our ancestors almost two centuries ago: a self-interest understood to require concern for others and for the common good. “[H]ard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism,” as President Obama said today:

— these things are old. These things are true.