奥巴马的华丽告别

Obama’s Gorgeous Goodbye
奥巴马的华丽告别

In this twilight of his presidency, Barack Obama is unlikely to deliver much in the way of meaningful legislation.

进入总统任期的最后阶段，贝拉克·奥巴马已经不太可能在立法领域拿出多少富有意义的成果。

But he’s giving us a pointed, powerful civics lesson.

但他却在给我们上一节犀利而颇具力量的公民课。

Consider his speech to new graduates of Howard University last weekend. While it brimmed with the usual kudos for hard work, it also bristled with caveats about the mistakes that he sees some young people making.

就拿他上周在霍华德大学(Howard University)毕业典礼上的发言来说。尽管其中不乏此类演讲中常见的对勤奋的赞美，但也有不少警醒之语，指出了他看到一些年轻人正在犯的错误。

He chided them for demonizing enemies and silencing opponents. He cautioned them against a sense of grievance too exaggerated and an outrage bereft of perspective. “If you had to choose a time to be, in the words of Lorraine Hansberry, ‘young, gifted and black’ in America, you would choose right now,” he said. “To deny how far we’ve come would do a disservice to the cause of justice.”

他批评台下的年轻人妖魔化对手，压制反对者。他提醒他们警惕一种过于夸张的不满和视角缺失的愤怒。“如果你必须选择一个时代，我可以借用洛林·汉斯伯里(Lorraine Hansberry)的话告诉大家，‘年轻而有才华的美国黑人’，你们会选择此时此刻，”他说。“否定我们已经取得了多少进步，会对正义的事业造成损害。”

He was by no means telling them to be satisfied, and he wasn’t talking only or even chiefly to them. He was talking to all of us — to America — and saying: enough. Enough with a kind of identity politics that can shove aside common purpose. Enough with a partisanship so caustic that it bleeds into hatred.

他绝不是在告诉他们要知足，也绝不只是在对他们讲话，甚至不是主要讲给他们听。他是在对我们所有人——对美国——喊话：够了。那种会抛弃共同目标的身份政治，够了。如此具有腐蚀性乃至滋生仇恨的党派偏见，够了。

Enough with such deafening sound and blinding fury in our public debate. They make for entertainment, not enlightenment, and stand in the way of progress.

还有我们在公开辩论中那震耳欲聋的吼声和令人丧失判断力的愤怒情绪，也够了。它们可资娱乐，却并不能带来启迪，反而会阻碍我们进步。

His remarks at Howard were an extension of those in his final State of the Union address in January and of those to the Illinois General Assembly in February, nine years to the day after he announced his history-making bid for the presidency. The Illinois speech, wise and gorgeous, received less attention than it deserved.

奥巴马在霍华德大学的演讲延续了他之前两次演说的内容。一个是他在今年1月所做的最后一次国情咨文演说；另一个是他今年2月对伊利诺伊州议会所做的发言，也就是他历史性地宣布参选美国总统整整九年之后。他在伊利诺伊的发言充满华彩，不失智慧，但没有得到应有的重视。

“We’ve got to build a better politics — one that’s less of a spectacle and more of a battle of ideas,” he said then. Otherwise, he warned, “Extreme voices fill the void.” This current presidential campaign has borne him out.

“我们必须打造一种更好的政治——一种观赏性更弱但观念交锋更多的政治，”他当时说道。他警告，如若不然“极端的声音就会填补这片虚空。”目前正在进行的总统竞选一直在证明他的观点。

Obama detractors and skeptics probably hear in all of this a professorial haughtiness that has plagued him and alienated them before. And there’s legitimate disagreement about the degree to which he has been an agent as well as a casualty of the poisoned environment he rues. His administration’s actions haven’t always been as high-minded as his words.

诋毁和怀疑奥巴马的人很可能会把这一切看作一种学者式的傲慢。这种品质一直困扰着奥巴马，也造成这些人与他的隔阂。他既是现在这种他懊悔的有害环境的促成者，也是它的受害者。至于他这两种角色孰轻孰重，的确存在一些合理的分歧。奥巴马政府的行为并非总如他本人的言辞那般高尚。

But we should all listen to him nonetheless, for several reasons.

尽管如此，我们还是都应该听听他的心声，理由如下：

One is that he’s not just taking jabs at opponents. He’s issuing challenges to groups — African-Americans, college students — from whom he has drawn strong support and with whom he has real credibility.

首先，奥巴马不只是在攻击对手。他是在向几个群体发出挑战——非裔美国人、大学生。他从这些群体获得强大的支持，也真正地被他们信赖。

“We must expand our moral imaginations,” he told black students at Howard, imploring them to recognize “the middle-aged white guy who you may think has all the advantages, but over the last several decades has seen his world upended by economic and cultural and technological change, and feels powerless to stop it. You got to get in his head, too.”

“我们必须扩大自己在道德上的共情范围，”他在霍华德大学对黑人学生表示，恳求他们看清楚“那些中年白人男性，你可能觉得他占尽了全部优势，但事实是在过去几十年里，他的世界因经济、文化和技术上的改变而天翻地覆，而且他感到无力阻止这一切。你必须同时了解他的内心。”

Just two weeks earlier, at a town-hall-style meeting in London, he volunteered a critique of the Black Lives Matter movement, saying that once “elected officials or people who are in a position to start bringing about change are ready to sit down with you, then you can’t just keep on yelling at them.”

就在两周前，在伦敦举行的一次与民众直接对话的活动上，他主动谈起“黑人的命也是命”(Black Lives Matter)运动，表示一旦“民选官员或者能带来改变的人愿意坐下来与你交流，你就不能只是一味地对他们大吼大叫。”

Another reason to listen to Obama is the accuracy and eloquence with which he’s diagnosing current ills. In Illinois he noted that while ugly partisanship has always existed, it’s fed in our digital era by voters’ ability to curate information from only those news sources and social-media feeds that echo and amplify their prejudices.

我们应该听取奥巴马言论的另一个原因在于，他对当今社会问题的诊断十分精确，谈论起它们时又能传神达意。他在伊利诺伊州指出，尽管丑恶的党派偏见一直都存在，但在我们这个数字年代，因为选民只从附和并放大他们偏见的新闻渠道和社交媒体获取特定信息，所以这一问题变得日益严重。

“We can choose our own facts,” he lamented. “We don’t have a common basis for what’s true and what’s not.” Advocacy groups often make matters worse, he added, by “keeping their members agitated as much as possible, assured of the righteousness of their cause.”

“我们可以选择自己想要相信的事实，”他哀叹道。“对于何为真何为假，我们并没有统一的判定标准。”他还表示，游说团体往往会让情况更糟，它们会“尽可能地让自己的成员焦虑不安，同时又让他们深信自己投身的事业是正义的。”

At Howard, Obama insisted that change “requires listening to those with whom you disagree, and being prepared to compromise.”

在霍华德大学，奥巴马坚称，要有所改变，“必须倾听那些与你意见不一的人，要做好妥协的准备。”

“If you think that the only way forward is to be as uncompromising as possible, you will feel good about yourself, you will enjoy a certain moral purity, but you’re not going to get what you want,” he continued. “So don’t try to shut folks out. Don’t try to shut them down, no matter how much you might disagree with them.”

“如果你觉得前进的唯一道路是尽可能地不做妥协，你会自我感觉良好，会享受某种道德上的纯净感，但你不会达成自己的目标，”他接着说道。“所以不要试图把别人拒之门外。不管你有多么不同意他们的观点，不要试图禁绝它们。”

At this late point, his message isn’t a self-serving one about the political climate that he personally wants to operate in and benefit from. It’s about the climate that would serve everyone best. If it draws attention to the improvements that he pledged but couldn’t accomplish, he’s O.K. with that. It still needs saying.

在任期最后阶段，奥巴马传达这样的讯息并非为自己谋私利，不是为了营造他个人可以在其中运作并从中受益的政治环境，而是为了营造能给所有人都带来最大好处的环境。如果此举让人们注意到那些他曾承诺做出但没能实现的改进，他也可以泰然处之。这些话还是需要讲出来。

And so he’s fashioning this blunt, soulful goodbye, a reflection on our troubled democracy that, I fear, will be lost in the din of the Trump-Clinton death match. It brings him full circle, from the audacity to the tenacity of hope.

他采取了如此直率而又充满情感的告别方式，对我们问题重重的民主制度进行反思。我担心，在特朗普和克林顿生死对决的喧闹之中，这种反思或有遭到淹没之虞。这样的告别让他兜了一个大圈，又回到原处，从无所畏惧，回归对希望的不懈追求。