Like lots of Americans, I tuned in Wednesday afternoon to hear Kamala Harris’ belated concession speech. I had low expectations for what she was going to say, but the spectacle of Harris graciously conceding to a man she had very recently warned was an incipient fascist was too jarring not to witness.
Anyway, I found the speech pretty innocuous and unmemorable right up until the very end when, rallying the crowd for something resembling a rousing conclusion, she said this:
There’s an adage a historian once called a law of history, true of every society across the ages. The adage is, only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. I know many people feel like we are entering a dark time, but for the benefit of us all, I hope that is not the case. But here’s the thing, America, if it is, let us fill the sky with the light of a brilliant, brilliant billion of stars.
Initially what gave me pause was that, while the rest of the speech had been inoffensive pablum, this was just terrible writing. Even by the standards of speechwriting in modern politics, this jumps out as uniquely bad. Why would this trite metaphor about stars be a “law of history”? And man, I hope “the light of a brilliant, brilliant billion of stars” wasn’t the actual text of the speech, because that’s not even grammatical. It was so bad that I wonder if she wrote it herself.
