پایان بندی

Epilogue

T he black first president exited; the first black president appeared. On November 2, 2015, Chris Jackson and his castmates stood gaping offstage left as Barack Obama entered from stage right. The president (the real one, not the one Chris plays in the show) smiled and waved, waiting for the entrance applause to end. “What’d I miss?” he said. It would have blown the powder clear off George Washington’s wig to imagine a half-Kenyan man becoming president. Yet there was Obama, his 43rd successor, raising funds to help elect his 44th. Democratic Party officials had arranged a special performance of Hamilton, guessing that donors would pay generously to see the hottest show in New York. They guessed right. It meant that six years after Lin had gotten a boost from his association with the White House, the White House was, improbably, getting a boost from Lin. Obama teased the audience about it: “You write a check and you listen to some boring politician talking–now that’s commitment,” he said. “Coming to this show–you don’t get special props for this.” Obama rallied the troops that night by reviewing his legacy. This touched off another bout of historical vertigo. Didn’t we just watch a president sum up his legacy, when Chris sang Washington’s Farewell Address at the end of “One Last Time”? Past and present seemed to be tumbling together–a shimmery double exposure. But the president had an aim beyond “reviewing the incidents of my administration,” as Lin had said onstage about 45 minutes earlier. Obama wanted to make an argument about change, and how it comes to America. To do so, he turned to Hamilton again and again for illustration. “Part of what’s so powerful about this performance is it reminds us of the vital, crazy, kinetic energy that’s at the heart of America–that people who have a vision and a set of ideals can transform the world,” he said. “Every single step of progress that we’ve made has been based on this notion that people can come together, and ideas can move like electricity through them, and a world can change.”

This is a community organizer’s vision of progress, one that Obama has advanced since before he became president. In the 2004 speech that made him a national figure overnight, he insisted that in spite of our outward differences, “there’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America– there’s the United States of America.” One measure of America’s health, then, is how warmly it embraces the diverse souls who live here. Obama found this spirit in Hamilton as well: “The idea of America that was represented here was more than just numbers, more than just statistics. It’s about who we are, who’s seen, who’s recognized, whose histories are affirmed.” In spite of all the similarities between his worldview and the show’s, Obama didn’t try to claim it for a single political party. It is, he said, “the only thing Dick Cheney and I agree on.”What’s really striking, though, is the fact that Obama could locate so many parallels to his ideas in a historical drama. Hamilton depicts events that happened a long time ago; its ideas are, by definition, old. Why, then, do so many people greet them as bold and revelatory when Obama says them? For that matter, why do so many different kinds of people leave a performance of Hamilton feeling newly connected to their country? Unless Lin made the whole thing up–and nobody has said that he did–it suggests that however innovative Obama’s speeches and Lin’s show might seem, they are, in fact, traditional. They don’t reinvent the American character, they renew it. They remind us of something we forgot, something that fell as far out of sight as the posthumously neglected Alexander Hamilton, who spent his life defending one idea above all: “the necessity of Union to the respectability and happiness of this Country.” Obama’s speeches and Lin’s show resonate so powerfully with their audiences because they find eloquent ways to revive Hamilton’s revolution, the one that spurred Americans to see themselves and each other as fellow citizens in a sprawling, polyglot young republic. It’s the change in thought and feeling that makes all the other changes possible. The Obama presidency will end in January 2017, but the show that shares so much of its spirit will keep running.

At the Rodgers that night, the president all but anointed Hamilton as a keeper of the flame. His “primary message,” he said, was to remind people of the need to keep hoping and to work together, but “this performance undoubtedly described it better than I ever could.” The most important affinity that Hamilton will carry into its future isn’t a specific message, though, political or otherwise: It’s an underlying belief in stories, and their power to change the world. Good community organizer that he is, the president knows that stories can be an engine for empathy, and a way to show people what they share. It’s why he introduced himself, in that first big speech in 2004, by telling his own story. In the years to come, some of the many, many kids who are going to see and even perform Hamilton will be newly inspired to tell their stories too. Every time they do, the newly kaleidoscopic America will understand itself a little more. “I can do that,” they’ll say. And if they’re like Alexander Hamilton, they’ll add, “And I can do it better.”