President Obama's Arizona memorial speech was

a lot like his presidency to date: mannered, eloquent at moments, cautious, well-meant, and ultimately of little value to the nation, although I am certain that his personal comforting of the loved ones of the dead and injured was heartfelt and will stay with them forever.

Obama would have been better off, I think, had he kept to the personal eulogizing and philosophizing, which he did well, and not tried to expand into civic territory, since he was clearly afraid to address anything of substance in that regard. His basic civics messages seemed to be 1.) Don't be a Blamer who looks for specific things to challenge or change as a result of the tragedy (e.g., lax gun laws, gutless economic policy that nurtures bitterness, the disproportionate concentration of lynch-mob politics in particular camps), and 2.) Be nice. But he did mention health care in passing as part of a possible resulting national discourse, which at worst was a well-timed political plug for his health "reform" plan and at best was an earnest nudge for us to look at improving mental health care. I wonder, too, if Obama's "Let's be friends" stance as eulogizer was, beyond being the kind of predictable pose one would strike at such a dangerous time, also a try at maneuvering Republicans into behaving civilly, since now the implicit punishment for reckless partisanship is not just being shamed but being potentially blamed for trends publicly associated with tragedy.

What I didn't understand at all was what the whole event was supposed to be: Memorial service? National tribute? Nationwide teachable moment? At times it felt like a pep rally, complete with roaring crowd and cheap patriotic applause lines, which to me didn't set well at all with reverence for the dead, wounded, and grieving.

And whatever the case, the extended scriptural readings by Cabinet members(!), limited exclusively to the Bible(!!), were beyond the pale. Sorry, but once this became a national civic event, even one of mourning, making the Bible the official godly text was unforgivable. Does anybody remember that, in addition to Christians and Jews, we are also a nation of Muslims, Mormons, Atheists, Hindus, Bahai believers, Rastafarians, and Buddhists, to name just a few? The right thing – not to mention the constitutionally appropriate thing – would have been to leave scripture out of it entirely. This little act of theological strong-arming gave me my second-greatest feeling of American shame of the evening – dwarfed only by the monumental horror of the killings themselves.