Word: propheteer
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...decade later, the prophet stands at the sixth-floor balcony outside his office at the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games (A.C.O.G.), surveying his sweltering promised land. To the north lie the new Olympic Village dorms and the aquatic center; right below him to the west is Centennial Olympic Park, swarming with scores of road-paving, tent-erecting workers frantically engaged in the last-second realization of his vision...
...horizon from the CNN Center-dominated southwest skyline up north past the big red Nike swoosh and into the northwest wasteland, that crumbling welter of faded-brick buildings and crack-vial sidewalks whose putative renewal could turn out to be these Games' most enduring local legacy. "This," the prophet says with unfathomable certitude, "is where it's all going to grow...
...thing to remember about Payne is that until a prophet proves himself, he pretty much comes off as a blowhard. An obscure real estate lawyer winning the Olympics for Atlanta? The city laughed--until he pulled it off. Build the largest urban park America has seen in decades, thereby changing Atlanta history? The city hasn't stopped laughing at that...
...sense, Payne obviates the distinction between prophet and blowhard, for a blowhard isn't necessarily wrong, and most prophets are willing to cut corners in the service of their vision's greater glory...
...valid, if limiting, but that the second, at least in his case, is misplaced. This is as subtle and perceptive a portrait as any black writer could have produced of one of the most complex public figures of our times. Jackson has always combined the moral clarity of a prophet with the grubby opportunism of a jackleg preacher. The tendency among the millions who have watched his career unfold over the past 30 years has been to seize upon one of those facets of his character to the exclusion of the other. Frady, who has previously delved into the lives...