"How can we reach our president with advice? He is ignorant, self-willed, and is surrounded by men, some of whom are almost as ignorant as himself.
"So we have the dilemma put to us. What to do when his power must continue for two years longer and when the existence of our country may be endangered before he can be replaced by a man of sense. How hard, in order to save the country, to sustain a man who is incompetent."
Written by a former Secretary of the Navy, no less. Will this ever stop?
5 comments:
Very good catch, Rick..
PDS,
I believe that you have identified the core of the literate public's problem with Bush and communication. Lincoln knew the KJV and its stories as well as did Melville, Whitman or Faulkner. All of them possesed the ability to evoke emotion through the use of known and understood rhythms and imagery. That knowledge of Elizabethan English also allowed Lincoln to interject Shakespearean themes which resonated within his time. Bush was apparently raised on the flat language of the NIV and his grasp of the language as an instrument reflects the lack of exposure to English as an instrument. His speech writers have a decent grasp of the potential to evoke but he has never demonstrated that grasp in daily speech.
Knuck,
No, it will not stop. Even worse, Bush lacks Lincoln's mandate from Congress to jail Copperheads as he sees fit. Lincoln would have put Feingold and a few others away for the duration some time ago. I didn't realize til this morning that the quotation cited must have occured in '62 - at a time that the issue was gravely in doubt. Ah well, the Copperheads were cowards then and they are cowards today - little has changed. Same party, too.
Bush often seems clumsy when speaking off the cuff, but that might resonate more than we think with those who are less enamored with educated, "fancy" talk.
Also, once upon a time something such as the KJV was a culturally unifying kind of text. There are fewer or less powerful texts of any sort that represent "common" knowledge. I think that certain actions or images can serve such a function these days, but I wonder if there is anyone around that could hold people together primarily on the basis of rhetoric.
Barry,
I would argue that there are no current texts that are as unifying as the KJV. I recognize that the KJV is not optimal - I just had a rather spirited discussion with my wife over her selection of the KJV as the proper Bible to give to our nine year old granddaughter as a "first" Bible on the basis that 'She won't be able to understand it.' I lost, of course.
The NIV doesn't cut it and there is nothing currently on offer that is unifying in any sense. This is the main problem with Truepeers assertions - i understand (somewhat) the assertion but it lacks both mythos and a language level that is communicable.
Orson Scott Card is the only author who comes readily to mind when I think of ability to ennunciate a common modern viewpoint and I don't really subscribe to the model presented.
I return to 'Has the distance grown so vast that we cannot sing the songs of yesteryear?'. And I simply don't know the answer.
Of course, we are talking about a particular function for this rhetoric to serve, namely the ability to pull people together during times of strife and during times of volatile (even incendiary) differences of opinion. I'm at a loss for who could do that these days.
When FDR gave fireside chats, how many Nazis were welcome as students at Yale? How good would one's rhetoric have to be to bridge that gap? Bush actually attended Yale, but even if he walked on water and gave the Sermon on the Mount, how effectively could he speak to both the Yale adminstration and red staters?
Lincoln's rhetoric helped hold the North together not the North and the South. It took war to do that. It's an interesting question as to how much some disagree with the Adminstration and how much some are on the other side.
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